Essentially everything regarding Russian economy and politics is traditionally explained by the qualities brought about by the country’s immense territory and severe climate. These inherited characteristics nurture a vast range of disadvantages for the Russian economy, including higher transportation costs, lower agricultural productivity, and higher energy consumption. This paper is a rather technical exercise attempting to re-examine the trend of the average temperature per capita (TPC). The latter metric underpinned Hill & Gaddy’s (2003) argument about the cost of the cold being one of the decisive determinants of the inefficiency of the Soviet (and post-Soviet Russian) economy. This scrutiny differs from Hill & Gaddy’s (2003) design in two principal ways: it embraces a broader geographical scope (the entire pre-Soviet Russian Empire and the Soviet Union) and a wider chronological window (from the late 19th century to the end of the Soviet era). This allows the authors to unravel the claim that the Soviet command-administrative system ushered in and perpetuated the "economy of cold" by nuancing the historical trends of TPC within three geographical loci: the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, non-Russia, and modern Russia. The novel aspect of this study is that it reveals that the declines in TPC were not persistent either chronologically or geographically. Overall, the declines were most pronounced between 1939 and 1959 and were essentially confined to the territory of the modern Russian Federation.
