Y. Avdakov and V. Borodin's USSR State Industry During the Transition Period is, on its face, a work of institutional economic history: a close study of how the Soviet state built the machinery to run its factories between the October Revolution and the abolition of the Supreme Economic Council in January 1932. It follows the offices, statutes and reorganisations — the Supreme Economic Council and its chief committees, the trusts, the syndicates, the credit reform, the shift from economic councils to branch People's Commissariats. It is drawn, as the authors say, from "a study of documents in the Central State Archive of the USSR National Economy and in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution," and much of what it reconstructs from those documents is genuinely useful and available in English almost nowhere else. It is also, in a way its administrative surface is designed not to show, a book about the greatest economic argument in the history of the transition — an argument it settles by pretending it never happened.
The spine reads 1977, and unusually for this series the text is close to its cover date. The latest events and citations reach into the early 1970s — 1974 is the newest year cited — so the Russian original was written in the mid-1970s and the English translation, by Jane Sayer, followed promptly. This is a Brezhnev-era book, and it reads like one.
It is worth asking who commissioned it and why, because the authors tell you in their first two pages and the answer is not "the Western reader." Avdakov and Borodin open by insisting that their study of the 1920s "is not only of historical significance." The reason is contemporary: "In recent years, much has been written in bourgeois literature about the economic reform in the USSR and the other socialist countries. Bourgeois critics try to prove, for example, that the idea of production amalgamations has been borrowed from the capitalist world. In fact, this idea appeared immediately after the Great October Socialist Revolution." The tell is the word amalgamations. Throughout the book the 1920s trusts and syndicates are held up as the ancestors of "present-day production amalgamations." In 1973 the Soviet government had reorganised industry around exactly such bodies — the proizvodstvennye ob"edineniya, the production and industrial associations that were the centrepiece of the mid-1970s management reform. Avdakov and Borodin's history is written to give that reform a Leninist pedigree: to show that the large multi-plant association is not a borrowing from the capitalist corporation but a native Soviet form present at the creation. The 1920s are being combed for precedents to a decision already taken in the 1970s. This is a genuine work of archival scholarship pressed into service as a genealogy.
That double character — real research, instrumental purpose — runs through the whole volume, and the reader who wants to use it has to hold both facts at once.
The doctrine is orthodox and, within its frame, clearly argued. The Revolution abolishes private ownership of the means of production; the Supreme Economic Council (SEC, the VSNKh) is created in December 1917 as "a planning, regulating, managing and supervising agency"; nationalisation proceeds not as a spasm of the Civil War but as the deliberate economic content of the proletarian dictatorship. The book is careful and often persuasive on the institutional detail: how the chief committees of the pre-revolutionary war economy were captured and turned; how "chief administrations" for nationalised enterprises displaced the older regulatory "chief committees"; how the tangle of Plenary Board, Bureau and Presidium was resolved in favour of the Presidium; how, after the tenth Party Congress and the turn to the New Economic Policy, industry was recast around self-accounting trusts and, above them, the syndicates that handled supply and sales.
On NEP the authors are more concrete than most Progress volumes dare to be. They take khozraschot — cost-accounting, rendered here as "self-financing" or "self-sufficiency" — seriously as an economic principle rather than a temporary retreat, defining it as "a method for the planned running of socialist enterprises based on economic independence and commodity-money relations." They reconstruct the credit reform of 1930 and, remarkably, criticise it: they describe the doctrinaire attempt to abolish money and the market, "setting the plan in opposition to the market," as a distortion that had to be "decisively rejected." A reader looking for the mechanics of how a nationalised industry was actually administered — the flow of authority from Council of Labour and Defence down through the SEC Presidium to trust and enterprise — will find here a level of granular reconstruction that the polemical literature rarely reaches. The stated task is honestly executed: "showing how the socialist system of industrial management took shape along with the building of the socialist economy."
And yet the transition period had a defining argument, and this book about the economics of the transition does not contain it.
