An Economic History of the USSR by Alec Nove

A concise and objective study of the growth of a country, tracing the economy of the USSR throughout the 20th-century. From War Communism, to the new economic policy of the early 1920s and to the economy under Stalin’s coercion. This included the Soviet “great leap forward” of five-year- plans, collectivization and Stakhanovism. The author’s account of these years of terror reveal not only his close acquaintance with the Soviet sources, but also his ability to divine the historical facts through a mist of propaganda. After a brief survey of the distorted economy of the Second World War and of Malenkov and Krushchev, with their well-intentioned but often hare-brained schemes to expand the economy, he concludes with a notably fair-minded assessment of Russian achievement to date.