In examining economic development between 1913 and 1945 we shall be concerned with four substantially different economic systems.

(1) The economy of late Tsarism was in large part a capitalist market economy, but one in which the state played a considerable role and in which peasant households themselves produced a large part of the food they consumed.

(2) Following the two revolutions of February/March and October/November 1917, during the civil war (1918–20) a highly centralised system was established, later known as ‘War Communism’: the state owned nearly all industry and sought to manage all economic activity (in practice, however, an illegal free market was responsible for a substantial proportion of goods circulation).

(3) Between 1921 and 1929, the New Economic Policy (NEP) led to the establishment of a mixed economy: the state continued to own nearly all large-scale industry, but state industry traded with the 25 million individual peasant households through a market which was partly in private hands, partly in state hands. NEP was a period of coexistence, collaboration and conflict between state planning and the market.

(4) Following the breakdown of the market economy at the end of the 1920s, from 1930 onwards economic development was planned or managed by a centralised state administrative system. Capital investment and industrial production were administered largely through physical controls; individual peasant households were forcibly combined into collective farms, and the market relation with the peasants was largely replaced by administrative or coercive control of agricultural output.