Forty years ago the USSR was rushing toward a degree of economic isolation unparalleled by any industrial economy at peace. The autarkic position reached by the Soviet economy in the mid-1930s seemed to be a fundamental characteristic of Soviet policy. In the past two decades, however, Soviet foreign trade has grown rapidly. Thus, it is of both current and historical interest to understand and reassess the circumstances under which the USSR sharply curtailed economic relations with the world capitalist economies in the 1930s. Conventional interpretation stresses that Stalin, during the First and Second Five-Year Plans (1928/29-1932, 1933-37), deliberately pursued economic autarky—a policy intended to reduce Soviet foreign trade as quickly as possible to a “tolerable minimum” and without regard to the possible economic gains from higher levels of foreign trade. According to this explanation, the initial expansion of trade between 1927/28 and 1931 is interpreted as a policy of “imports of machinery intended to end imports” and the subsequent cutback in imports is cited as evidence of its success. In the following analysis of the policies and events that culminated in Stalin’s “autarkic policy,” it is argued that the collapse and stagnation of Soviet foreign trade after 1931 were unforeseen and caused by events beyond the control of Soviet planners.

The words Obshchina and Mir should be familiar to all students of nineteenth-century Russia. Yet most Russian historians would probably be hard pressed to distinguish properly between the two terms. Current scholarship offers scant help regarding precise definitions and usages of these nouns. Semantic as well as historical questions are raised by their use, and the semantic questions are compounded by the fact that both Russian words are usually translated into English as “commune.” Each of these words does have its own history and a meaning which separates it from its counterpart, however, and this article attempts to eliminate some of the confusion surrounding the use of the two terms.

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.

No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

The Russo-Polish War occasioned some of the most anxious moments in the history of relations between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic. Within Germany, the advance of the Red Army toward Warsaw in 1920 aroused strong, but contradictory emotions. First, it led many Germans to anticipate the destruction of Poland and to hope for the restoration of the Reich’s former eastern territories. Simultaneously, however, the westward Russian march raised fears of the invasion of Germany by Bolshevik forces. Within Russia, a similar dichotomy of views about Germany existed. On one hand, the German government was considered a hostile, though negligible and temporary—a Communist revolution there was thought imminent—factor in Russia’s situation. On the other, Germany was held important enough to Russia that serious proposals of a far-reaching alliance against Poland and the Entente were made to her. The former view rested on a fundamentally optimistic assessment of Russia’s prospects; the latter, on a sober one. Grounds for concern were afforded by the Soviet Republic’s grave economic problems and by worry about whether the weary Red Army could defeat Pilsudski’s forces, whose offensive capacity had been demonstrated by their capture of Kiev in May 1920. If Germany, which had had military forces in the field against the Bolsheviks only a year before, should actively assist the Poles, Russia’s situation could be appreciably worsened. Surprisingly, therefore, although there are several recent, excellent studies of Soviet-Polish affairs and the Russo-Polish War, and a voluminous literature on relations between the Soviets and the Weimar Republic, little attention has been paid to Soviet policy toward Germany during the conflict with Poland. To explain that policy, and its apparent contradiction, is the purpose of this article.

While historians have studied Pilsudski’s coup d’état in Poland extensively, histories of interwar Eastern Europe either totally ignore or make only guarded references to an alleged attempted coup in Czechoslovakia in the same year under the aegis of the prominent general and former Russian legionary, Radola Gajda (1892-1948). In 1926, Gajda, the acting chief of staff of the Czechoslovak Army, was removed from his post to be tried and convicted for having committed several treasonable offenses against the Czechoslovak state. Historians agree that Gajda harbored Fascist political sympathies—as after his dismissal from the army, he became the leader of the “National Fascist Community” (Národnί obec fašistická or NOF), the small Czech Fascist movement—but no one has written in detail about Gajda’s career in the army before 1926. Two older accounts of Czechoslovak politics by Ferdinand Peroutka and Harry Klepetář briefly discuss the sensational scandal surrounding Gajda, and several Communist historians have asserted that Gajda reached an agreement with the Slovak leader Vojtech (Béla) Tuka to carry out a coup against the government during the 1926 Sokol gymnastic congress.

An article printed in 1970 in the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, of which several volumes are still to appear, defined bibliofil'stvo and bibliofiliia as the pursuit of collecting “rare and valuable publications.” The author of the entry, O. G. Lasunskii, had nothing but praise for the activity: