Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Interregional disparities in the Soviet Union are large. There are major
difficulties in the interpretation of official data on the subject, as GNP measures
and their like are not used. One approximation is the level of industrial output
per capita. In 1926-7 (Dmitrieva 1996) there was a ratio of 5.22 to 1 between the
highest unit, Russia, and the lowest, the Kirghiz republic. The range in 1988 was
4.33 to 1 between Estonia and Tadjikistan. Estonia was not a member of the
Union in 1926, and had it been so the earlier value would have been still higher.
There is thus some diminution of the differences over time, but even the 1988
figures indicate a very great gap. Some of the gap must be expected over such a
huge territory; the larger the unit, the more likely are differences to be found.
But the values seem to refute at once the idea of equality. Most other output
indices for the recent past show comparable levels of difference, about 5 to 1.
These are based generally on primary and secondary sector production, since the
service sector, producing non-material goods, was not regarded as contributing to
wealth in Marxist and socialist economics. If services had been added in, it is
likely that the differences between regions would be larger still, because large
urban regions such as Moscow and Leningrad and their surrounds have a high
development of services compared with some poor regions. A further increase of
the overall differences between republics in the USSR would be obtained from
using world prices for goods rather than those of the Soviet Union itself, where
all prices were artificial, being set by the state. This kind of policy meant that oil
and gas and most minerals were underpriced, and thus the output for Russia itself
was artificially low. Using market prices would mean increasing Russia's output
differences over the other republics.
In recent decades the differences have ceased to decline, and since 1960 have
shown an increase related to the decline in developmental impulses towards
Siberia and the termination of large projects in central Asia (Dmitrieva 1996).
Most rapid growth and development has been, not in Siberia nor in the heartland
of industrial Russia, but in the regions marginal to this latter, along the Middle
and Lower Volga and in the Urals.
A case study: Central Asia
Russia may be said to have two peripheries. First, to the east, there is a resource
frontier with a thinly scattered population. A second one is the ethnic periphery,
whose main components are the Caucasus and central Asia. Examining central
Asia, most commentators have argued that this has been a kind of internal colony
of the USSR. The countries of this region, including the Turkmen, Uzbek, Tadjik
and Kirghiz Republics, certainly have a lower standard of living than in the
centre, ranking in a group fifth out of six classified by Dmitrieva (1996) on the
basis of household income and retail volume data, as well as social welfare
criteria such as schooling and medical care. The case generally made (Liebowitz
1992) is that Russia purposely developed the Central Asian region as a provider
of primary goods, principally cotton, to the detriment of other production, and in
