Party and State Management of the Soviet Administrative - Command Economy

The Soviet administrative-command economy was the greatest social science experiment of this century. The dismantling of this system will be the greatest economic and political challenge of the next quarter century. It is therefore important to understand this system before it disappears or threatens to return. The purpose of this research is to study the working arrangements of the Soviet administrative-command economy from the 1930s to 1991 using the newly accessible archives of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the archives of its associated party and state organizations, personal archives of Party and state leaders, and more than 60 accumulated interviews with Soviet economic administrators conducted by the PI at the end of the Soviet period. This research uses theories of information economics, public choice, and theories of bureaucracy to study high-level decision making in the Soviet administrative-command economy. It addresses the fundamental issue of the viability of the administrative command economy raised by Hayek and Mises in the 1920s. It is one of the first in-depth studies of working arrangements above the level of the Soviet enterprise. It would be the first to use the actual records of the highest echelons of the Soviet Party and State to describe how and how well the Soviet administrative-command economy worked. This project seeks to answer a number of research questions: How the top Soviet leadership dealt with the greater concentration of information at the periphery, how planners' preferences were formed, the quality of information upon which high-level decisions were based, the size of the party's apparatus, the use of monetary versus physical targets, the formation of interest groups, the toleration of criticism and dissent, principal/agent problems and identification of the levels at which agents can be distinguished from principals, the factors behind the choice of radical reform in the 1980s, and risk avoidance behavior.

The Soviet administrative-command economy was the greatest social science experiment of this century. The dismantling of this system will be the greatest economic and political challenge of the next quarter century. It is therefore important to understand this system before it disappears or threatens to return. The purpose of this research is to study the working arrangements of the Soviet administrative-command economy from the 1930s to 1991 using the newly accessible archives of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the archives of its associated party and state organizations, personal archives of Party and state leaders, and more than 60 accumulated interviews with Soviet economic administrators conducted by the PI at the end of the Soviet period. This research uses theories of information economics, public choice, and theories of bureaucracy to study high-level decision making in the Soviet administrative-command economy. It addresses the fundamental issue of the viability of the administrative command economy raised by Hayek and Mises in the 1920s. It is one of the first in-depth studies of working arrangements above the level of the Soviet enterprise. It would be the first to use the actual records of the highest echelons of the Soviet Party and State to describe how and how well the Soviet administrative-command economy worked. This project seeks to answer a number of research questions: How the top Soviet leadership dealt with the greater concentration of information at the periphery, how planners' preferences were formed, the quality of information upon which high-level decisions were based, the size of the party's apparatus, the use of monetary versus physical targets, the formation of interest groups, the toleration of criticism and dissent, principal/agent problems and identification of the levels at which agents can be distinguished from principals, the factors behind the choice of radical reform in the 1980s, and risk avoidance behavior.