In 1960, for the first time in the postwar period, the Central Statistical Office of the Rumanian People's Republic released data on the country's foreign trade in its official statistical yearbook.

The coverage of the statistics given out at this time was highly selective. It comprised only the total value of imports and exports in "foreign-currency lei" in 1958, index numbers linking these data to 1950 and 1955, a geographical breakdown of trade by countries for 1958, and the volume of imports and exports of the "principal commodities" traded in that year. From 1959 to 1963 these figures were each year brought up to date, but no additional information was given out. In the 1964 yearbook there appeared a breakdown of imports and exports by commodity groups (nine in all) covering the years 1950, 1955, and 1959 to 1963. While these published statistics were extremely valuable in themselves, they did not supply an adequate basis for an understanding of the most important trends in postwar trade, including the trade expansion associated with the first period of intensive industrialization from 1949 to 1953, the stagnation period that followed the introduction of the New Course in mid-1953, and the major restructuring after 1958 of Rumania's trade relations with its Comecon partners and with Western markets, which is only imperfectly reflected in the geographical distribution of imports and exports in recent years.

Iurii Olesha's Short Novel Envy (Zavist', 1927) has been greatly admired and even has some claim to be considered the “great Soviet novel.“Yet comparatively little has been written about Envy since the first flood of reviews and articles, many uncritical, appeared in the Soviet press between 1927 and 1933.

Envy is a complex novel, sometimes described as expressionistic, written in a variety of styles and with many planes of meaning. Elements of realist, romanticist, and symbolist styles are present. Dreams, fantasies, and lies are introduced, often as reality. It is a work in which the author's ideological intentions are far from clear or unambiguous, a work deeply hedged with irony. And it is a work that can yield much to discerning analysis.

Historians have customarily treated two major periods of Russia's commercial relations with Western Europe (defined as Western Christendom) in the pre-Petrine period: (1) until 1494, the year in which Ivan III closed the Hanseatic establishment in Novgorod and which is generally viewed as the end of Hanseatic dominance in the Russian trade; and (2) from 1553, when the English first sailed around the North Cape to establish regular commercial relations with Russia via the northern route, or from 1558, when Ivan IV conquered the Baltic port of Narva (he then maintained direct trade with Western merchants there until he lost that port to the Swedes in 1581).

At the end of 1932 Soviet agriculture was in an extremely perilous condition. After three years of forced collectivization, “dekulakization,” and confiscatory procurement policies, labor discipline and operational effectiveness were collapsing in the socialist enterprises in the village—the machinetractor stations (mashinno-traktornye stantsii—MTS), the kolkhozes, and the sovkhozes. Through neglect or outright sabotage the peasants had decimated the herds of cattle and essential draft animals. Finally, a growing famine, partially artificial in origin, was striking certain major regions of the country.