The Soviet Union was actually relatively immune to the effects of the Great Depression. It had a closed economy, and thus buffered against the effects of the global economic disruption. The unemployment in the West allowed the Soviet Union to "import" out of work Western specialists to help with its industrialization. For example, the city of Magnitogorsk used specialists from Gary, Indiana to build its massive steel refineries.

The Depression helped the USSR in other ways. Ford had signed a trade deal with the USSR before the Depression and had sent over workers to aid in the construction of a modern automobile factory, the Gorki Automotive Plant (GAZ). Some of these workers actually elected to stay behind in the USSR where there was employment. Such actions added luster to the USSR: it could maintain full employment while the rest of the world shut its factories. The Depression had reenergized the global left and Communism appeared to have gained a degree of credibility because the Depression seemed to vindicate Marxist-Leninism's dictum that capitalism was unsustainable. The Depression also led to the rise of fascism within Western Europe, which at last gave Soviet propagandists an enemy who really were aggressive and militaristic anti-communists.

The only area that global economic disruption did impact the USSR was in grain prices. The Soviets had used the export of grain abroad to gain hard currency to pay for manufactured goods like industrial plant. The Depression precipitated a collapse in grain prices, so that the Soviets had to export more grain. This was a contributing factor to what historians call the Holodomor in Ukraine, a prolonged famine in which the Soviet government bears a great deal of blame (whether or not the famine was intentional is an enormous source of debate among Soviet historians).

Sources

Davies, R. W., Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft. The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.