Paul R. Gregory - Böcker

This original analysis of the workings of Soviet state security organs under Lenin and Stalin addresses a series of questions that have long resisted satisfactory answers. Why did political repression affect so many people, most of them ordinary citizens? Why did repression come in waves or cycles? Why were economic and petty crimes regarded as political crimes? What was the reason for relying on extra-judicial tribunals? And what motivated the extreme harshness of punishments, including the widespread use of the death penalty? Through an approach that synthesizes history and economics, Paul Gregory develops systematic explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. The book draws on extensive, recently opened archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves to illuminate in new ways terror and repression in the Soviet Union as well as dictatorships in other times and places.

In this groundbreaking book, prominent Western and Russian scholars examine the “lost” transcripts of the Soviet Politburo, a set of verbatim accounts of meetings that took place from the 1920s to 1938 but remained hidden in secret archives until the late 1990s. Never intended for publication or wide distribution, these records (known as stenograms in Russia) reveal the actual process of decision making at the highest levels of the Soviet communist party. The transcripts also provide new, first-hand records of the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship. The contributors to the volume explore the power struggles among the Politburo members, their methods of discourse and propaganda, and their economic policies. Taken as a whole, the essays shed light on early Soviet history and on the individuals who supported or opposed Stalin’s consolidation of power.

In Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy, Paul R. Gregory takes an inside look at how the system worked and why it has traditionally been so resistant to change. Gregory's findings shed light on a bureaucracy that was widely considered the greatest threat to Gorbachev's efforts at perestroika, or restructuring. Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy is based on Soviet and Western published accounts as well as interviews with former members of the Soviet economic bureaucracy, mainly from the middle elite. These informants, with their expert knowledge of the system, tell how bureaucrats big and small made the routine and extraordinary decisions that determined Soviet resource allocation. The often-criticized irrationalities of the Soviet bureaucracy are revealed to contain their own internal logic and consistency.

In Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy, Paul R. Gregory takes an inside look at how the system worked and why it has traditionally been so resistant to change. Gregory's findings shed light on a bureaucracy that was widely considered the greatest threat to Gorbachev's efforts at perestroika, or restructuring. Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy is based on Soviet and Western published accounts as well as interviews with former members of the Soviet economic bureaucracy, mainly from the middle elite. These informants, with their expert knowledge of the system, tell how bureaucrats big and small made the routine and extraordinary decisions that determined Soviet resource allocation. The often-criticized irrationalities of the Soviet bureaucracy are revealed to contain their own internal logic and consistency.

This book presents estimates of the growth of the tsarist economy during the 'industrialization era', 1885-1913. The performance of the tsarist economy is compared with that of Soviet Russia during the plan era and of other industrialized countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its main importance is to provide a frame of reference against which to contrast the Soviet performance. The author finds a stronger performance from the tsarist economy than the literature had led us to suspect, and he disputes several of the established views of economic historians concerning Russian agriculture and the Russian nineteenth-century business cycle.

This book uses the formerly secret Soviet state and Communist Party archives to describe the creation and operations of the Soviet administrative command system. It concludes that the system failed not because of the 'jockey'(i.e. Stalin and later leaders) but because of the 'horse' (the economic system). Although Stalin was the system's prime architect, the system was managed by thousands of 'Stalins' in a nested dictatorship. The core values of the Bolshevik Party dictated the choice of the administrative command system, and the system dictated the political victory of a Stalin-like figure. This study pinpoints the reasons for the failure of the system - poor planning, unreliable supplies, the preferential treatment of indigenous enterprises, the lack of knowledge of planners, etc. - but also focuses on the basic principal-agent conflict between planners and producers, which created a sixty-year reform stalemate.

This book uses the formerly secret Soviet state and Communist Party archives to describe the creation and operations of the Soviet administrative command system. It concludes that the system failed not because of the 'jockey'(i.e. Stalin and later leaders) but because of the 'horse' (the economic system). Although Stalin was the system's prime architect, the system was managed by thousands of 'Stalins' in a nested dictatorship. The core values of the Bolshevik Party dictated the choice of the administrative command system, and the system dictated the political victory of a Stalin-like figure. This study pinpoints the reasons for the failure of the system - poor planning, unreliable supplies, the preferential treatment of indigenous enterprises, the lack of knowledge of planners, etc. - but also focuses on the basic principal-agent conflict between planners and producers, which created a sixty-year reform stalemate.

In a work with significant implications for present-day economic reform in the Soviet Union, Paul Gregory examines Russian and Soviet economic history prior to the installation of the administrative command system. By drawing on basic economic statistics from 1861 to the 1930s, Gregory's revisionist account debunks a number of myths promulgated by historians in both the East and the West. He demonstrates that the Russian economy under the tsars performed much better than has previously been supposed; the Russian economy and its financial institutions were integrated into the world economy, allowing Russia to attract significant foreign capital. Furthermore, he shows that Stalin's justifications for the abandonment of the New Economic Policy in the late 1920s were incorrect: the so-called crises of NEP were either fabricated or the result of misguided economic thinking. Before Command is the culmination of the author's lifelong study of the economic history of Russia and the Soviet Union.In convincing detail it describes little-known Russian and Soviet successes with market capitalism, while it also shows the problems inherent in a mixed system, such as the NEP, which seeks to combine very strong elements of command with market resource allocation. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.