The 1920s industrialisation debate was the last open, high-level economic controversy in Soviet history. Its central question was where the resources to build socialist industry would come from in a backward peasant country with no colonies to plunder and no foreign capital to borrow. On one side stood the Left Opposition and its foremost economist, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, whose The New Economics (1926) argued that the state sector would have to fund its own expansion by pumping a surplus out of the private, largely peasant, economy — a process he named, provocatively, "primitive socialist accumulation," by deliberate analogy with the primitive accumulation Marx had described at the birth of capitalism. Against this stood Nikolai Bukharin, who warned that squeezing the peasant would break the smychka, the worker-peasant alliance on which the regime rested, and who urged that the country would move towards socialism at a snail's pace on the back of a prosperous peasantry, enriching the countryside so that its growing demand pulled industry forward. This was not a marginal quarrel. It engaged Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev on the Left; Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky on the Right; and it was conducted with real economic sophistication by a generation of Soviet economists — Preobrazhensky, Vladimir Bazarov, Vladimir Groman, Nikolai Kondratiev, the planners of Gosplan and the Commissariat of Finance — who built the categories of development economics that the rest of the world would later rediscover.
Search Avdakov and Borodin for any of it. Preobrazhensky appears zero times. Primitive socialist accumulation appears zero times; so does socialist accumulation as a named concept, and Bukharin's snail's pace in any form. Bukharin himself — a member of the Politburo, the Party's leading theorist for most of the decade the book covers, the author of the economic line that actually governed NEP until 1928 — appears zero times. Kondratiev, Bazarov, Groman: zero. The economists who made the debate are not named, criticised, or refuted. They are simply not there.
Trotsky appears exactly five times, and the manner of his single substantive appearance is the key to the whole procedure. He surfaces not over industrialisation but over a narrower, older question — whether the nationalisations of 1917–18 were driven by economic necessity or political expediency. The authors report that "L. Trotsky, for example, considered that nationalisation was a measure not of economic expediency, but of political necessity," that Kamenev supported him, and that in doing so "the Trotskyites and other unexposed enemies of the Party and the socialist state were in fact opposing the policy of building a socialist economy." A page later Trotsky and Kamenev are folded in with "bourgeois 'specialists' on Soviet affairs." That is the sum of it. The most consequential economic thinker of the Opposition is admitted to the book only as an enemy of a proposition about 1918, and then bracketed with the class enemy. The debate that actually bore his name — the argument over tempo, over the five-year plan, over the source of accumulation — is nowhere.
The erasure is not a matter of omission alone; the book performs the omitted argument in its own voice, stripped of authorship. In its closing glossary, defining "Socialist Industrialisation of the USSR," it states plainly: "The main sources for socialist industrialisation were the incomes of nationalised industry and the accumulations of agriculture, the banking system, internal and foreign trade." The accumulations of agriculture. That is Preobrazhensky's thesis — surplus pumped from the peasant economy to build heavy industry — reproduced as settled fact, with its author unmentioned and the word he coined for it suppressed. The same entry describes the collectivisation that supplied those "accumulations" as "voluntary co-operation of the peasants' holdings." The violence of 1929–33, the deportations, the requisitioning, the famine that killed several million in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Volga — the historiography still contests the exact toll, with credible estimates ranging into the millions — all of it disappears into the word voluntary. The book thus commits both halves of the operation at once: it adopts the Left Opposition's economic answer and it launders the Stalinist method of executing it, while naming neither.
It is worth being precise about the shape of this silence, because the book is not silent about opposition as such. It names the oppositions of 1918–21 freely — the "Left Communists," the anarchists, and above all the Workers' Opposition, which earns its own glossary entry as "an anti-Party anarcho-syndicalist group that emerged in 1920" that "was routed by the Communist Party." These were the safe targets: currents defeated early, associated with figures who were mostly not later elevated to the summit of the state, and so available to be condemned without embarrassment. The oppositions the book cannot name are the ones of the middle and late 1920s — the Left Opposition, the United Opposition, the Right — because to name them is to name Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky and Trotsky, men the Party had raised to its highest offices and then, within a decade of the events described, shot or driven to suicide or murder in exile. The glossary that finds room for the Workers' Opposition of 1920 has no entry for the Left Opposition, for socialist accumulation, or for a single one of the economists who theorised the transition. The selection is not random. The book will condemn the opposition it can afford to remember and erase the opposition it cannot.
