The Results Of The First Five Year Plan

The Second Five-Year Plan of the Development of the U.S.S.R. (1934) contains a summary of the achievements of the Soviet Union’s First Five-Year Plan and the provisions of the Second Five-Year Plan. As Herbert Morrison says in his introduction, the volume was ‘vetted’ by the Russian authorities and as such is a semi-official view of the Soviet plans, and that students ‘must think and judge for themselves on the first-class issues of economic policy involved’.

This paper examines the effect transactions with the IMF have on the monetary situation within a country when the foreign exchange purchased from the IMF is used to meet a balance of payments deficit. In some countries, the national currency counterpart is kept on deposit to the credit of the IMF at the central bank. In other countries, the government substitutes a noninterest-bearing note for the national currency counterpart of a transaction with the IMF. It is with the effects of the latter practice that this paper is primarily concerned. The effect of a balance of payments deficit on the money supply will be offset if credit is expanded to finance a government deficit, investment by business, or spending by consumers. The ultimate effect on the money supply will depend upon how the government deals with the national currency turned over to it by the Exchange Equalization Account. Considerable caution is required in concluding that a balance of payments deficit is likely to be moderate and temporary.

China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written. More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First World War. Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow describes how millions of peasants in the USSR were dispossessed and deported as a result of the abolition of private property, and how millions in the newly established ‘collective’ farms of the Ukraine and other regions were then deliberately starved to death through impossibly high quotas, the removal of all other sources of food and their isolation from outside help. With the publication of this and his earlier book, The Great Terror, which revealed the truth about Stalin’s political purges, Robert Conquest revealed to the West the staggering human cost of the Soviet regime.

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The author of this book was in a position which allowed him to become thoroughly conversant with the working of the Government machinery in Russia, and in this volume, originally published in 1938, he presents the situation in Soviet Russia as it developed since the Revolution of 1917 and discusses the events which led up to it. Based mainly on information drawn from Soviet sources, which the author acknowledges may not be impartial, the author nevertheless maintains that a clear outline of the real situation may be inferred.