ABSTRACT
From the institutional point of view, the economic history of the Soviet Union is a history of tensions between the two ideal types of economy—one based on command, the other on contract—and of the shifts in the relative weights given to the two principles, whether by design or otherwise. Five million men were under arms to protect the newly established Soviet power. They had to be fed. But the society was tom apart, the economy in ruins. Industrial production had fallen sharply—by 1920 it was still at about one-fifth of the 1913 level—and the peasants were getting only one-eighth to one-sixth of the prewar supply of manufactured products. In the early 1920s, 80 percent of the country’s population were peasants. All had welcomed the nationalization of land in 1917, but the replacement of exchange by requisition turned most of them against the Soviet government.
