One could say that the history of the USSR economy, with all its virtues and vices, is mostly a history of large enterprise. Indeed, in hardly any other country was the buildup of large enterprises given such top priority, as it was in the USSR. For all that, their history has yet to be written: we find no basic, seminal works setting forth the pertinent facts and figures dn a systematic way. The author of this chapter is not a historian but an economist, laying no claim to tackling such an ambitious task. The purpose of this chapter is a somewhat different one.

The socialist economy was a highly specific type of market economy, but for all the official denials, it was, in fact, a market economy: Soviet large enterprises made the greatest contribution to the wealth of the nation when they operated in the spirit of the marketplace, and proved to be ponderously inefficient, when made to function otherwise. That is the causal nexus examined here.

BRIEF REVIEW OF HISTORY OF LARGE ENTERPRISES IN THE USSR

Large enterprises first emerged in Russia in the prerevolutionary period. While Russian industry lagged behind that of the leading European countries and the United States, it still had a high degree of concentration: in 1910, large plants employing over 500 persons accounted for 53.4 percent of the country's labor force (as compared with 33.0 percent in the United States). The especially high level of concentration was achieved in shipbuilding, rubber industry, nonferrous metal production, electric and transportation equipment production (see Table 13.A.1).