We don’t know how much of the Soviet economy shrank after the collapse of communism, because the Soviet economy was unknowable. But we do know that electrical consumption fell by only 18 percent. This argues against the amount of GDP contraction claimed by the Russian government. We also know that black-market activity grew, although by how much is also unknowable. (Amazing how little you can find out from the people running things when they’re flanked by enormous thugs.) I talked to one of Communist presidential- candidate Gennady Zyuganov’s economic advisors. She claimed to be an expert on the “black economy” and said she believed that 45 percent of Russia’s industry and trade was now conducted off the books. Some of the shrunken parts of the USSR’s economy will not be missed. In a leftover Soviet-era guidebook, I found a passage about how “a giant wood-pulp and paper mill polluted the pristine waters of Lake Baikal.” I saw no sign of that thing. And some of the downturns in economic indicators are actually signs of progress. From 1986 to 1990, the part of the USSR that’s now Russia produced an average of 105 million tons of grain per year. Now it produces only 69 million tons. But at the end of the communist period, 27 million tons of grain per year were being imported, while today, Russia is a net grain exporter. This is no paradox, considering the USSR’s transportation and storage facilities. As much as 60 percent of the Soviet Union’s food used to be lost moving it from field to face. Still, the Russian economy did have conniptions in the 1990s. There was the wallet-popping inflation. In 1992 the inflation rate reached 1,353 percent. When the Soviet Union went to pieces, all of its former republics were left with central banks that had the equipment to print rubles, and no one was there to stop them. In effect, Russia had fourteen estranged wives, each with a duplicate of the Kremlin Visa card. And many of the country’s largest industries collapsed. The cars, refrigerators, and TVs they made were junk. The only way they’d been able to sell them before was through a Soviet retail system so screwed up that no one could buy any cars, refrigerators, or TVs, and so there were no complaints. Tens of thousands of jobs disappeared, or, worse, the jobs stayed but the paychecks vanished. By all rights, Russia should have been in the kind of great depression mess that led to Hitler in Germany and whiny, nasal Woody Guthrie songs in the United States. But Russia, mysteriously, was not singing “This Land Is Your
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