The Political Economy of Repression: Stalin and His Organs of State Security

本研究研究了新获得的苏联国家档案，以研究世界上最残酷和最持久的独裁政权之一将镇压作为经济和政治工具的使用。这将导致专著和学术文章的出版，这将对那些研究独裁经济学的人有价值。这些档案将在莫斯科和胡佛研究所档案馆进行研究。本研究运用政治经济学的方法来研究国家安全机构和斯大林独裁统治下的古拉格行政当局的非经济激励/镇压。它使用了大量新获得的苏联国家和政党档案，这些档案现在可以作为这项研究的基础。所有的经济系统都使用物质激励或意识形态/道德激励来激励经济主体。极权主义制度的一个显著特征是使用惩罚（镇压）来达到经济和政治结果。在这项研究中，调查人员使用了现在世界上记录最完整的独裁政权——斯大林的苏联，来研究独裁者如何利用镇压来实现他的目标。方法是简单的委托-代理模型、公平工资模型和犯罪与惩罚的经济模型。这些数据来自官方档案中这些新材料提供的数百万页法令、信件、报告和统计数据。拟议活动产生的更广泛影响：本研究适用于更广泛的专政经验和理论研究，并可作为一个有充分记录的案例研究。尽管根据自由之家（Freedom House）的衡量，2005年“非自由”国家的数量降至45个，但民主对独裁统治的主导地位是一个相对较新的现象，而且不断面临逆转的威胁。因此，理解极权主义独裁的内部运作是至关重要的。鉴于独裁政权倾向于隐瞒信息，对一个长期（而且极其残酷）独裁政权的内部记录的研究，应该有助于了解其他时代和其他地方的极权政权。这项研究试图回答一些普遍的问题，比如独裁统治的稳定和不稳定的来源，独裁者的目标是经济的还是政治的，独裁者控制其代理人的工作安排，极权主义和镇压是否交织在一起。经济学家、经济历史学家、政治科学家和对独裁统治的经济和政治感兴趣的政策制定者将对这项工作感兴趣。俄罗斯的学者和政策制定者对此尤其感兴趣，因为俄罗斯的政治结构尚未确定。

This research studies new acquisitions to the Soviet state archives to study the use of repression as an economic and political instrument by one of the world's most brutal and long lasting dictatorships. It will result in the publication of monographs and scholarly articles that will be of value to those studying economics of dictatorships. These archives will be studied in Moscow and at the Hoover Institution archives. This research applies methods of political economy to study non-economic incentives/repression by the state security apparatus and by the Gulag administration under the Stalin dictatorship. It uses significant new acquisitions from the Soviet state and party archives that are now accessible as a basis for this study. All economic systems use material incentives or ideological/moral incentives to motivate economic agents. A striking feature of totalitarian systems is the use of punishment (repression) to achieve economic and political results. In this research the investigators use what is now the world's best documented dictatorship, Stalin's Soviet Union, to study the dictator's use of repression to achieve his goals. The methodology is simple principal-agent models, fair wage models, and economic models of crime and punishment. The data is drawn from millions of pages of decrees, correspondence, reports, and statistics provided by these new materials from the official archives.Broader Impacts Resulting from the Proposed Activity: This research fits within a broader family of empirical and theoretical studies of dictatorship and serves as a well-documented case study. Although the number of "non-free" countries fell to 45 in 2005 according to Freedom House measures, the predominance of democracy over dictatorship is a relatively new phenomenon and under constant threat of reversal. It is therefore crucial to understand the inner workings of totalitarian dictatorships. Given the tendency of dictatorships to conceal information, the study of the internal records of a long lasting (and extremely brutal) dictatorship should shed light on totalitarian regimes of other times and places. This research seeks to answer universal questions, such as the sources of stability and instability of dictatorships, whether the dictator's goals are economic or political, the working arrangements whereby the dictator controls his agents, and whether totalitarianism and repression are intertwined. This work will be of interest to economists, economic historians, political scientists and policy makers interested in the economics and politics of dictatorship. It should be especially interesting to scholars and policy makers in Russia where the political structure remains to be settled.