The present publication is a translation of Materialy po balansu narodnogo khozyaistva SSSR za 1928, 1929 i 1933 g.g., issued in October 1932 by the Central Administration of National Economic Records of the USSR for official circulation. This important statistical study was made available for general use in several Soviet libraries in the early 1970s; a photocopy may be consulted in the Alexander Baykov Library of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham.

In this edition the translation is preceded by three articles by the British editors. The first article (pp. 3–15) provides a brief guide to the complicated structure of the tables and explanatory notes of the Soviet work; the second (pp. 16–33) discusses the Materialy as a source of information on Soviet economic development; the third (pp. 34–48) reviews the place of the Materialy in the history of Soviet planning. At the end of the book we have provided a glossary of Russian terms, and of our English-language Versions of the difficult Russian.

The initial translation was prepared by Brian Pearce, to whom we are most grateful for his careful work with a difficult text; it was revised by the editors. The translation is complete, except for half a dozen diagrams at the beginning of the book which do not contain new material. Phrases and words added to the text by the British editors are placed in square brackets, as are the numbers and letters of headings which we have changed or added to assist clarity.