Soviet forestry represented a new and the highest form of social organization in the history of world forestry. The foundation and source of its development lay in the fundamentally new socialist mode of production. Soviet forestry was a branch of the socialist economy that encompassed the cultivation, protection, and organized utilization of forests in order to satisfy the needs of the national economy and the population for timber, while also making use of forests' other beneficial functions, such as protection, water conservation, and public health services. The fulfillment of the tasks of Soviet forestry required organizational work. One form of such work was the organization of forestry through forest inventory and survey activities. In the Soviet Union, forest inventory and survey work had not yet covered all forest regions; at the same time, forestry operations were carried out throughout all forest areas. Therefore, many forestry organization issues usually addressed during forest inventory could also be resolved within current forestry operations. The difference was that forestry organization carried out through forest inventory rested on a much more solid foundation, namely, new forest stand inventory data, detailed research and analysis of forestry economics and natural conditions, and fuller use of the latest methods and technologies in forest inventory work. Such tasks were difficult to accomplish solely through the efforts of forestry enterprises and forest districts themselves. Therefore, forestry organization achieved through the process of forest inventory and survey (the subject discussed in this book) should be regarded as one of the most important forms of economic organizational work undertaken by the Soviet state in the field of forestry. In developing and applying its theory and practice, Soviet forest inventory and survey work had to be based on the laws of socialist economic development and be consistent with the tasks of communist construction. At the same time, all achievements of forestry practice, biology, and forestry science should be utilized in order to provide forest inventory with a sound forestry-scientific foundation. These fundamentally important prerequisites, however, had not yet been fully reflected in Soviet forest inventory practice. Soviet forestry made great progress in defining its fundamental principles and directions of activity, whereas forest inventory lagged considerably behind forestry in this respect. This can be explained by the general lag of forestry science behind the needs of forestry production and by the insufficient study of theoretical issues concerning the organization of Soviet forestry. Insufficient research into the environmental conditions affecting the growth of forest trees and shrubs, as well as the influence of forest vegetation on the environment, resulted in forestry literature, including textbooks, focusing mainly on the general characteristics of tree species, while failing to adequately reveal the relationship between silvicultural characteristics and growth conditions. The principles established by G. F. Morozov did not receive the development they deserved in forestry research, and the existing level of research could not meet the needs of forestry. Methods for studying forestry phenomena were based primarily on forest mensuration and statistical techniques. These methods did not reveal the essence of processes or the laws governing their development, and therefore did not always allow effective management of the natural processes of forest growth. Naturally, these shortcomings in forestry science limited the possibilities for improving the quality of forestry organization, since the success or failure of the latter depended on the level of development of forestry science and the depth of research into silvicultural problems under different natural forest-growing conditions. At the present stage of forestry science, forest typology should serve as the natural-historical foundation for forestry organization. Unfortunately, it had not yet received the application it deserved either in forestry science or in forest inventory and survey work. Although regulations repeatedly emphasized the use of forest types in forestry organization, these provisions had not been adequately implemented in practice, and forest typology was used mainly for describing natural forest-growing conditions. Research on the theoretical problems of Soviet forest inventory was largely confined to refining old forms and elements, such as rotation age, cutting cycle and felling age, management divisions of forest enterprises, and allowable cut calculations, and adapting them to modern conditions. The content of forest inventory changed very little. Compared with landlord-bourgeois forestry, Soviet forestry possessed a much richer content and broader orientation, yet the new organizational elements arising from it were insufficiently studied. Formalism became widespread in forestry organization: the management of one forest enterprise resembled that of another, and the direction and management measures of one management unit were similar to those of another. Such standardization weakened the effect of the most important governmental directives aimed at differentiating forest utilization and organizing management accordingly. Forest inventory and survey should promote expanded reproduction in forestry, that is, increase the utilization of the beneficial functions of forests under specific given conditions. A correct formulation of the fundamental problems of forest inventory and survey would enhance its role and significance in forestry production, enrich its content, and ultimately help strengthen the contribution of forestry to solving the most important tasks of the national economy. The foregoing demonstrates that both the theoretical foundations and the practical implementation of forest inventory and survey require further improvement, and that some aspects even need to be reestablished from the ground up. While discussing methodological issues of forest inventory and survey, this work also attempts to provide a silvicultural foundation for forestry organization, particularly for the mixed-forest zone. These foundations may prove useful in the practical implementation of forest inventory and survey work.