Socialism in one Country 1924-1926 1. [antikvár]

PREFACE The present volume, the first of three under the title Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, brings me to the heart of my subject. As I said in the preface to the first volume of The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, my ambition was 'to write the history, not of the revolution but of the political, social and economic order which emerged from it'. The volumes hitherto published have been, in a certain sense, preliminary to this main purpose. While history knows no hard-and-fast frontiers between periods, it is fair to say that the new order resulting from the revolution of 1917 began to take firm shape only in the middle nineteen-twenties. The years 1924-6 were a critical turning-point, and gave to the revolutionary régime, for good and for evil, its decisive direction. By way of introduction to this central section, four chapters have been grouped together under the general title 'The Background'. In the first, I have attempted to define the relation of the revolution to Russian history, which first became clearly apparent in this period (part of this chapter appeared in the volume of Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier in 1956); in the second, to illustrate the moral and intellectual climate of the period by drawing on peripheral fields neglected in the earlier voliunes; in the third, to investigate the obscure and crucial issue of the motive forces of the new society; in the fourth, to portray the personal characteristics of some of the principal actors and to indicate the place which they occupy in the story. The remainder of the volume is devoted to the economic history of the period from the spring of 1924 to the spring of 1926, In the second volume, the sixth of the whole series, I shall describe the party struggle leading to the break-up of the triumvirate and to the first defeat of Zinoviev, and the political and constitutional developments of the period. The following volume will deal with external relations. As always, the most difficult problem of presentation has been that of arrangement. Precedence has been given to the narrative