What had come to an end was not history itself,
but an empire, whose time had run out.
— Karl Schlögel in The Soviet Century
In my last post, ‘The Half Life of Empire’, I charted the rise and fall of the British and US empires, as measured by their share of world energy use. Afterwards, several readers requested that I apply the same methods to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
Here’s my attempt to do so.
Figure 1 shows my estimates for the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, as measured by its share of world energy use. The Soviet ‘half life’ — the period spent to and from the halfway mark of peak dominance — lasted for sixty six years, from 1926 to 1992.
Some backstory. The Soviet Union formed out of the ashes of the Russian Empire, which itself dates back to the early 18th century. Unlike the British Empire, which industrialized during the 19th century, the Russian Empire remained largely agrarian. (It was one of the last places to allow serfdom.) Hence, Russia saw little material growth during the 1800s.
That would change with the Russian Revolution, which began in 1917. After a half decade of internal turmoil mixed with imperial conquest, the Red Army proclaimed victory and created the Soviet Union in 1922. Afterwards, the Soviet regime embarked on a period of intense industrialization, organized around a series of five-year plans. As a result, Soviet energy use exploded.
By the 1960s, the Soviet Union reached its peak level of dominance, consuming slightly more than 15% of the world’s energy. Then, after coasting for several decades, the late 1980s saw the Soviet government embroiled in a series of crises which would ultimately proved insurmountable. By 1992, the Soviet regime had collapsed, and the remaining Russian state fell into a deep depression. Today, Russia’s share of world energy use is less than a third of the Soviet peak.
The Soviet experience: burning bright and collapsing fast
Returning to wider imperial history, one of the intriguing features of the British and US empires is that despite their apparent differences, they’ve had a curiously similar rhythm. Both empires rose and fell over the course of two centuries. And both empires had a half-life of about one hundred years. Figure 2 shows the similarities.
Is this shared timeline a universal feature of imperial history — a sign that all empires have a fixed destiny? Turning to the Soviet example, the answer seems to be no. Figure 3 makes the case.
Compared to Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union rose and fell more abruptly. And that makes sense; both the beginning and the end of the Soviet empire were punctuated by revolution. The Soviet Union was created when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsarist regime and instituted state communism. And the communist regime died when the Soviet government collapsed and was replaced by capitalist oligarchy.
In contrast, the British and US empires rose and fell with far less internal conflict. And so their histories of dominance and decline are smoother … at least so far.
Looking to the future, it seems unlikely that American politicians will manage to reverse the US descent into imperial irrelevance. But what could happen is that US politics devolve into revolution and/or civil war, similar to when the Soviet Union collapsed.1 If that happens, expect a punctuated decline of American power.
The Cold War in hindsight
While we’ve got the Soviet energy data in hand, let’s revisit some Cold War history. According to standard lore, the Cold War consisted of a protracted struggle between two superpowers — one capitalist and one communist. In the end (the story goes), the United States won the battle because of the superiority of capitalism.
Turning to the energy data, the empirical story is rather different. As Figure 4 shows, the US exited World War II as the world’s sole superpower. In 1945, it consumed about 37% of the world’s energy. In that year, the Soviet share of world energy use sat at just under 11% — less than a third the US value.
In this context, it seems inappropriate to call the Soviet Union a ‘superpower’. It was a rival empire, yes. But at the dawn of the Cold War, there was no real competition. The US utterly dominated the global picture.
Over the next forty years, however, things changed. From the 1950s onward, US dominance gradually waned, while the Soviet Union managed to maintain its share of the world energy pie. The result was a gradual convergence between the two powers. Indeed, this convergence is the real story of the Cold War, as Figure 5 shows. From the dawn of the conflict in 1947 to the end in 1991, Soviet energy consumption consistently increased relative to the United States.
Of course, when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, the energy convergence ended. But should we read this collapse as a testament to the innate superiority of capitalism over communism?
In some ways the answer is yes, simply because things that die prematurely can hardly be called ‘superior’. And yet, while it existed, the Soviet regime was remarkable effective at closing the energy gap with the United States. The reasons are not mysterious.
