The present volume and its successor, written jointly by E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, open the final instalment of E. H. Carr's A History of Soviet Russia. They deal with economic affairs, and the central theme is the replacement of the guided market economy of NEP by direct planning, first predominantly in financial, and later also in physical, terms. The varying fortunes of the struggle between market forces and the aims of the planners are worked out in the spheres of agriculture, industry, management of labour, trade and finance. The volume ends with a study of the build-up of the planning mechanism, culminating in the adoption of the first five-year plan in the spring of 1929. The decision of January 1930 to collectivize agriculture falls outside the period covered, but the conditions and reasons leading up to it are fully discussed. These were the opening years of a tense period of Soviet history, in which extraordinarily rapid expansion of industry was accompanied by increasingly ruthless economic pressures and political repressions