During the 1920s the Bolshevik leadership faced a particularly urgent need for a theoretical understanding of the road to socialism in Russia. This was due to the fact that previous theoretical schemes of a direct leap, a virtually immediate transition of the developed capitalist countries to communism, were hopelessly outdated (see particularly The Communist Manifesto by K. Marx and F. Engels, Critique of the Gotha Programme by Marx, and State and Revolution by V.I. Lenin). No such leap occurred. The first round of the world communist revolution ended in a ‘draw’: the proletariat triumphed, but only in a single country that was far from being one of the most advanced in capitalist terms. As a result, Soviet Russia was compelled to resolve three complex and interconnected problems simultaneously: 1) its survival as a link in the world revolution (was its survival possible in principle, and if so where should it focus its main efforts – on ‘subversive activity’ in the citadels of capitalism or on domestic economic construction, etc.?); 2) overcoming its technical-economic backwardness in relation to the leading countries (at what tempos, by attracting foreign loans and investments and/or by beginning primarily with domestic sources of accumulation, etc.?); and 3) its own transition to socialism and communism. While there was a starting point for interpreting the third problem (see the works mentioned above), the ways to solve the first two, and to subordinate them to the third, had to be developed from scratch.
The severity of the situation was intensified by two circumstances. In the first place, by the time the Civil War ended, the Soviet government controlled vast economic resources, with market mechanisms playing virtually no role in their distribution. Consequently, there was an urgent and immediate need for theoretical elaboration of the laws governing the operation of the ‘new economy’: the proportions and mechanisms of planned distribution of resources both within the socialised sector of the economy and also taking into account the organisation of this sector’s exchanges to acquire resources from the non-state sector. Otherwise, the Soviet economy was threatened with a permanent crisis and the inevitable political result – collapse of the proletarian dictatorship. Secondly, though this unprecedented concentration of resources was in the hands of the Bolshevik Party, the latter had no coherent leadership. Deprived of its historical leader, V.I. Lenin, the Bolshevik Areopagus plunged into a prolonged struggle over leadership. As a result, the formulation, understanding and solution of urgent theoretical problems were often functions of the struggle for power between the ‘leaders’.
Despite such an unfavourable context, however, it was precisely during the 1920s that a ‘wealth’ of theoretical work was created, which subsequently – even though it was ‘buried’ in the ‘special depositories’ – did not disappear. Periodically it found an echo in emasculated ‘Soviet’ discussions; it became a major starting point for the development of Marxist thought outside the USSR (particularly for devising models to overcome the backwardness of ‘third-world’ countries); and it provided one of the most important impulses in today’s quest for alternatives to capitalist globalisation, which has driven humankind into a blind alley. In our view, perhaps one of the most important results of the development of Marxist thought in the Soviet Union during the 1920s came in the theoretical work of E.A. Preobrazhensky’s The New Economics.
The book had a very troubled fate. By labelling him a ‘Trotskyist’, Preobrazhensky’s opponents prevented him not only from publishing it in full but also, apparently, from completing the writing of his main work. Unfortunately, the compilers of this research have thus far been unable to find the author’s texts for the unpublished parts of The New Economics (it is possible that they have not survived). Nevertheless, the search did lead to the discovery of interesting archival materials that were directly or indirectly connected with Preobrazhensky’s work on the book. Together with the published portions and fragments of The New Economics, along with other works that were written as part of the same problematic, they do allow us to re-create the main body of the text of The New Economics in a way that we believe is close to what the author intended.
In volumes II and III of The Preobrazhensky Papers we attempt such a reconstruction. The materials for that purpose include: 1) the author’s Preface to the first edition of The New Economics, in which he sets out the general plan of the book as a whole; 2) the text of the second edition of The New Economics; 3) published fragments that the author indicated are parts of The New Economics; 4) published materials that Preobrazhensky did not intend to be part of The New Economics but which might have been the basis for the chapters he did not get to write; 5) archival materials that relate directly to The New Economics; and 6) archival documents that, judging by the general design of the book, might have become the nucleus for the unwritten chapters.
According to Preobrazhensky’s Preface to the first edition of The New Economics, the book was to consist of two volumes.
He planned to include two parts in the first volume: 1) an ‘historical’ part, involving ‘a brief review of socialist and communist conceptions of socialism’; and 2) a ‘theoretical’ part, characterising the methodology for studying the Soviet economy and an analysis of the basic laws regulating its development, along with Appendices devoted to the polemic with his opponents.
