TO THE QUESTION OF THE STATE OF THE SOVIET PRE-WAR ECONOMY IN THE LATE 1930s – EARLY 1940s

The article presents an overview of the book by E.A. Osokina, who describes in detail how the Soviet economy developed in the prewar years, during the years of industrialization in 1927-1941. We have tried, to the best of our ability, to present the general content and some of the main thoughts of this remarkable theme. The basic idea is that the Great Patriotic War, which began in 1941, only exacerbated the deep socio-economic problems in the USSR. This are the problems associated with food and consumer goods (the so-called «consumer goods»), as well as access to the ordinary civilian population. It turns out that the Soviet state and the government turned out to be unable to establish a full-fledged supply of food to the population in the usual peaceful years, including due to the lack of a market and for other reasons. But in the war years, the Soviet state and government turned out to be at a new administrative height, since at that time it was possible to use the administrative methods of central planning and distribution that were usual for it from above, and for this the market was not needed at all. Such an interesting historical phenomenon is described in the monograph by Е.A. Osokina, the review of which is given in this article.