The collapse of the Soviet Union in December of 1991, in some sense, also signaled the end of scholarly study of the Soviet administrative-command economy by economists. As a long-term student of this economy, I was acutely aware that our lack of knowledge about this economy remained considerable. This ignorance was not due to the lack of acumen or effort but to the veil of secrecy that had been erected by Soviet leaders around this system. As Mikhail Gorbachev began his policy of Glasnost in the mid-1980s, the barriers of secrecy began to fall, but the scholarly community had by then turned its attention to more pressing agendas, such as the Soviet system in collapse and then the fundamental issue of its transition. Specialists on the Soviet economy turned primarily to transition as did numerous newcomers to the field, attracted by the challenge of transitioning a planned socialist economy into something resembling a market economy. Few continued to study the fundamental nature of the Soviet administrative-command economy either due to the conviction that we already knew all we needed to know or the belief that there were better uses of our time.

This book studies the creation of the Soviet administrative-command economy in the 1930s. I have written it for three reasons: First, only now is it possible to study the Soviet economic system without the barrier of secrecy.