Russia After Stalin

	Germany	30	55
Goods traffic on rail-ways (in millions of tons)	Russia	187	590
	Germany	463	500 (approx.)

* The figures for Germany do not include the output of Austria, the Sudetenland, and other territories annexed by Hitler.

The table indicates, of course, only that Russia's aggregate industrial power was catching up with Germany's. The degree of Russia's industrial saturation was, because of her much more numerous population, well below the German level. In consumer industries Russia was far behind Germany. On the other hand, in engineering and armament industries she was already well ahead of Germany precisely because she devoted only a negligible proportion of her basic materials to consumer industries and used them mainly for the expansion of her engineering plant.

Basic Production*

	Million metric tons
	U.S.S.R. in 1951	U.S.S.R plan for 1955	Great Britain, France, and West Germany 1951	United States 1951
Coal	281	372	398	523
Oil	42	70	1.7	309
Electricity (billion kwh)	103	162	147	370
Pig iron	22	34	29	63
Crude steel	31	44	39	95

* This table is taken from The Economist of 30 August 1952. Another table in the same paper showed that Russia's industrial saturation, i.e. her output per head of population, remains well below that of Western Europe, although it is approaching that of France. Here again, Russia is much further behind Western Europe in consumer industries than this table indicates, but she is also more ahead in engineering and armament.

In the present decade Russia is beginning to overtake the combined industrial power of Germany, France, and Great Britain; and she obviously aspires to catching up with the United States in the not too remote future.

Whether or not Russia will ever be able to realize her ambition of attaining industrial parity with the United States, the mere fact that she is about to leave behind the combined industrial power of the great nations of Western Europe and is thinking ahead so ambitiously, gives a measure of the profound transformation she has undergone in the Stalin era.

This transformation has taken place on the basis of a publicly owned and planned economy. Stalinism claims to have provided the first historically significant demonstration, carried out on a gigantic scale, that planning is the most effective method for the rational use and the most rapid development of a nation's economic resources. Stalinism has implanted this conviction in the new Soviet generations even in its most bitter opponents