Gregory P.R. The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives

Paul R. Gregory. The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives. Cambridge, 2004.
This book uses the formerly secret Soviet State and Communist Party archives to describe the creation and operations of the Soviet administrative-command system. It concludes that the system failed not because of the jockey (i.e., Stalin and later leaders) but because of the horse (the economic system). Although Stalin was the system’s prime architect, the system was managed by thousands of Stalins in a nested dictatorship. The core values of the Bolshevik Party dictated the choice of the administrative-command system, and the system dictated the political victory of a Stalin-like figure. This study pinpoints the reasons for the failure of the system – poor planning, unreliable supplies, the preferential treatment of indigenous enterprises, the lack of knowledge of planners, etc. – but also focuses on the basic principal–agent conflict between planners and producers, which created a sixty-year reform stalemate. Once Gorbachev gave enterprises their freedom, the system had no direction from either a plan or a market, and the system imploded. The Soviet administrative-command system was arguably the most significant human experiment of the twentieth century. If repeated today, its basic contradictions and inherent flaws would remain, and its economic results would again prove inferior.
Paul R. Gregory is Cullen Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and currently serves as a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin. Professor Gregory has published widely in the field of Russian and Soviet economics for more than thirty years and served as a visiting professor at Moscow State University. Among his numerous books are Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy (1990), Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin (1994), and Russian National Income, 1885–1913. He is the co-author (with Robert Stuart) of Russian and Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, now in its seventh edition. Professor Gregory received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1969.