Gregory, Paul R. (ed.). Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy

Gregory, Paul R. (ed.). Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001.

Paul R. Gregory’s article “The Dictator’s Orders” examines the interaction between the Politburo (including Stalin) and other economic bodies (primarily Gosplan, but also lower-level organs) in the planning and implementation of Soviet economic policy. He argues that the Politburo attempted to control the development of Soviet economy by controlling “key” sectors and defining the priorities, but due to its inability to encompass all spheres of Soviet economy, much decision-making was delegated to other bodies of power. The latter, therefore, could negotiate certain terms and conditions with the government. Moreover, interests of the center were often undermined by lower-level agents, as in the case of ministries: “Ministries hid information from the center, refused to present disaggregated targets, abused any decentralized authority offered them, and sought as much independence of action as possible” (33).

E. A. Rees’s discussion (“Leaders and their institutions”) of the evolution of power function in the supreme party organs (primarily, the Politburo) aims to revise the nature of Stalinist regime: in particular, the extent and limits of Stalin’s power, as well as “what measure of influence was exerted by other leaders apart from Stalin, and what influence institutional lobbies or social pressures had in shaping this regime” (35). Curiously, but Rees concludes his interesting analysis with a commonplace: “to all intents and purposes, the Soviet Union already from 1933 was under Stalin’s personal dictatorship” (58), and at this place, it looks like he squeezed new material into the Procrustean bed of his earlier views.

“Making Economic Policy” by R. W. Davies explores the extent to which Stalin personally shaped the development of the Soviet economy, especially in the latter half of the 1930s. He also looks at the manner in which reforms were negotiated between certain economic bodies and Stalin. “Providing for defense” by Mark Harrison studies the burden that the Soviet military effort exerted on economy; he also addresses the question of reasonability of this burden arguing that “Soviet plans to build a military-industrial complex were laid down… in spite of the absence of any immediate military threat” (86) – a statement which totally misses the point that the Soviet leadership dealt not with “real” threats, but rather with perceived threats of outside aggression which were formed as a result of the foreign military intervention in the Russian Civil War and their own rhetoric of “capitalist encirclement.” Harrison then explores finance-related problems of the Soviet defence industry, focusing on difficulties in controlling the value of production in a non-competitive economy.

Oleg Khlevnyuk’s “The economy of Gulag” explores “the relative size of the Gulag’s economy and the real value to Soviet industrialization of the facilities that prisoners built” (112). The article explores the dynamic and distribution of forced labor during the 1930s, as well as specific tasks that were given to the Gulag system. Khlevnyuk uses archival evidence to demonstrate that there were no specific economic requirements behind the Great Terror, but it was rather driven by political motivations. “The volume of capital projects performed by the NKVD on the eve of the war amounted to about 13-14 percent of the total volume of capital projects” (121). Their actual efficiency was, however, very low (BBK or railroad construction as two typical examples). Evidence that Oleg Khlevnyuk used in his article highlights some limits of Stalin’s power in his position of the Soviet leader. He mentions that at some point in 1940 Stalin attacked the extensive use of forced labor in Soviet capital projects (p. 128) and yet “these criticisms by Stalin did not have any serious consequences” (ibid.).

Eugenia Belova’s “Economic crime and punishment” looks at the criminalization of economic offenses, particularly at the practice of Soviet control commissions. Belova argues that the very Soviet economic system left to its practitioners no other choice but to become involved in illegal or quasi legal activities to meet the quotas given by supreme authorities (she discusses the phenomenon of ‘tolkachi’ as one case). Aleksei Tikhonov’s and Paul G. Gregory’s “Stalin’s last plan” poses the question to what degree the post-war Soviet economic system reflected earlier debates and problems of economic reforms of the 1930s. They study this question in the context of power struggle in the Communist leadership and explore the competition between agencies responsible for the development of the post-war economic policy (Gosplan, Gossnab and Ministry of Finances).