The question of products-exchange was an object of discussion on two major occasions in Soviet Russia and both times it was associated with the question of the construction of communist society. In the period of War Communism, and even earlier, when the Russian communists considered that Soviet Russia was passing over directly to communism Lenin and others proposed the direct exchange of products between town and country with the temporary mediation of monetary relations. The necessity of preserving the worker-peasant alliance at the close of the civil war period and the introduction of the New Economic Period which encompassed the utilisation of commodity-money relations for some time did not permit the question of products exchange to be taken up as an immediate task.⁽¹⁾ The co-existence of Soviet industry with the sea of peasantry wedded to private property and production for profit, the preservation of capitalist social relations in the countryside, were a permanent brake on the advance to socialism and communism. The liquidisation of the rich peasantry as a class, the last capitalist class as had Lenin called it, and the formation of the collective farms of the poor peasantry dramatically transformed the social relations of Soviet society by ending altogether the existence of antagonistic social classes. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 recorded the fact that socialism in the main had been constructed. The CPSU (b) thereafter began to consider the tasks of the completion of the advance to a classless socialist society and the gradual establishment of communism. This is apparent from the internal deliberations of the party on the question of drafting a new party programme as well as the discussions which took place at the Eighteenth Congress and afterwards.⁽²⁾ The Second World War interrupted these projects. With the rapid return of the productive forces to the level of 1940 and their further accelerated growth thereafter the question of the gradual transition from socialism to communism returned to the fore. The discussions in ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’ are witness to this.⁽³⁾ In this work Stalin suggested inter alia that the existing system of ‘merchandising’ wherein some collective farms exchanged their surplus product in return for the manufactures of state industry required to be expanded to embrace all branches of agriculture which would not only contract the sphere of operation of commodity circulation but also bring the product of the property of the collective farms under the sphere of national planning. The little-known article by N. Smolin reprinted here expanded on the views expressed by Stalin at the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU held in 1952.⁽⁴⁾ These views were current in the USSR for only a short period. Within weeks of the demise of Stalin the perspectives on the transition to communism sketched out at the Nineteenth Congress were phased out and the theses on the need to extend products-exchange were replaced by new proposals on the necessity to expand the sphere of operation of ‘Soviet trade.’ The era of ‘market socialism’ and ‘market communism’ was slowly and silently dawning.

1. A useful introduction to the discussions in this period, despite the attachment of the author to the inordinate retention of commodity-money relations in socialist society, may be located in Laszlo Szamuely, ‘First Models of the Socialist Economic Systems, Principles and Theories’, Akademiai Kiado, Budapest, 1974.

2. See: Vijay Singh,‘The CPSU (B), Gosplan and the Question of the Transition to Communist Society in the Soviet Union 1939-1953’, RD Vol. III, No. 1, April 1997.

3. As also the discussion held by Stalin with Soviet economists on 15th February 1952 in RD Vol. IV, No. 2, September 1998.

4. This article was previously printed in India as an appendix to the Hindi edition of ‘Economic Problems’. J. V. Stalin, ‘Soviet sangh men samajvad ki arthik samasyaen’, Kamgar Prakashan, Delhi, 1984, pp. 96-120. Translated into Hindi by Karan Singh Chauhan.

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