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further, in robert conquest's 'the dragons of expectation' - the book i mentioned - it describes how the yield of soviet industrialisation was miniscule; ie production barely delivered more at the peak of the soviet age, than in the tsarist period, and the share of wealth of ordinary people actually declined. if i wade through the book later i'll get you some quotes. obviously this is but one account, but it at least illustrates that this area is debatable.
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Conquest (at least by the time he wrote The Dragons of Expectation) was far from a balanced source, in any sense of the word: can you recall, without trawling for figures and quotes, if and how he took into account the loss of resources and industry in the 1917 peace settlement, or from the civil war, or when the figures were actually culled from? The reason I comment is because if it was before 1941, the country was decimated by loss of resources from the above, if it was before about 1960 it was decimated by WWII, and after that it was pretty much embroiled in the Cold War and there ceases to be any meaningful comparison to be made....