Question

Describe socio economic condition in Russia prior to the October

Answer 1

One of the things they did was to set up a foreign trade Monopoly. Another was to eventually collectivize farm land. (I am talking about policies the Bolsheviks did, not policies that I think were necessarily good or socialist.). They set up a partially egalitarian pay regimen, but that had many exceptions. The economic policies were in the following order: war communism, the New Economic Policy (a retreat into small scale trading and small time capitalism), collectivization of agriculture, planning. By the 1970’s there was a malaise. There had been real transformation on many levels, but not nearly the production of consumer goods as predicted by Khrushchev. A good place to read about the economic history of the Soviet Union is Alec Nove's book with the appropriate title: An Economic History of the Soviet Union. Anything by Nove on the Soviet economy is good. I would avoid reading Communist or professional anti-Communist works on the Soviet economy as they tend to be devoid of fact. Nove wrote, also, The Economics of Feasible Socialism. He felt that much of Soviet economic policy was misguided. (I don't know if he was a socialist.)