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skill. The first five-year plan provided for a very largeexpansion in foreign trade, above all in imports of agriculturalmachinery, engineering equipment and machinetools. They were financed by short-term foreign creditsand by a forcing of exports, principally oil, grain, fursand timber. The second and third five-year plans reliedon imports of capital construction and scarcity goods toa smaller extent, and Soviet foreign trade declinedheavily and almost continuously from its peak in 1931-32.Foreign technical aid also was an indispensable elementin the extraordinarily rapid expansion and transformationof Soviet industry. In addition to some training ofSoviet technicians abroad, foreign specialists were enlistedin considerable numbers, especially Americans in thegiant new construction works. There was, however, noreturn to the limited concessions policy of the N.E.P.period, and there was no financial or operational controlby foreign firms of works equipped with their mostup-to-date machinery.At the same time, Soviet mastery of twentieth-centuryscience was not to be dependent upon foreigners, but tobe secured by the training of a new generation of scientists,technical experts, and skilled workers. In the past lackof specialist and skilled labour in Russia had been thegreatest single obstacle to quality and high output andmaintenance. The Soviet regime has made sustainedefforts to make good this weakness by its enormously expandededucational system. Much has been done, thoughthe weakness has been far from overcome. By 1940the supply of ' white-collar' specialists may perhaps havebeen adequate in numbers, if not in quality, but thedemand for skilled and semi-skilled labour was still solarge that a labour recruitment plan was put into operationwhich involved the training of 800,000 to 1,000,000 youthsa year in industrial and constructional work.The revolution in industry has not only done much totransform the technical level of labour; it has, designedly,involved a great transference from agriculture and greatshifts in population. A comparison between the 1939and 1926 censuses shows (cf. p. 365):2B—R.H. 385