The Preobrazhensky Papers, Volume 2: Chronicling Continuity and Change

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 editors create a unique portrait of Preobrazhensky as an economist and social theorist, assess the viability of NEP as a model of economic growth, and identify the fault lines that contributed to the split in the Trotskyist Opposition and its defeat in the struggle against Stalin.

The bulk of the work included in this volume consists of the important An Attempt to Provide a Theoretical Analysis of the Soviet Economy, while the material in Volume III focuses on concrete analysis.

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 of 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).