Fundamentals of the Soviet Economy: An Introduction to Lenin and Stalin Years

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks won power in Russia. What they did not possess was an economy to run.Between 1918 and 1953, the Soviet Union improvised, reversed course, and argued its way toward an economic system - through War Communism's emergency grain requisitions, Lenin's tax-in-kind retreat under the New Economic Policy, Stalin's forced-pace Five-Year Plans, the collectivization of the countryside, and finally Stalin's own attempt, in his last major work, to state the settled economic laws of socialism.This short guide tells that story largely in the words of the people who lived it - Lenin explaining why he was permitting capitalism to partially return; the economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky working out what laws could govern an economy that was neither capitalist nor fully socialist; and Stalin, reporting industrial results to his own Central Committee and, decades later, attempting to close the theoretical gap Marx had left open.Each chapter pairs clear original analysis with excerpts from the primary texts, so readers can follow the argument in something closer to the words of the people making it. No prior background in Marxist economics is assumed - every term is defined at first use.Primary-source excerpts with original editorial analysis, from the Overmind Publishing catalog of Marxist theory and Soviet history.