1) What's the capital of the Soviet Union? It is an
important industrial centre, isn't it?
Following the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin, fearing possible foreign invasion, moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow on March 12, 1918. The Kremlin once again became the seat of power and the political centre of the new state.
Primary industries in Moscow included the chemical, metallurgy, food, textile, furniture, energy production, software development and machinery industries.
The Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant was one of the leading producers of military and civil helicopters in the world. Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center produced various space equipment, including modules for space stations Mir, Salyut and the ISS as well as Proton launch vehicles and military ICBMs. Sukhoi, Ilyushin, Mikoyan, Tupolev and Yakovlev aircraft design bureaus also were situated in Moscow.
The Electrozavod factory was the first transformer factory in Russia. The Kristall distillery was the oldest distillery in Russia producing vodka types, including "Stolichnaya" while wines were produced at Moscow wine plants, including the Moscow Interrepublican Vinery. The Moscow Jewelry Factory and the Jewellerprom were producers of jewellery in Russia; Jewellerprom used to produce the exclusive Order of Victory, awarded to those aiding the Soviet Union's Red Army during World War II.
There were other industries located just outside the city of Moscow, as well as microelectronic industries in Zelenograd, including Ruselectronics companies.
Gazprom, the largest extractor of natural gas in the world and the largest Russian company, had offices also in Moscow, as well as other oil, gas, and electricity companies.
2. What other important industrial centres do you know
in the Soviet Union?
Other important industrial centres in the Soviet Union were Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Dzerzhinsk, Volgodonsk, Nizhnevartovsk and Syzran.
3. Is the Soviet Union an industrial or an agricultural
country?
Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes (prodrazverstka, prodnalog, and others) were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against (vaguely defined) "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33 (most especially the holodomor in Ukraine). A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, many reforms (such as Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign) were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their standard of living.
Despite immense land resources, extensive farm machinery and agrochemical industries, and a large rural workforce, Soviet agriculture was relatively unproductive. Output was hampered in many areas by the climate and poor worker productivity.
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