When the Great Depression was happening in the 1930’s did it have any effect on Communist nations like Russia?
Well, during the Great Depression the Soviet Union was the ONLY communist nation, so we don’t have a lot of other cases to compare it to.
Essentially, the Great Depression had both positive and negative aspects for the USSR. Since the Soviet Union avoid the mass unemployment and drop in agricultural production, its planned economy looked much more attractive to those in the West than might otherwise have been the case. Much of the sympathy for the Soviet experiment dated from this period when it actually did seem like the USSR had figured out something that the capitalists couldn’t.
Depression in the West also meant that Western firms were eager to sell licenses and technology to the USSR, which desperately needed that kind of expertise, since it was beginning its own industrialization drive during the First Five-Year Plan, which got rolling officially in April 1929.
That meant there were lots of out-of-work technicians and engineers who were happy to try their luck in the Soviet Union. One, John Scott, wrote a VERY interesting set of memoirs (Behind the Urals) that’s easy to get ahold of.
On the DOWN side, the Great Depression deflated agricultural prices dramatically, and the Soviet Union relied on agricultural exports to earn the bulk of the hard currency it needed to buy Western technology and capital goods. Result was the Soviet Union had to push that much harder and sell that much more to earn dollars. That HELPS to explain why the USSR ended up starving 5-7 million of its own people to death in the early 1930s: the needs of state demanded continuing agricultural exports, damn the human costs.
WHOOPS! That should be “avoided the mass unemployment and drop in INDUSTRIAL production”