the Soviet Union, only by 1927 had industrial output achieved approximately the 1913 levels under the Tsarist regime, but Soviet exports to Germany increased to 433 million Reichsmarks annually by 1927 after trade agreements were signed between the two countries in the mid-1920s. Economist Nikolai Kondratiev was asked to study the Soviet economy, and he advocated slow prudent growth that kept the residual market economy of the New Economic Policy. In the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin took the economy in the opposite direction, beginning a successful period of full-scale socialist industrialization in his first five-year plan for a Soviet economy that was still over 80% composed by the private sector, with plans to shed all vestiges of the free market. Kondratiev was accused of espousing a "counter-revolutionary" equilibrium theory, after which he was fired and jailed for being a "kulak-professor." Towards the end of his 8 year sentence he was put on trial again and executed at the Kommunarka shooting ground by firing squad on the same day his death sentence was issued. Early 1930s In the early 1930s, Soviet imports decreased as the Communist model achieved greater self sufficiency. The Soviet economic planning body, improved greatly in spite of hostile foreign powers. What followed was a system which included the most adequate review of national accounts and economic measurements. The subsequent changes to Gosplan improved its operation. Though Soviet industrial output had significantly increased over its prior levels, Soviet exports to Germany fell to 223 million Reichsmarks in 1934 due to the Soviets distrust of the German regime. Although the Soviet Union possessed almost double the population of Germany, its industrial output still lagged behind because of the backward nature of the former Tsarist regime and invasions of the Soviet Union by the Western powers and others that followed it inception. Its steel production almost caught up with Germany's in 1933 during the German economic collapse in the Great Depression. Following are German imports from Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union from 1912 to 1933: {| class=wikitable |- ! Year ||Imports fromRussia/USSR* ||rowspan=8| ||Year || Imports fromRussia/USSR* |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1912||1,528||1928||379 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1913||1,425||1929||426 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1923||147||1930||436 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1924||141||1931||304 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1925||230||1932||271 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1926||323||1933||194 |- style="text-align:center;" | align="left"|1927||433|||| |- |colspan="6"|*millions of Reichsmarks |} While Soviet exports into Germany were a small percentage of Germany's imports due to the large amount of trade