HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

476 I. S. KOROPECKYJinterregional inequality first in tsarist Russia and then in the USSR.The movement toward less geographical concentration of industry canalready be detected during the half-century preceding World War I(Spechler, 1980, pp. 410-411, Table 1). The trend resulted mainlyfrom the relative decline of the Central Industrial Region aroundMoscow and of the St. Petersburg-Baltic Region in the country's totaloutput. The principal beneficiaries of this development were theUkraine and, to a lesser extent, the Transcaucasus and other borderprovinces of the empire. Thus, in spite of the budgetary losses, theUkraine experienced above average growth of its industry. It can beassumed that, as a result, the level of the Ukraine's economic developmentapproximated the average for the empire during the turn of thecentury.For social and political reasons, the commitment of the Sovietleadership to interregional economic equalization, primarily industrialequalization, has been explicit and more important than that of thetsarist government (Koropeckyj, 1970, pp. 236-37). 10 Because of thecentrally planned economy and the public ownership of the means ofproduction, the Soviet government's ability to achieve this goal wasalso incomparably greater than the tsarist government's had been.Indeed, an equalization trend, as evidenced by the decrease in thepopulation-weighted coefficient of variation for some variables, can beobserved during the interwar years for the eleven union republics thatthen constituted the USSR. 11 The coefficient for urbanization — avariable assumed to be a good indicator of economic modernization— decreased from 0.148 to 0.112 between the censuses of 1926and 1939. However, there is little change in the coefficient for grossindustrial output in the years for which comparable data are available:it decreased from 0.269 to 0.259 between 1932 and 1937 (TsUNKhU,1939, pp. 8, 9, 144). 12 Because of the rapid industrialization during thepreceding Five-Year Plan, 1928-32, the relative decrease in this indicatorfor the same period would probably be comparable to that forurbanization.The population weighted coefficients of variation for urbanization,10Some Western scholars, however, claim that the equalization objective hasnever been of high priority for Soviet leaders (McAuley, 1979, p. 145).11These were the present republics minus the three Baltic republics and Moldavia,although part of present-day Moldavia was then an autonomous republicwithin the Ukraine.12Because population estimates for 1932 and 1937 are unavailable, the results ofthe 1926 and 1939 censuses were used as respective weights.