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The Preobrazhensky Papers, Volume 3. Concrete Analysis of the Soviet Economy

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Published Nov 2022

Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky

Volume Editors: Sergei Tsakunov, Mikhail M. Gorinov, and Richard B. Day
Evgeny A. Preobrazhensky was Russia’s foremost economist in the 1920s. This volume editorially reconstructs his theory of socialist industrialisation in an agrarian country and relates it to previous socialist theories and to issues of political struggle, culture and communist morality. The bulk of the work consists of Preobrazhensky’s Concrete Analysis of the Soviet Economy, which supplements his theoretical inquiry published in Volume II. A number of appendices present Preobrazhensky’s analysis of the NEP and his correspondence with Trotsky alongside extensive contributions by the volume’s editors and translators.

Biographical Note

Richard B. Day, Ph.D. (1970), University of London, is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published extensively on Soviet economic and political history, including Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation (Cambridge, 1973); a translation of Preobrazhensky’s The Decline of Capitalism (M.E. Sharpe, 1985); and Volume I of The Preobrazhensky Papers (Brill, 2014) with Mikhail M. Gorinov.

Mikhail Gorinov, Ph.D., is an historian of political struggles within the Russian Communist Party during the 1920s. He is co-editor of Preobrazhensky’s works in Russian and has published several works on Preobrazhensky’s political life, co-edited The History of Russia: The Twentieth Century (Heron Press, 1996), and contributed to The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Sergei Tsakunov, Ph.D., is an economist specialising in Russian economic theory during the 1920s. He is co-editor of Preobrazhensky’s works in Russian and author In the Labyrinth of Doctrine (Rossiya Molodaya, 1994). He has published chapters on NEP in several Russian journals and books, including Volume 1 of Soviet Society (Rosiiskii gos. gumanitarnyi universitet, 1997), and History of the Motherland (Politizdat Moskva, 1991).

Readership

This book will be of interest to developmental economists, historians of the Russian revolution, and students of Marxism and socialist theory.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

Part 1 [The Theory of Economic Equilibrium]

[Foreword]: The Problem of Economic Equilibrium in Concrete Capitalism and in the Soviet System

[1] Economic Equilibrium under Capitalism

[2] Economic Equilibrium in the System of the USSR

Part 2 [Concrete Analysis of the Soviet Economy]

[1] Results of the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia

[2] The Economic Policy of the Proletariat in a Peasant Country

[3] Economic Crises under NEP

[4] Economic Notes: On the Goods Famine

[5] Economic Notes: On the Consequences of the Goods Famine

[6] Address from E.A. Preobrazhensky in Debates on the Report from V.P. Milyutin on ‘Perspectives of Economic Development in the USSR (Gosplan’s Control Figures)’

[7] Economic Notes: Gosplan’s Control Figures and Our Economic Tasks

[8] Economic Notes: What Is New in the Economic Situation

[9] Notes of an Economist on ‘Notes of an Economist’

Part 3 [Socialist Culture and Morality]

[1] On the Material Basis of Culture in Soviet Society

[2] On Morals and Class Norms

Part 4 Appendices

[Appendix 1]: From the NEP to Socialism (A Glance into the Future of Russia and Europe)

[Appendix 2]: Letter from E.A. Preobrazhensky to L.D. Trotsky (Early March 1928)

[Appendix 3]: Theses by E.A. Preobrazhensky on ‘The Left Course in the Countryside and the Prospects’ (April 1928)

[Appendix 4]: Excerpts from Correspondence by E.A. Preobrazhensky (May 1928)

[Appendix 5]: Letter from E.A. Preobrazhensky to L.D. Trotsky (No Date)

[Appendix 6]: Letter from E.A. Preobrazhensky to L.D. Trotsky (2 June 1928)

[Appendix 7]: Letter from E.A. Preobrazhensky to L.D. Trotsky (June 1928)

[Appendix 8]: E.A. Preobrazhensky to L.D. Trotsky: ‘What Has to Be Said to the Comintern Congress’

Part 5 Conclusions

1 E.A. Preobrazhensky: A Review of His Economic Works
M.M. Gorinov and S.V. Tsakunov

2 Preobrazhensky and Trotsky: The Transition to Socialism and the Afterlife of NEP
Richard B. Day

Biographical Index
References
Index