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-REVIEW: of The Economics of World War II. Edited by Mark Harrison (Harold G. Vatter, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.1 (1999) 120-121

This book affords a quantitative and analytical survey of the wartime economies of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. It compares the contribution of the respective economies to their war effort and touches on the condition of those economies in the immediate aftermath years. Each case also contains a brief treatment of how the wartime upheaval changed the relationships of government to the market system during the entire Cold War era.

Harrison contributes an overview chapter, as well as the chapter about the Soviet Union. [...]

Harrison's chapter is of particular interest in view of the disintegration of the Soviet system since the end of the 1980s. He calls the Soviet Union "the defeated victor," arguing that, in general, it was "the only one of the victors to suffer a significant, long-lasting economic setback from World War II". To an important extent, this setback is linked with the heavy peacetime defense burden of the Cold War, the chief internal vehicle for which was a military-industrial complex tightly connected with the Communist Party and ethnic Russians.

Hard to believe there are still folks who need to be convinced that the Soviet Union was a basket case at the end of WWII and that the Cold War kept it that way. It was always ripe for the plucking yet we waited until it had rotted out. That's a decision we still pay for in myriad ways, not least in the current ethos of terror in the Middle East. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 20, 2003 6:34 PM