What a real shutdown looked like

Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, and Aleh Tsyvinski say, not nice;

Therefore our answer to the ‘Was Stalin Necessary?’ question is a definite ‘no’. Even though we do not consider the human tragedy of famine, repression and terror, and focus on economic outcomes alone, and even when we make assumptions that are biased in Stalin’s favour, his economic policies underperform the counterfactual. We believe Stalin’s industrialisation should not be used as a success story in development economics, and should instead be studied as an example where brutal reallocation resulted in lower productivity and lower social welfare.

That's what resulted when the government shut down the country, not the other way around. But, did it really take four Phds to show us that.