Although the Soviet Union was insulated from the effects of the Depression, the global downturn in the economy did not leave the Soviets unscathed. The rise of protectionist tariffs made it much less profitable for the Soviets to export grain, timber, and other raw materials to acquire foreign goods that could not be produced within the Soviet Union. The Soviet's solution to this problem was typically Stalinist: simply export more. The exports of wheat grew from 200 000 tons to two million tons between 1929-1931. This increase in agricultural exports came at an acute time in Soviet agriculture and added yet more hardship to the Soviet public. The state also sold art treasures and Torgsin shops sold special items to Soviet citizens for precious metals which would be in turn used to pay for foreign imports.

The most acute period of agricultural export (1931) coupled with the nadir of the global Depression, so the detrimental effects exports had on the Soviet economy appeared relatively slight. As a whole though, the Soviet economy exhibited a great deal of growth during the Depression. The Soviets were able to import technical experts and specialists from the West that they might not otherwise in a better global economic climate. Ford helped set up a state of the art car factory in Nizhnii-Novgorod and other American firms aided the massive tractor factories in Stalingrad and Kharkov. Modern foreign machinery also greatly assisted the Stalinist crash industrial drive. In this respect, the Depression helped render the Soviet economy much more efficient. Soviet growth rates in GNP far exceeded the growth exhibited by their capitalist counterparts. This considerably helped the Soviet's ideological appeal and added luster to the Soviet experiment.

Sources

Davies, Robert William, S. G. Wheatcroft, and Mark Harrison. The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-45. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994.

Nove, Alec. An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991. London, England: Penguin Books, 1992.

USSR didn't have a Great Depression. At the beginning of Great Depression they started a minor recovery from Civil War and post-coup turmoil.

Actually Great Depression benefited USSR since most of the US companies are more than willing to trade with Soviets and many engineers and qualified workers moved in USSR to be main driving force of Soviet Industrialization.