Finance and Credit in the USSR

A primer on how socialist money was supposed to work, written at the one moment when its authors had most reason to be confident.

For once the date on the spine is close to the date of the text: the latest events are the Twenty-Third Congress of March-April 1966 and its directives for the 1966-70 plan, and the budget tables run in one series from 1960 to 1971. This is a genuine early-1970s book, not a lagged reprint, and its subject is the reform then in progress - the 1965 measures associated with Kosygin, which promised to run Soviet enterprises on profit, profitability and khozraschot, the practice of measuring an enterprise's outlays against its receipts in money terms.

Its structure tells you who it was for. Every major topic is expounded three times over - under capitalism, under socialism, and in developing countries. Public finance, state financial systems, credit and credit institutions each get their three sections in turn. This is not a book written to persuade a London reader. It is a comparative manual pitched at the newly independent states of Africa and Asia, the countries it repeatedly calls those "steering a socialist course", offering the Soviet financial system as the model a decolonising government might adopt in place of the one its former masters left behind.

Read as that - a working manual of Soviet public finance, budget structure, credit and the state bank, set out plainly for a reader with no prior knowledge - it is the clearest short account of the subject Progress published.

Translated by Donald Danemanis. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.