Prodrazverstka and geo-economics of the Soviet Russia
Authors:   Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Popov Gregory G. , Razdina Nataliya V. ,   Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
Published: October 2024

This article is a research which touches a number of subjects covering examination of “Prodrazverstka” and the early stage of the NEP impacts on the RSFSR agricultural sector recovery. It is proposed to conduct this examination from the point of view of geo-economics. The aim of this article is to put forward arguments that prove our hypothesis that the fractional restoration of the geoeconomic space of the former Russian Empire at the end of 1919-1920 contributed to the beginning of the post-war restoration of the RSFSR national economy, when such an institutional factor as the start of the NEP in 1921 was secondary in the process of the Russian recovery from the crisis. We prove that the re-integration of the country had led to the accession of product-surplus regions in order that to ground our point, which mentioned above. In connection with the purpose of the study we carry out the following most important tasks: regarding the published in the USSR materials containing the dynamics of volumes of the state provision from 1916 to 1921; updates data on the state of the Russian economy before and after the February and October revolutions of 1917 in order to decide the degree of influence of the Imperial heritage on the survival of Russians under the conditions of severe economic crisis of 1918 – 1920; the discovery of the connection between “Prodrazverstka” and the plowing’s size in Russian agriculture. Our work is based on a number of theoretical and statistical works, including statistical and analytical studies completed by contemporaries of the Russian Civil war. In particular, the materials of Oganovsky's book Essays on the economic geography of the USSR are insufficiently analyzed in post-Soviet Russian historiography, as well as a number of other works by Soviet economic historians, in particular, the voluminous work Of arutinyan A. A. and Markus B. L. “The development of the Soviet economy”, published in 1940, is mainly devoted to the 1920s – 1930s, but contains a lot of interesting materials on the Russian economy during the First world war and the Civil war. Despite the fact that the work Arutinian A. A. and Marcus B. L. written during the era of Stalinism, it is fairly objective regarding the evaluation of achievements of the Russian Empire to the beginning of the First world war and the February revolution. We also appeal to several collections of documents. Our article definitely contains a discussion with the mainstream of historical science both in Russia and abroad. In particular, our main conclusion, which follows our research hypothesis, states that the effectiveness of the NEP in bringing the country out of the crisis was exaggerated, the ground for getting out of the economic crisis was created at the end of 1919 during the Red army’s offensive along The Civil war fronts, when a number of bread-rich regions were recaptured from the Whites and the interventionists, this process was then repeated in 1920.