ABSTRACT
The problem of exchange between town and country came to haunt, as nothing else did, the foster-comrades of the world’s first socialist revolution. The switch in policy-making, back and forth, in the early years following the Revolution, from the days of War Communism to the improvisations of the New Economic Policy, and the subsequent-and often frequent-adjustments throughout the 1920s, were each rude manifestations of the crisis posed by the ‘accursed’ question. The polemics of revolution had to be substituted by the artifices of economic growth. It was an awkward transition, but had to be gone through. While grappling with the problems of transition, it was impossible for the leaders of the Soviet Union to abstract from the fundamental issue of extraction of surplus from the countryside, for it is only on the basis of this surplus that development could proceed on a wide span elsewhere in the economy. This, after all, followed from the tenets of classical political economy itself.