There is one further silence the reader should register, because it is the darkest. In reconstructing the planning apparatus of the late 1920s, Avdakov and Borodin necessarily walk past the men who staffed it. Many of those men were shot. The Gosplan and Finance Commissariat economists — Groman and Bazarov among them — were tried in the fabricated "Menshevik trial" of 1931 and destroyed. Kondratiev, whose name is now attached to the long waves of the world business cycle, was imprisoned in 1930 and executed in 1938. Preobrazhensky was shot in 1937; Bukharin in 1938 after the last great Moscow show trial. A history of Soviet industrial administration in the 1920s is, whether it wishes to be or not, a history of a cohort that the regime it praises later murdered. The book's silence on that fact is not neutral. Trotsky, who watched it happen, caught the mechanism exactly when he noted that the very engineers and economists who drew up the cautious first five-year plan "were some years later severely judged and punished by law as conscious sabotagers acting under the direction of foreign powers" — punished, he added drily, for having faithfully executed the Politburo's own line.
The case against this account was not composed in hindsight; it was made by the losing side while the argument was still live, and it can be read today. The indispensable text is Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936), whose second chapter, "Economic Growth and the Zigzags of the Leadership," is a direct history of the industrialisation debate written by one of its principals. It records what Avdakov and Borodin cannot: that the demand for a five-year plan and for rapid industrialisation came from the Left Opposition, in 1923, and was "met with mockery"; that the ruling coalition of "Stalin, Molotov, Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin" spent five years fighting "the advocates of 'super-industrialization' and planned leadership"; that Stalin "thundered against the 'fantastic plans' of the Opposition," insisting industry must not "rush ahead, breaking away from agriculture." And it records the reversal: when the peasant grain strike of 1928 forced the leadership's hand, "the fundamental elements" of the new plan were, in Trotsky's phrase, "borrowed in toto from the platform of the shattered Left Opposition." The men who had proposed the policy were expelled and, later, killed; the policy was adopted, at a tempo so reckless that, as Trotsky put it, "opportunism, as has often happened in history, turned into its opposite, adventurism" — the Politburo leaping from Bukharin's "tortoise tempo" to a rate that shattered the currency and the peasantry alike. Where Avdakov and Borodin present a smooth institutional unfolding of "the socialist system of industrial management," The Revolution Betrayed gives the record of a leadership that ridiculed the correct policy, adopted it under duress without acknowledgement, and shot its authors.
For the specifically economic questions, the reader should turn to Preobrazhensky's The New Economics, the theoretical statement of the case for planned industrialisation funded by the state sector's accumulation. It is the book whose central argument Avdakov and Borodin silently reproduce in their glossary. Trotsky's own contemporaneous critique of the 1929–30 turn — that it was correct in direction but catastrophic in its unplanned violence — is set out in his 1930 essay "The New Course in the Economy of the Soviet Union," written from exile as the collectivisation drive began. Read alongside the present volume, these establish what the archival surface conceals: that there was a road not taken, that it was proposed by named people on economic grounds, and that the regime chose to erase the proposal along with those who made it.
None of this is a reason to discard the book. Its polemical frame is thin and its silences are grave, but its research is not fraudulent, and a reader who is warned about the frame can extract real value from the substance.
The institutional reconstruction is the genuine article. Avdakov and Borodin worked in the economic archives of the Soviet state, and their account of the administrative history of Soviet industry — the internal evolution of the SEC from a universal economic authority into, in effect, a Commissariat of Industry; the mechanics of the trust and syndicate systems under NEP; the composition of the chief committees and the class conflicts fought out inside them; the credit reform of 1930 and its failure — is detailed, source-based, and in English hard to find elsewhere. They cite serious specialist scholarship, including A. V. Venediktov's standard study of Soviet state industry, and they are willing, within limits, to record institutional failure: the "serious defects" of the self-financed amalgamations of 1929–30, the over-centralisation, the doctrinaire attempt to abolish market categories that had to be reversed. On the plumbing of the Soviet planned economy in its formative years — how orders actually flowed, who actually answered to whom — this is a competent and informative technical history. Used as a description of institutional forms rather than as an account of the politics that shaped them, it repays reading. The task is to read the machinery it documents while supplying, from outside it, the argument it was written to bury.