48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST prospect of inducing the peasants to sell more for money if that money could not be exchanged against manufactured goods entering into their consumption. These goods remained and were expected to remain in chronic short supply for some time to come. Yet rapid growth of industry was vital for the very survival of the socialist system and of Soviet power; for the rapid growth of industry self-financing was inadequate and resources had to be transferred from agriculture through taxation; matched by an excess of supplies from agriculture over its absorption of goods from non-agriculture, attained by keeping manufactured goods prices higher than those which would have prevailed under free-market conditions. (On occasion 'socialist legality* was also violated and products confiscated, as we will see). These basic contradictions arising in the industrialisation of a backward economy surrounded by hostile capitalist powers, worked themselves out in forms which entailed not only heavy economic but political costs. Yet it is difficult to see an alternative scenario given the circumstances. With base year 1913, the terms of trade by 1925-26 shows a 56 per cent shift against agriculture. It was estimated that while grain sales totalled 18-19 m. tons in 1914, in 1926 they were only 10 m. tons. The bulk of supplies came from some 34 m. peasant holdings while less than 10 per cent came from the small, though growing sector of large-scale socialised production represented by the kolkhozy and sovkhozy. Table 1 Marketed Grain by Source Grain Contributed by Grain Marketed/Total Output Year Collective + Peasant Total Collective State House- All State farms Households Farms Farms holds 1927 0.67(7.6) 8.1(92.4) 8.7(100.0) 35.4 63.6 16.8 17.7 1928 0.85(11.3) 6.6(88.7) 7.6(100.00) 39.9 68.2 14.7 16.1 1929 1.51(14.0) 9.2(86.0) 10.7(100.0) 42.8 62.4 19.9 21.7 Source: Table 6, Carr & Davies, 1969, p.999. The intensive debates which took place during the period regarding the policy to be followed vis-a-vis the well-to-do peasants (kulaks and better off middle peasants) who contributed the bulk of the marketed surplus, tended to focus almost exclusively on the price question. This was made more complex by the fact that in the absence of complete socialised control over trade and distribution under the prevalent NEP regime any concession by way of raised agricultural prices or lowered manufactured goods prices did not automatically benefit fully the peasant producers: the gap between wholesale and retail prices became an important variable to consider in addition to the question of agricultural goods prices versus manufactured goods prices. The planners were acutely conscious of the contradiction between the imperatives of industrialisation on the one hand, and the