Back to 1900

Russia's standard claim to vast economic progress got one more ringing refutation last week. After long study, Australian economist Colin Clark documented his conclusion that the rate of Soviet production per man-hour of work was less than one-eighth that of the U.S. "Economic progress in Russia," said Clark, "has been uncertain and slow, and the most recent figures indicate that productivity is now only at about [its] 1900 level."

The Russians, Clark finds, have achieved only one-fourth the productivity of Britain, two-fifths that of France. Russia is in a class with such economically backward countries as Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Turkey. It leads India, which produces only half as much per man-hour as Russia, and China, whose productivity rate was only one-fourth of the U.S.S.R.'s.

Clark makes his comparisons by means of an "international unit" (IU). One IU equals the amount of goods and services that $1 could buy in the U.S. during the period 1925-1934 (see chart). Clark takes his figures for Russia from official Soviet statistics, but adjusts them in an involved process of his own invention. (His former computations about the Soviet economy were at one time heavily criticized; since then, however, they have been strikingly confirmed by independent research of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board.

According to Clark's analysis, whatever industrial progress Russia has made has been largely offset by agricultural stagnation. Soviet productivity, rated in 1900 at .15 IUs (15-c- worth of goods per man-hour, at U.S. 1925-34 prices), dropped to .10 after the land reforms of 1918-19; it rose to .16 in 1927-28, but forced collectivization of farms in 1928-33 pulled the level down to .12. No Soviet statistics for the war years are available, but by 1947 Soviet productivity had climbed back to .14 IUs, just under the 1900 level. The U.S., on the other hand, almost tripled its man-hour output in these years, hitting a rate of 1.19 IUs in 1947.

Clark's estimates were close to those made by the New York Times's Will Lissner (TIME, Dec. 29, 1947). Nevertheless, none of his comparisons was likely to give the democratic world any conviction that Russia was politically unstable. In spite of a low IU, the police state still had the means to enforce poverty at home, to concentrate on conquest abroad.

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