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

这项研究研究了对苏联国家档案的新获取，以研究世界上最残酷和持续时间最长的独裁政权之一将镇压作为经济和政治工具的使用。它将导致出版对研究独裁经济学的人有价值的专著和学术文章。这些档案将在莫斯科和胡佛研究所的档案馆进行研究。本研究运用政治经济学的方法，研究斯大林独裁统治下国家安全机构和古拉格政府的非经济激励/压制。它使用了从苏联国家和政党档案中获得的重要新资料，这些资料现在可以作为这项研究的基础。所有经济制度都使用物质激励或思想/道德激励来激励经济主体。极权制度的一个显著特征是使用惩罚(镇压)来实现经济和政治结果。在这项研究中，调查人员利用现在世界上记录最充分的独裁政权--斯大林的苏联--来研究这位独裁者如何利用镇压来实现他的目标。研究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由这些新材料提供的数百万页的法令、信件、报告和统计数据。拟议活动产生的广泛影响：这项研究符合关于独裁的更广泛的经验和理论研究，并作为一个有充分记录的案例研究。尽管根据自由之家的措施，2005年“非自由”国家的数量减少到了45个，但民主凌驾于独裁统治之上是一个相对较新的现象，而且经常面临逆转的威胁。因此，理解极权独裁政权的内部运作方式至关重要。鉴于独裁政权倾向于隐瞒信息，研究一个长期(且极其残忍)的独裁政权的内部记录，应该会有助于我们了解其他时代和地区的极权政权。这项研究试图回答普遍的问题，例如独裁政权的稳定和不稳定的来源，独裁者的目标是经济还是政治，独裁者控制他的代理人的工作安排，以及极权主义和镇压是否交织在一起。对独裁的经济学和政治学感兴趣的经济学家、经济史学家、政治学家和政策制定者将会对这项工作感兴趣。这应该会让俄罗斯的学者和政策制定者特别感兴趣，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.