Tamar Qeburia1; 1 Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European (IOS) Regensburg; The Institute of Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State U (Georgia), Germany
Discussion
The Soviet economy has often been characterized as an economy of scale, premised on the constant mobilization and movement of vast resources. Yet refocusing analysis on smaller-scale peripheral economies, such as the Georgian SSR, provides an important prism for rethinking it. Drawing on the case of Georgian manganese mining - an ore essential for metallurgical, steel, and chemical production, this paper illuminates the inverted economic logic of Soviet extractivism. Rising extraction rates and labor mobilization concealed accelerating resource depletion, substituting quantitative output for material reproduction. Examining how peripheral mining economies maintained productivity's appearance while exhausting its substance, the paper argues that Soviet planning was less a rational system than a performance of growth - one that systematically obscured the material limits it continually transgressed.
