The Crisis and the Crash

A large literature exists in the West on the state that emerged from the October Revolution, and the internal controversies that punctuated its development have themselves been extensively examined. Richard Day's book advances into territory hitherto large neglected by Soviet scholarship - the complex debates among economists and politicians about the course and fate of the capitalist system. Day recounts the conflicting assessments of capitalism's restabilization after the First World War, detailing the theories of economic specialists like Kondrat'ev and Varga as well as the analyses of political theorists like Trotsky and Bukharin. He traces the Soviet response to the 1929 slump and documents the mounting political interference in scientific economic controversy by the Stalin leadership, culminating in the scurrilous assault on the most original Soviet economist of the 1920s: Evgeny Preobrazhensky. This scholarly book concludes with an account of Soviet reactions to the new era inaugurated by sweeping state intervention designed to eliminate capitalist crisis, as embodied in the diverse examples of Nazism and Roosevelt's New Deal.