This two-volume publication, the first volume of which appeared in 1950, is intended to provide botanists and production specialists of various fields with a concise introduction to the richness and diversity of the plant raw materials of the Soviet Union, to indicate the future directions of raw-material studies, and to demonstrate the possibilities for satisfying the raw-material requirements of the nation’s industry and agriculture. The first volume, in addition to the thematic article The Natural Sources of Plant Raw Materials and the Laws Governing Their Distribution by M. M. Il’in, includes papers describing the principal groups of plant raw materials that are already utilized in the Soviet Union or hold promise for future utilization. These groups belong to the category of technical plants, that is, plants that require a certain degree of industrial processing before they can be used. The second volume contains reviews of natural plants that can be used directly or require only minimal processing before serving as sources of raw materials. Such plants include food plants, forage plants, vitamin-bearing plants, and medicinal plants, all of which provide an extraordinarily wide range of products and commodities. The second volume also contains the paper On the Complex Utilization of Plant Raw Materials by P. A. Yakimov, which substantiates the necessity of the comprehensive utilization of plant raw materials as a means of reducing the production costs of corresponding commodities. The task facing Soviet scientists is a complex one: within a short period of time, it is necessary to discover valuable plant resources capable of providing broader supplies of inexpensive raw materials for the needs of national industry and agriculture and thereby fully satisfying the material requirements of working people. The Department of Plant Resources of the Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, together with the republican academies and branches of the Academy of Sciences, specialized research institutes, and production organizations, regards this task as one of primary and utmost importance and seeks to solve it within the framework of a unified scientific research and national economic plan. To this end, a series of measures has been developed, along with a continuous publication program for disseminating research results. As was already noted in the preface to the first volume, its contents constitute only a brief introduction to the plant resources of our country. The two-volume edition serves merely as a precursor to the multi-volume work Plant Resources of the Soviet Union. This new large-scale publication should strive for comprehensiveness and become an indispensable reference work for specialists and planning organizations. Accordingly, it is desirable that as many Soviet botanists as possible participate in its preparation. At the same time, the broader Soviet public is in need of at least one concise publication on this subject. It is precisely to meet this need that the present reference work, Plant Raw Materials of the Soviet Union, has been prepared.