Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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? 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...
...Take Soviet Ballet. Dennis' full-length portrait of Divver belongs in the gallery of great comic figures. In his youth reduced by sneering Manhattan intellectuals to a self-analyzing jelly, Divver believed, or thought he believed, in Freud and historical Forces; his misery reached brilliant heights as he talked his first marriage to death. He went abroad to study life under Fascism, and found significance in everything from prostitutes to opera. Wrote Divver in his notebook...
...Opera composer views life from standpoint at odds with history. Knows work is artificial, ludicrous, does not care, or cannot help self . . . Soviet love of ballet quite different-freedom of movement, jumping, aspiring, etc. Probably otherwise under Czar." But such happy jottings were soon to be interrupted. At a mass press conference with Mussolini, Divver was jostled accidentally and raised a protesting voice; he was ejected, shouting and waving his fist, and at once became a hero back home. Too cowardly to refuse his accidental fame, Divver became Forward's expert on Italian affairs. Practice...