The non-agricultural private sector

This chapter delves into the private sector outside of agriculture. The legal, semi-legal, and illegal private sectors existed as a way to make up for the Soviet economy’s lacklustre consumer goods industry. It was not a negligible remnant of the past but a prefiguration of the future. This chapter thus furthers the claim that the Soviet economy was a capitalist economy in development and helps transition into the examination of state industry and accumulation. Delving into the non-agricultural private sector helps criticise the view that the Soviet economy was an all-encompassing state economy, held both by partisans of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ and by some theorists of ‘state capitalism’.