Economic Regionalization in the Soviet Union

D vESPITE the profound historical and politico-economic differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, the trends in the economic regionalization of the two countries have been surprisingly similar. Both have had a stable core area that has persisted in importance. In both, increasing economic decentralization, reduction of regional inequalities, and displacement of economic activity from agricultural to mineral producing areas have been significant. Differential rates of displacement for various economic factors have been evident in both. The primary difference has been in the speed of regional economic displacement and readjustment; that is, speed relative to the rate of over-all economic growth. This has been greater in the United States than in the Soviet Union. Over the past 25 years the pattern of Russia's economic geography has been twice recast, and a third reformation is under way'. The earliest pattern, characterized by the concentration of economic development west of the Volga and the Caspian Sea, was inherited from pre-Revolutionary Russia; in its formation, mining and allied heavy manufacturing had been less influential than other factors, especially preindustrial demography. The second pattern was the fruit of the First Five-Year Plan; it was dominated, to an extraordinary degree, by the attempt to maximize the output of mining and allied heavy manufacturing while minimizing over-all investment, and it resulted in an efficient but rigid economic layout. The third pattern, which exists today, reflects, above all, the impact of World War II, postwar territorial acquisitions, and economic rehabilitation on the economic-geographical structure inherited from the First FiveYear Plan. Adjustments of the growing conflicts between the consequences of that plan and the increasing strategic and economic needs for a more nearly balanced development have been far less important. The objective of the present study is threefold. First, it seeks to determine the impact of industrialization, from I926 to ig5o, on the patterning of

Development economics · Economic geography · Economics · Economy · Geography · Political science · Politics · Soviet union · Law · Russia and Soviet political economy