This book is the famous “Stalin-era” political economy textbook—“the blueprint of how it works” and “a description of the principles of operation” of Stalin’s USSR. It is widely recognized that the textbook “presents the quintessence of Soviet economic thought of the 1930s, 1940s and the early 1950s.”
Preparation for publishing this book took about 18 years; dozens of Soviet economists took part directly, and hundreds took part in the discussion of drafts. The outstanding Stalin work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” was written in the form of remarks on the draft of this textbook. The book saw the light a year and a half after Stalin’s death and reflected the already emerging, at that time, shift of the new Soviet leadership away from Stalin’s legacy. But Stalin’s ideas—and even Stalin’s words (I. V. Stalin)—still sound quite clearly. Under Khrushchev, this book was removed from libraries; later it was suppressed, and young people simply didn’t know about its existence.
Year of publication — 1954