Analysis is based on the historical national accounts of the Russian Federation for 1960–1990 and official data for the post-Soviet period. The results of the International/European Comparison Programme for 2002 are used to develop retrospective estimates of Russia's GDP components in comparison with the United States. These estimates are compared and cross-checked with the results of previous rounds of ICP/ECP and with the CIA's USSR–USA comparisons. This approach makes it possible to offer more reliable estimates of the level of Russia's economic development in the Soviet period and to make biases in the structure of the centrally planned economy more explicit. If the convergence/divergence of economies is treated in a formal manner, based only on per capita GDP data, then in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s the Russian and US economies converged, and in the 1990s they diverged. But if convergence/divergence is measured by structural features or even by the system of economic relations as a whole, it must be said that differences between the Russian and US economies intensified throughout the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, i.e. there was a clear process of divergence between the two economies.

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