Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the rise of the concept of economic growth in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the environmental contours of how socialist economists thought about growth, and the role of these professional discussions in the eventual decision to embrace rapid industrialization under Stalin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the environmental dimensions of discussions among economic thinkers in the Soviet Union in the 1920s as they developed ideas about how to industrialize their new country and expand its economy under an avowedly socialist system. The history of the rise of national income accounting both in the United States and internationally has been well-examined by scholars, including those who have underscored the perverse environmental logic of measures like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a catch-all priority of state policy. However, much less attention has been paid to the alternative economic thinking that attached many state-socialist countries of the twentieth century just as firmly to an imperative for continual growth. As it turns out, Soviet economists were some of the first to develop a concept of economic growth during the period of the New Economic Policy in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks returned to a mixed economy with markets dominating in many spheres. Their ideas played a fateful role in the decision to embark on a project of rapid industrialization and building “socialism in one country” in the late 1920s. Historians have recently rethought and nuanced our assessment of the environmental impacts of Stalinism in important ways. Nevertheless, this paper maintains that the introduction of an economic growth imperative into Soviet socialism via central planning and a command economy had long-lasting consequences for the treatment of the natural world. This history remains relevant today in debates among eco-modernists and advocates of degrowth.