To a large extent, industrialization is a project of infrastructure build out. To industrialize, you lay railways, you pave highways, you erect cities, and you construct massive factories. And the truth is that these huge projects are always done by large hierarchically controlled organizations. So the question is not whether industrialization should involve ‘central planning’. The question is whether the ‘central planning’ should be state dominated or corporate dominated. The US (and Britain before it) opted for the corporate-dominated approach. The Soviet Union opted for the state-dominated approach.
Since it ultimately collapsed, we know that the Soviet state-dominated approach had a problem with staying power. In this regard, the corporate-dominated approach to industrialization has an advantage, in that individual firms are (usually) small enough that they can fail without breaking the whole system. That said, while it survived, the state-dominated approach to industrialization was remarkably successful. (Figure 6 shows some of the big Soviet infrastructure projects.)
Looking at this industrial history, the economist Branko Milanović argues that actually-existing ‘communism’ proved to be starkly different than the utopia envisioned by Karl Marx. While Marx saw communism as the final stage of social evolution, real-world communism seems to have been an alternative, state-dominated path to industrialization — a path that either collapsed into corporate capitalism (as in Russia), or evolved into corporate capitalism more gracefully (as in China). Either way, the road to industrialization ended with corporate oligarchy.
Of course, given the unfolding ecological calamity, it seems doubtful that the oligarchic system has a long-term future. But that’s a topic for another time.
Support this blog
Hi folks. I’m a crowdfunded scientist who shares all of his (painstaking) research for free. If you think my work has value, consider becoming a supporter.
Stay updated
Sign up to get email updates from this blog.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. You can use/share it anyway you want, provided you attribute it to me (Blair Fix) and link to Economics from the Top Down.
Accumulating territory vs. building industry
The rise and fall of the Soviet Union had two components:
- the expansion/collapse of industrial capacity
- the appropriation/loss of territory
The latter component was most important at the beginning and end of the Soviet regime. Figure 7 illustrates. During the Russian Revolution, the Red Army conquered huge swaths of Asia, considerably expanding the territory covered by the former Russian Empire. And when the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, many Soviet-block states gained independence.
The results of this territory gain/loss are visible in Figure 7 as the difference between the red curve (which tracks the share of world energy used by all Soviet block countries both before, during and after the Soviet Union existed) and the blue curve, (which tracks the energy use of the actual Soviet empire as it gained and lost territory).
Sources and methods
Soviet energy consumption
I estimate Soviet energy consumption by summing the energy used by Russia, plus the energy used by the various Soviet block states during the years they were part of the Soviet regime.
Reliable energy data for these countries — from the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy — goes back to 1985.
Prior to that, I estimate Soviet energy use from its carbon emissions. (Data is from Our World in Data Annual CO2 emissions.) The idea is that carbon emissions track the level of fossil fuel use, which is by far the most important source of industrial energy.
To account for non-fossil fuel energy use (which is most important prior to industrialization), I assume that Soviet citizens consumed about 26,000 KCal per person per day from biomass energy (mostly burning wood). (This number is Ian Morris’ estimate for per capita daily energy use in Western Europe, circa the year 1400.)
To convert carbon emissions into energy use, I index the carbon data twice. First, I index the carbon data to Soviet energy use in 1985. The resulting series assumes that Soviet energy use prior to 1985 directly tracks its carbon emissions.
The problem with this estimate is that it ignores non-fossil fuel sources of energy, which become more important as we head back in time. To correct this problem, I then add to the time series the constant value of 26,000 KCal of energy per person per day. (Population data comes from Our World in Data.) Finally, I re-index this updated energy estimate to the statistical data from 1985.
British and US energy consumption
For sources, see the appendix in ‘The Half Life of Empire’.
World energy consumption
Data for world energy consumption is from the following sources:
- 1800 to present: Our World in Data, Energy Production and Consumption
- Prior to 1800: data is from Ian Morris’ book The Measure of Civilization, Table 3.1 & 3.4. Morris reports data for energy use per capita in the East and West. Using population data from Angus Maddison, I use Morris’ data to estimate world energy use. I then splice this data to the OWD data in 1800.
Notes
- For what it’s worth, Peter Turchin thinks that the US revolution is happening now.↩︎
Further reading
Fix, B. (2021). Economic development and the death of the free market. Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, 1–46.
Milanovic, B. (2019). Capitalism, alone: The future of the system that rules the world. Harvard University Press.
Schlögel, K. (2021). The Soviet century: Archaeology of a lost world. Princeton University Press.