Half Full or Half Empty?: The Debate Over Soviet Regional Equality

Abstract

Ever since the early days of Bolshevik rule, Soviet leaders have promised to equalize socioeconomic development among the union republics. Their reasons, as I. S. Koropeckyj notes, have ranged from the ideological to the purely political. Equality is deemed an ideological necessity: every region must achieve a similarly advanced stage of development in order to pave the way for communism. Regional equality is also viewed as a way to defuse the nationality issue—in the short run by minimizing the socioeconomic disparities inherited from tsarist days and in the long run by creating a new climate in which local nationalism will disappear. The benefits of equalization should also spill over into the international arena, where the advances of traditionally underdeveloped Soviet regions highlight the “appeals of the Soviet development model for impatient revolutionary modernizes.”