"I'm not a Dr yet! Also who compares a 53 year period to a 5 year period? For one, this conveniently hides that while growth was high in the 1880s and 1890s, it had been considerably less before WWI. And that's only industrial production, in agriculture it was much worse. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6021.pdf "

Yes, that's the paper I cited. Agricultural growth can rarely be in the double digits, in fact 2-4% a year is considerably better than what collectivization managed.

There was a recession in the 1900s which slowed growth a bit, but in the long run capitalist growth in Russia was still high. For example if we take the New Economic Policy period 1921-1927, industrial production doubled in six years under basically a market economy, using official data. It took until 1940 for it to double again.

Sure, some of that was recovery to potential GDP after the war, but the same goes for the post-1928 period. The overall GDP growth from the first Five Year Plan in 1928 to Operation Barbarossa in 1941 was just 2.9% a year*, which is the same as the rate before WWI (3%) despite the opportunity to catch up from war damage.

*Using Khanin's corrected data, given in that Rhizzone thread.

http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6021.pdf?

PDF page 9 for 1928-41


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