The economic system of the Soviet Union is of vital interest not merely because the USSR is a world superpower but also because the Soviets offer their economic development strategy and system as a model to Third World nations seeking rapid development and social change. This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the evolution and operation of the Soviet economy, its external economic relations, and the challenges it faces in the next decade. The selections describe the nature and difficulties of Soviet economic planning and the wide range of legal and illegal unplanned activities in the Soviet economy today. They examine also the involvement of citizens as both producers and consumers. The closing section looks at prospects for the future in the areas of agriculture, energy, and technological development.

The Soviet Economy (1983) examines the long-term prospective growth of the USSR’s economy. It looks at the Soviet economy’s growth process at an advanced stage of development, and assesses how it would evolve in the period ahead. Various growth plans had made large advances to the state-planned economy, but by the 1980s this growth had slowed.

Why did the Soviet economic system fall apart? Did the economy simply overreach itself through military spending? Was it the centrally-planned character of Soviet socialism that was at fault? Or did a potentially viable mechanism come apart in Gorbachev's clumsy hands? Does its failure mean that true socialism is never economically viable? The economic dimension is at the very heart of the Russian story in the twentieth century. Economic issues were the cornerstone of soviet ideology and the soviet system, and economic issues brought the whole system crashing down in 1989-91. This book is a record of what happened, and it is also an analysis of the failure of Soviet economics as a concept.

The Real Thirteen Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. National Security Archive Documents Reader by Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh. National Security Archive Microfiche Collection Declassified intelligence reports, national security memoranda, cables, letters and summaries on everything from Operation MONGOOSE - America's covert war on the Castro government - through the resolution of the crisis, including translations of the letters exchanged between Khruschev, Kennedy.

For half a century the Soviet economy was inefficient but stable. In the late 1980s, to the surprise of nearly everyone, it suddenly collapsed. Why did this happen? And what role did Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms play in the country's dissolution? In this groundbreaking study, Chris Miller shows that Gorbachev and his allies tried to learn from the great success story of transitions from socialism to capitalism, Deng Xiaoping's China. Why, then, were efforts to revitalize Soviet socialism so much less successful than in China? Making use of never-before-studied documents from the Soviet politburo and other archives, Miller argues that the difference between the Soviet Union and China--and the ultimate cause of the Soviet collapse--was not economics but politics. The Soviet government was divided by bitter conflict, and Gorbachev, the ostensible Soviet autocrat, was unable to outmaneuver the interest groups that were threatened by his economic reforms. Miller's analysis settles long-standing debates about the politics and economics of perestroika, transforming our understanding of the causes of the Soviet Union's rapid demise.

The Soviet Economy on the Brink of Reform (1988) is a collection of essays in honour of Alec Nove and covers such topics as Leon Trotsky, Navrozov, Soviet Investment criteria, Soviet Agricultural, and economic politics under Andropov and Chernenko.

This book concludes The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, an authoritative account of the Soviet Union’s industrial transformation between 1929 and 1939. The volume before this one covered the ‘good years’ (in economic terms) of 1934 to 1936. The present volume has a darker tone: beginning from the Great Terror, it ends with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. During that time, Soviet society was repeatedly mobilised against internal and external enemies, and the economy provided one of the main arenas for the struggle. This was expressed in waves of repression, intensive rearmament, the increased regimentation of the workforce and the widespread use of forced labour.

While growth figures are high for Soviet industry in general, they are especially impressive for the MBMW sector which has far outperformed other sectors of the economy. The question widely debated in the U.S.S.R. now is whether these impressive figures actually reflect the growth of physical output. To put it differently, did the Soviet economy receive more machines and equipment as a result of this growth, and, if so, was the rate of real growth the same as the growth in value terms? But why would one raise such a question in the first place? To answer this and similar questions, the procedures of Soviet measurement of output, productivity, costs and prices have been analyzed in this study. Special attention is given to the processes of planning quality improvements and pricing new technological items. An analysis of procedures and methodological instructions used in planning and pricing MBMW products may be helpful in revealing possible discrepancies between prices of new goods and their quality characteristics.