From an earlier answer of mine

The advent of the Depression was one of the major propaganda coups for the nascent USSR and Stalin's dictatorship. The global scale of the Depression appeared to validate the Marxist-Leninist that capitalism was inherently unstable and the mass unemployment would finally lead to the long-predicted uprising by the proletariat. The USSR was relatively well-positioned to weather the Depression itself. The economic cordon around the USSR was fraying in the 1920s, but one of its legacies was that the USSR was still not all that connected up into global markets in 1929. The Soviet Union was insulated from the effects of the Depression, however, the global downturn in the economy did not leave the Soviets unscathed.

One of the immediate reactions of the major world economies to the Depression was preotectionism and tariffs. 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 Soviets' solution to this problem was typically Stalinist: simply export more. The exports of wheat grew from two hundred-thousand tons to two million tons between 1929-1931. Collectivization had imparted to the Politburo a false sense of security that it could export more and the global economic crisis created a sense of opportunity among the Soviet leadership that they needed to use this opportunity to modernize the economy. This increase in agricultural exports came at an acute time in Soviet agriculture and added yet more hardship to the Soviet public. These export policies were a contributing factor to famine conditions in Ukraine between 1931-32. As Stephen Wheatcroft and R. W. Davies note in the preface for their The Years of Hunger:

The good harvest of 1930 led to the decisions to export substantial amounts of grain in 1931 and 1932. The Soviet leaders also assumed that the wholesale socialisation of livestock farming would lead to the rapid growth of meat and dairy production. These policies failed, and the Soviet leaders attributed the failure not to their own lack of realism but to the machinations of enemies. Peasant resistance was blamed on the kulaks, and the increased use of force on a large scale almost completely replaced attempts at persuasion. Largely through their own fault, the Politburo had led the economy into an impasse. By the time the famine was looming over the country at the end of 1932, only an appeal for foreign assistance through grain imports would have stood any chance of avoiding famine. The Politburo did not even contemplate the public admission of failure which this would entail.

The state also auctioned off art treasures and Torgsin shops sold special consumer items to Soviet citizens for precious metals which would be in turn the state would use to pay for foreign imports.

The most acute period of Soviet agricultural export (1931) coupled with the nadir of the global Depression, so the detrimental effects exports had on the Soviet economy appeared relatively slight to outsiders. 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 as many Western firms were desperate for scarcer funds. The Ford Motor Company helped set up a state of the art automobile 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 and helped to create a truly massive heavy industry sector within the USSR. Foreign specialists became a more common sight in the various Stalinist projects. The massive steel city town of Magnitogorsk had a small American enclave, termed Amerikanka, for American steel engineers. The presence of these foreign specialist provided fodder for a number of conspiratorial-minded types in the Cold War that capitalists had funded the USSR, but the reality was more mundane. The foreign specialists provided a degree of initial guidelines, but the Soviets proved to be apt pupils. Soviet engineers easily took over the foreign expertise and the importation of expertise was more of a hothouse incubator for the development of Soviet heavy industry than something necessary for its genesis.

In this retrospect, the Depression helped render the Soviet economy much more efficient. There were significant human costs to the Soviet government's response to the Depression, namely both in higher grain requisitions and reinforcing the Stalinist drive to go all in on the development of heavy industry. The former led to starvation and accusations of wrecking in the countryside which added a further burden on the Soviet peasantry. Stalinist heavy industry also had a baleful balance sheet as the ambitious goals of the 5YPs could not be met and various managers engaged in trickery to meet them. This contributed to the Great Purges of the late 1930s as industrial managers engaged in a circular firing squad to deflect responsibility. On a long-term scale, the emphasis on heavy industry led to significant environmental degradation and also malformed the Soviet economy so that it was never able to respond to consumer needs in an adequate fashion. The success of centralized planning in establishing heavy industry and later defeating Hitler convinced a number of Soviet leaders postwar that centralized planning was essential and necessary, which further entrenched the inefficiencies of the Soviet economy. But these human costs did not eclipse the great propaganda value the USSR gained from the Depression. Soviet growth rates in GNP far exceeded the growth exhibited by their capitalist counterparts. This considerably helped the Soviet Union'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.

Wow thanks that was an interesting read!