The paper examines two prevalent schools of thought explaining the deterioration of the economy and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet system. The first explanation places the blame on Gorbachev's poorly designed perestroika which destroyed the well functioning central planning system without...

The authors suggest that the rapid growth of the illegal underground economy in 1970s and 1980s has destabilized the Soviet state economy and weakened the mechanism of central planning. This hypothesis is advanced on the basis of the examination of striking decline in income (legal) elasticities...

Summary and analysis of data on consumption of alcoholic beverages, alcohol abuse, and health and demographic impact of drinking in the USSR and Russia. Criticism of published statistics and author's estimates of unavailable data. A special section addresses fatal alcohol poisoning which...

Examination of changes in availability and reliability of Soviet and post-Soviet state statistics related to population money income, consumption, health, and welfare of the last ten years. It is noted that gaps, ambiguities, and archaic collection methods still plague the statistical data.