by Paul R. Gregory
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Product Description
Using formerly secret Soviet state and Communist Party archives to describe the Soviet administrative command system, this study concludes that the system failed not because of Stalin and later leaders, but because of the economic system. It pinpoints the reasons for failure such as poor planning, unreliable supplies, preferential treatment of indigenous enterprises as well as the basic principal-agent conflict between planners and producers, which created a sixty-year reform stalemate. Although the command system was the most significant human experiment of the twentieth century, its basic contradictions and inherent flaws would re-surface if it were to be repeated.
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Average Customer Review:
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Landmark analysis of the Soviet system, 2006-07-15
Gregory has worked tirelessly with Russian and Western scholars to use the new information available in the archives to explore alternative hypotheses about the Soviet system's history, practice, and collapse.
Scholars on the left have argued that the Soviet system's failures were a consequence of the misfortune of certain leaders: if only Trotsky had defeated Stalin, or if only Nikolai Bukharin had been in charge, then socialist democracy and rational planning would have been realized. On the right, writers have focused on the roles that Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan played in loosening the socialist stranglehold in the Soviet Union and throughout the East Bloc. Academics in the middle have often entertained the hypothesis that the social collapse sprang from a technology gap that finally reached crisis dimensions in the 1980s.
Whatever merits these alternative hypotheses might have, they must yield to the more fundamental hypotheses that rational economic planning is impossible under a system of collective ownership of the means of production and that the organizational structure of the administrative command system has its own logic and consequences that are detrimental to justice and individual freedom.
Rather than describing a workable system that might have operated efficiently if only the workers and managers had tried harder and stayed on task, the archives reveal individuals striving to cope and to better themselves within an inherently unworkable system. Rent-seeking political actors, shirking workers, opportunistic managers--such was the reality of Homo sovieticus.
Gregory deserves credit as the first economic historian of the Soviet system with both the analytical tools and the access to the archives required to expose this reality and to present it clearly to readers in economics, history, and political science.
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