Economic Trends in Soviet Russia (1930) examines the economic position of the USSR a decade after the Revolution. It displayed the contradictions evident in an economy that had been isolated from the world economy while undergoing great changes, and where the government was taking control over all aspects of economic life. Huge factories had been established, yet the countryside remained pre-industrial; and while the economy was in theory entirely under State control, in practice currency crises, crises of production, gluts, crises of demand, pressed hard on one another's heels, and were renewed again and again by the spontaneous play of economic forces.

A. Yugoff