Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production was apparently widespread in some branches of the economy and at...

The paper examines the control system that Stalin established, as the Soviet dictator, to enforce his orders. Historical records demonstrate that Stalin designed the system’s scope, organisation, and credentials to maximise its cost-effectiveness. On several occasions Stalin deliberately...

We provide the first thick description of the KGB’s counter-intelligence function in the Soviet command economy. Based on documentation from Lithuania, the paper considers KGB goals and resources in relation to the supervision of science, industry, and transport; the screening of business...

The article aims to verify whether, in the 1980s, there was a significant decrease in the involvement of the regional communist party structures in charge of economic affairs in Poland. The analysis is made on the case of the Warsaw Committee (KW) of the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP)....

This paper develops and implements a methodology for quantifying defense conversion in Russian manufacturing in the early 1990s. A two-sector, three-good model is employed to analyze the flows of resources from military to non-military uses and applied to firm-level survey data under alternative...

In two world wars, both sides committed substantial resources to economic warfare. Before the event, influential thinkers believed that the threat of blockade (and later of bombing) would deter aggression. When war broke out, they hoped that economic action might bring the war to a close without...

In hierarchies, agents’ hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records...

Given wide scope for asymmetric information in huge hierarchies agents have a large capacity for opportunistic behaviour. Hidden actions increase transactions costs and cause the demand for monitoring and enforcement. Once the latter are costly, this raises questions about their scope, logistics...

The Soviet Union was able to develop a large military-industrial complex and become the world’s second superpower despite the small size of its malfunctioning planned economy because defence was given high priority status and special planning, rationing and administrative mechanism were...