Materials for a Balance of the Soviet National Economy cover three crucial years of Soviet economic development – 1928, 1929 and 1930 – with some additional information on 1931. By 1928 both industrial and agricultural production already exceeded the pre-war level. In 1928–30 the industrialisation drive was launched; the industrial developments of these years laid the foundations for Soviet victory in the second world war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a super-power after the war.

The industrialisation drive of 1928–30 was accompanied by dramatic changes in the economic and social structure. On the eve of industrialisation, the Soviet economy was a kind of market economy. All large-scale industry (so-called ‘census’ industry) was nationalised soon after the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917, and in the simultaneous agrarian revolution the land of private landowners and much of their property were divided up among 20 million individual peasant households. The New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced in 1921 established a market relation between the state sector of the economy and individual peasant agriculture, while retaining and extending important elements of planning in the industrial sector. In 1927 this market relationship broke down, first for grain and then for other agricultural products, and was replaced by the compulsory acquisition of peasant products by the state. During the early 1930s, the socialisation of the economy was completed by the forced collectivisation of agriculture.