There are no particular problems in reconstructing this volume, especially its ‘theoretical’ part. It was published entirely and in finished form in the second edition of The New Economics, which we have reproduced according to the text (see Part 2 of this edition). Preobrazhensky indicated that ‘From the second, historical part of the first volume, the first chapter and one-half of the second were published. The whole of the second part, if circumstances permit, will go to press by the autumn of this year, 1926’. Unfortunately, ‘circumstances did not permit’: the second half of the second chapter of the historical part never saw the light of day. In this volume we have reproduced the first chapter and the first half of the second according to the text that was published in issues of the Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii (see Part 1). As regards the Appendices, they are published here according to the text of the second edition of The New Economics, together with some previously published materials and some that were found in the archives (see the Appendices).
The second volume (Volume III in this series) was more complicated. In the Foreword to the first edition of The New Economics, Preobrazhensky commented that
The second volume (Volume III of this series) will be devoted to a concrete analysis of the Soviet economy, i.e., Soviet industry, Soviet agriculture, the system of exchange and credit, the economic policy of the Soviet state, and also a study of the beginnings of socialist culture. The most important first chapter of the second volume, considering the problem of equilibrium under concrete capitalism and in the economy of the USSR, will be published in the near future.
The ‘most important first chapter of the second volume’ actually did appear in two issues of the Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii and will be published in Volume III, Part 1 according to those texts. However, the other chapters of the second volume were not published. By way of ‘compensation’, therefore, in Volume III of this series we include materials by Preobrazhensky (including archival materials), which, in our view, might have been the basis for his work on the unpublished (or unwritten?) chapters of the second volume of The New Economics, devoted to ‘concrete analysis of the soviet economy’ (see Volume III, Part 2) and also to ‘a study of the beginnings of socialist culture’ (see Volume III, Part 3). In the Appendices to Volume III we include the key chapters1 of Preobrazhensky’s futurological work From NEP to Socialism, in which he projects the leading tendencies, conflicts and dates for exhaustion of the NEP economic model, as well as a survey article devoted to characterisation of Preobrazhensky’s works.2
In preparing this volume for publication, the editors have provided the titles and enumeration of volumes, parts and chapters that appear in square brackets, while those without brackets come from the pen of E.A. Preobrazhensky.
Preobrazhensky’s use of fonts in his published works (italics, boldface, and spacing) has been made uniform since the same concepts were at times treated differently.
Following modern norms of writing, we have also made uniform the abbreviations used, the numbers, references to the literature, and also the punctuation and spelling.
The archaeographic preparation of the documents was done according to ‘Rules for the publication of historical documents’ (1990). Typographical misprints and grammatical errors in the original text have been corrected without reservation. A number of clarifications are provided in square brackets.
The scientific-reference apparatus of this edition includes this Preface, notes, a List of Abbreviations and the Name Index.
For their assistance in preparing this volume, the editors wish to thank S.V. Mironenko, Director of the State Archive of the Russian Federation; V.A. Kozlov and L.A. Rogovaya, Deputy Directors of the State Archive of the Russian Federation; E.L. Garanenkova, Director of the scientific library of the State Archive of the Russian Federation; A.A. Fedyukhin, researcher at the State Archive of the Russian Federation; L.P. Kosheleva, A.S. Massal’skaya, E.P. Karavayeva, and A.A. Oshchepkova, all at the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History. We express particular gratitude to those at the Centre for Scientific Use and Publication at the Main Archive of Moscow, who participated in the work on this volume. We also express particular gratitude to N.A. Tesemnikova for assisting with the search for archival documents and the archaeographic treatment of them. This publication would not have been possible without the interest and participation of the English journalist Simon Pirani. The editors are especially grateful to Professor Richard B. Day, at the University of Toronto (Canada), who in fact initiated this project and has supported the editors and the authors’ collective at every stage in bringing it to publication.
M.M. Gorinov, S.V. Tsakunov
[The English-language edition of our Volume III includes the complete text of From NEP to Socialism.]
[The English-language edition of Volume III also includes letters that Preobrazhensky wrote to Leon Trotsky while in exile early in 1928, his analysis of Stalin’s ‘left course’ in the countryside, and a concluding essay by Richard B. Day, analysing the relation between Preobrazhensky and Trotsky and also the ‘afterlife’ of the New Economic Policy in China following the death of Mao Zedong.]