HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

MOSCOW-UKRAINE ECONOMIC RELATIONS 473share, for example, 19.5 percent in 1970. The investment share fell aslow as 14.6 percent in 1979. It approached the population share in theUkraine only during the years immediately following both WorldWars, exceptions probably explainable by the need to reconstruct awar-devastated economy. In contrast, as Table 2 shows, the investmentshares of the RSFSR during the entire period since the Revolutionand of Kazakhstan during the postwar period were higher thantheir population shares (53.8 and 5.4 percent, respectively, in 1970).Now let us compare the tsarist and the Soviet regimes with respect tothe level of national income withdrawals from the Ukraine. In relationto budget receipts, outflow in terms of budgetary surplus was higherbefore the Revolution (between 40 and 50 percent) than during the1920s (between 11 and 23 percent) or during the 1960s (slightly over30 percent). This difference can be explained in part by a higher shareof national income flowing through the state budget in the USSR, over60 percent in recent years. In comparison, the share in capitalist tsaristRussia estimated for 1900 was about 37 percent (Prokopovich, 1928,p. 24; Khromov, 1950, p. 527). The latter percentage has, in addition,a somewhat upward bias; Prokopovich's national income data referonly to the European part of the empire, whereas Khromov's budgetdata are for the entire empire. The share of national income transferredfrom the Ukraine after World War II ranged between 10 and20 percent, and even if one accepts the lowest estimate of 10 percent,that is considerably higher than the rough approximation of about3 percent during the tsarist period. The transfer of either about 3 percentor more than 10 percent of the Ukraine's national income to otherregions of Russia/USSR year after year during one century is probablyunique in the history of international and interregional relations (cf.Wiles, 1977, p. 311).There is an important distinction between the interregional transfersof national income in Russia and the USSR and those in Westerncountries. Under parliamentary democracy in the West, the governmenthas to have approval from the population or from electedrepresentatives for such budget transfers. This has not been the caseeither in tsarist Russia or in the USSR. It is certain that if politicaldemocracy existed in multinational Russia/USSR, the capital exportingnationalities would object to such a budget policy, 6 since, almost as6Such objections were heard before the Revolution (cf. Petrovs'kyi's speechcited in fn. 3 above) and in recent times (for examples, see Koropeckyj, 1977,pp. 20-24).