In a recent research article, the Dutch social historian Marcel van der Linden demonstrates that Gerschenkron was a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria, one of the two major political parties in Austria, which has ties to the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB) and the Austrian Chamber of Labour (AK); and, later, the Communist Party of Austria, both banned between 1933 and 1945 under both the Fatherland Front regime and the Third Reich control of Austria after the 1938 Anschluss. Gerschenkron kept his former political affiliations a secret after he was able to immigrate to the United States. Gerschenkron kept to his Russian roots—in his economics, history and as a critic of Russian literature. His early work concentrated on development in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In a celebrated 1947 article, he found the "Gerschenkron effect" (changing the base year for an index determines the growth rate of the index). His early work often pursued the statistical tricks of Soviet planners. In 1954, Gerschenkron published a celebrated article, "A Dollar Index of Soviet Machinery Output, 1927–1928 to 1937", in which he introduced what is now called the Gerschenkron effect (the difference between calculated Paasche and Laspeyres volume indexes). In this study, he constructed a series of dollar indexes of Soviet industrial output for the purpose of proving the deficiencies of the official Soviet index during that time (1927-1937). He showed that the high rate of growth of Soviet industrial production was an effect of index number bias: a Laspeyres index calculated on the basis of 1926–1927 weights significantly overstates real expansion. This "Gerschenkron effect" was a significant finding that deflated the announced superior Soviet growth. The OECD website: gives a more detailed description of the Gerschenkron effect:  In 1951, Gerschenkron wrote an essay "Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective", a cornerstone of his career, and of significance to European economic history. In it, he advanced the linear stages theory of economic development, which posits that development goes forward in largely determined stages. The essay deals with "economic backwardness", and argued that the more backward an economy is at the outset of economic development, the more likely certain conditions are to occur. Gerschenkron stated that a country such as Russia, backward relative to Britain when it embarked on industrialization, did not go through the same stages.