Russkiy ekonomicheskiy sbornik.

Complete set in exceptionally fresh condition of this rare émigré periodical revealing the economic reality behind the well polished propagated data of the early Soviet Union.

Its editor Sergey Prokopovich (1871, Tsarskoe Selo – 1955, Geneva) was a Russian economist, sociologist and liberal politician. With the same enthusiasm that he welcomed the February Revolution of 1917, he subsequently opposed the October Revolution, which overthrew the provisional government where he held several ministerial portfolios. In 1922 he was expelled from the Soviet Union for his anti-revolutionary activities and work with American and Western European aid agencies.

In emigration in Berlin Prokopovich initiated establishment of the Economics Cabinet [Экономический кабинет], a research institute based in Czechoslovakia that united Russian émigré economic and social scientists. Among them were economists P. Struve, M. Bernatskiy, A. Chuprov and B. Brutskus; historians A. Kizevetter, E. Shmurlo and B. Nikolskiy; jurists N. Timashev and L. Petrazhitskiy.

With financial support from Czechoslovakian government, the Economic Cabinet was publishing several periodicals, including the Russkii ekonomicheskii sbornik (Russian Economic Review) offered here.

Its articles contain analysis of the levels of harvests and production in the Soviet Union, legal aspects of the nationalisation policy, a role of private capital, national and international trade, emigration, and Russian Diaspora in France and South America . In this periodical great minds used the official Soviet data combined with their own firsthand knowledge of the Russian economic system to analyse the real state of the economy and impact of the so-called New Economic Policy [НЭП].
This capitalism-oriented economic policy was introduced by Lenin in 1922 after the Russian Civil War, and was aimed at fostering the economy of the country, which was in ruins. This system of mixed economy, which permitted private individuals to own small enterprises and encouraged foreign investments while keeping banks, foreign trade, and large industries under the state control was abolished by Josef Stalin in 1928.

Conclusions made on the pages of the Russkii ekonomicheskii sbornik were in many ways different from the picture painted by the official Soviet Union, and their accurateness became obvious only after the collapse of the Soviet state many decades later.

Very rare, especially when complete. Not in the holdings of the Russian National or State Libraries. No complete sets on the market; no auction records in the recent decades.