We began with Joseph Berliner's question: Did the Soviet administrative-command economy fail because of poor leaders (the jockey) or because of the system itself (the horse)? In the past ten chapters, we examined the working arrangements of the Soviet administrative-command economy using its own records from the formerly secret state and party archives. We examined the system in its first two decades. If the jockey was the problem, we would have to conclude that the system could have survived and perhaps prospered with a better jockey. Lenin was incapacitated in December 1922, well before the blueprints for the new system were drawn. Stalin and his team was the first jockey because the system was created under their direction.

If Stalin were the sole jockey, then it could be argued that the system would have worked quite differently and its excesses avoided. We reject such a Stalinocentric interpretation, although we do not deny that Stalin was the principal architect. The Bolshevik Party, whose claim on authority was not challenged after the civil war, had no choice but a totalitarian system. Its core values called for planning, state ownership, and primitive accumulation. We accept the Hayekian proposition that an administrative system based on these core values inevitably breeds a Stalin-like figure. Perhaps this Stalin alter ego would have refrained from excessive terror and purges, but the economy would probably not have been managed much differently.