Gravel institute is a garbage institute, that manipulates data to push its agenda, making it as bad as PragerU. It claims that capitalism didn't reduce global poverty.

Beginning of part 2:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261848874_The_1950s_-_The_triumph_of_the_Soviet_economy

According to Khanin's article, the causes for the economic decline after the late 1950s were:

  1. A sharp increase in military spending in 1958-1960, with an emphasis on missile and nuclear weapons, which required the urgent creation of a number of new enterprises and industries.

  2. The decline in the investment process in civilian sectors of the economy that began in the late 1950s due to the diversion of resources to the military-industrial complex.

  3. An unjustified reduction in the number of planning indicators in the areas of production, logistics and trade since 1953, which led to an increase in the disproportionalities of the economy and a weakening of state economic control.

  4. Systematic elimination of the most qualified and energetic, responsible economic personnel of the highest qualification, starting with the removal of L. P. Beria.

  5. A sharp weakening of the control functions of the state and the activities of control bodies, which led to increased irresponsibility and laxity in the economic apparatus, its corruption.

  6. Ill-conceived and hasty economic reorganizations in the field of industrial management (transition to sovnarkhozes), agriculture (dissolution of MTS), labor organizations (refusal to review labor standards).

  7. Complacency reigned in the country's leadership , which led to low-energy measures to introduce new efficient production and management schemes.

  8. Reducing the power of state bodies in favor of party bodies that are prone to incompetent interference in economic life and in the selection of economic personnel.

To put it very succinctly, the cause for the economic decline after the late 1950s was the decentralizing of planning and efforts to reintroduce commodity and market relations.

Hence his conclusion that:

The changes in the economic mechanism and the methods by which it operated noted above meant that by the end'of the 1950s the classical command economy system formed in the 1930s-1940s was to a considerable extent dismantled and came to have in many respects only a formal character. This fact played a very important role in the slow-down in the economic development of the USSR from the end of the 1950s. Hence claims that the command economy was the cause of this slow-down are very superficial. Little remained of it by this time. In support of this idea I shall quote the vehemently anti-communist Egor Gaidar and the experienced economic manager N. Nazarbaev. The former called 1929-53 'the only period when communism triumphed'. Nazarbaev wrote in 1991: 'For three decades [i.e. since the end of the 1950s] we simply have not had a planned economy ... The term concealed not simply other methods of economic management but appallingly bad management and irresponsibility'. Finally, Andrei Belousov, describing the causes of the crisis in the industrial system of the USSR, wrote of 'disintegration of the hierarchical system of management of the economy and formation of closed departmental structures, and the replacement of national economic objectives and priorities by the development of departmental-corporate aims'.

...

Ultimately, our analysis shows that the basic economic reason for the continuous fall in the rate of economic growth in the 1960s-1980s was the gradual dismantling of the command economy and deterioration of the standard of economic management. This conclusion largely coincides with that perspicaciously drawn by the sociologist Barrington Moore in 1954. In his book Terror and Progress in the USSR, which was underestimated at the time, he wrote:

Industrial expansion [in the USSR] ... takes place almost exclusively from above. By itself the Soviet economic system does not generate the ruthless energy which made the USSR a first-class industrial power ... The communist elite is in this respect a substitute for the spirit of adventure which created the great industrial and financial empires of the Western world. If the political source of industrial expansion disappears or diminishes there is nothing that could replace it.

Ellman & Kontorovich, in the foreword to their collection of articles on the disintegration of the Soviet economic system, fully agree with this statement by Barrington Moore. As the leading reason for the continuous fall in economic growth in 1958-82 they single out the almost uninterrupted decline in pressure from above.

This conclusion is very similar to that in the book Альтернатива--выбор пути: перестройка управления и горизонты рынка ,which was very famous in the USSR when it was published in 1990.

As for your Anton Cheremukhin article, his results are contradicted with Allen's, but I see no reason to choose one over the other, so we are inconclusive as to what Soviet growth "could have been" with a continuation of the NEP or a capitalist economy.

u/FactDontEqualFeeling

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