Soviet industry and the Red Army under Stalin : a military-industrial complex?

The paper considers some of the views of the Stalin–era relationship between Soviet industry and the Red Army that are current in the literature, and disentangles some confusions of translation. The economic weight of the defence sector in the economic system is summarised in various aspects. The lessons of recent archival research are used as a basis for analysing the army–industry relationship under Stalin as a prisoners’ dilemma in which, despite the potential gains from mutual cooperation, each party faced a strong incentive to cheat on the other. It is concluded that the idea of a Soviet military–industrial complex is not strictly applicable to the Stalin period, but there may be greater justification for the Soviet Union after Stalin

Post-war Russian economic growth : not a riddle

In a recent article Steven Rosefielde (2003) has advanced three propositions. He suggests that according to the best available statistics the post-war growth of the Russian economy under the command system was surprisingly good; in fact, he argues that it was too good. The standard for this judgement is economic theory, which holds that non-market systems must fail by comparison with market economies; Rosefielde associates specifically this view with the 'Washington consensus'. He concludes that it is the statistics that are at fault: they 'lied and were misconstrued' by Western 'statistically oriented comparativists' in a way that was unduly favourable to the command system. In this comment I argue that Rosefielde has misread both the facts and the theory. There is no riddle in the statistics. His conclusion, therefore, must fall

Accounting for secrets

The Soviet dictatorship used secrecy to shield its processes from external scrutiny. A system of accounting for classified documentation assured the protection of secrets. The associated procedures resemble a turnover tax applied to government transactions. There is evidence of both compliance and evasion. The burden of secrecy was multiplied because the system was also secret and so had to account for itself. Unique documentation of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, is exploited to yield an estimate of the burden. Measured against available benchmarks, the burden looks surprisingly heavy

Communism and economic modernization

The paper examines the range of national experiences of communist rule in terms of the aspiration to ‘overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically’. It reviews the causal beliefs of the rulers, the rise and fall of their economies (or, in the case of China, its continued rise), the core institutions of communist rule and their evolution, and other outcomes. The process of overcoming a development lag so as to approach the global technological frontier has required continual institutional change and policy reform in the face of resistance from established interests. So far, China is the only country where communist rule has been able to meet this requirement, enabled by a new deal with political and economic stakeholders. The paper places the “China Deal” on a spectrum previously limited to the Soviet Big and Little Deals

Why did NEP fail?

Why did NEP fail? I should like to distinguish three ways in which this question has been answered, indicating why the third appears to me to be the most satisfactory. In the first view, NEP was abandoned because it was inconsistent with any further industrial development of a socialist kind, and its abandonment was therefore a rational economic decision. In the second view, strongly reacting against the first, NEP is seen as consistent with a wide variety of development patterns, including the industrial development actually achieved in the inter-war Five Year Plans. Therefore the abandonment of NEP had no strictly economic rationale, but was an outcome of brute political struggles and the formation of the Stalinist political system. In the third view, NEP is seen as inconsistent with the degree and rate of industrialization actually undertaken from 1928 onwards, but contained the possibility of alternative development patterns involving a lesser commitment to industrial growth. In this case, the abandonment of NEP was neither simply rational (according to the first view) nor irrational (according to the second), but was the outcome of a political conflict over the course of Soviet economic development

Forging success : Soviet managers and accounting fraud, 1943 to 1962

Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production was apparently widespread in some branches of the economy and at some periods of time. A feature of accounting fraud was that cases commonly involved the aggravating element of conspiracy. The paper provides new evidence on the nature and extent of accounting fraud; the scale and optimal size of conspiratorial networks; the authorities’ willingness to penalize it and the political and social factors that secured leniency; and inefficiency in the socialist market where managers competed for political credit

Bombers and bystanders in suicide attacks in Israel, 2000 to 2003

The paper analyses the results of interaction between suicide operatives and bystanders in the course of 103 suicide attacks in Israel over a recent threeyear period. It shows that bystanders’ intervention tended to reduce the casualties arising by numbers that were both statistically and practically significant. When bystanders intervened, however, this was often at the cost of their own lives. The value of a challenge was particularly large for suicide missions associated with Hamas, but Hamas operations were also less likely to meet a challenge in the first place. These findings, while preliminary, may have implications for counter-terrorism. More systematic collection of statistical data relating to suicide incidents would be of benefit