grain was still the most lucrative export, especially since the timber trade had run into trouble; reports (which were accurate) that convict labour produced Soviet timber had led to calls for boycotts in a number of Western countries. The level of grain exports duly rose throughout the 1920s. Britain bought 26,799 tonnes of wheat from the USSR in 1924; by 1926–7 that had risen to 138,486 tonnes. Exports to Italy, Turkey and the Netherlands grew as well. Between 1929 and 1931, Soviet grain exports to Germany tripled.
