The Socialist Experiment and Beyond: The Economic Development of Eastern Europe

Using recent advances in historical national accounts and scholarship of the region, this chapter depicts the economic development of eastern Europe from the times of the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian Empire before World War I through the turbulent interwar years, with the onset of the communist regime and socialist experiment in Russia, the spread of the centrally planned economic system and communist rule in the post-World War II decades, its collapse in the late 1980s and then a decade of transition to market economies. The chapter assesses the region’s economic performance in each of these periods. Even though the path of eastern Europe since the late nineteenth century has been one marked by a series of significant shocks, there were also significant continuities, so that the socialist ‘experiment’ did not result in the significant break with the past that its architects had envisaged.