In this 1992 book Professor Peter Rutland analyses the role played by regional and local organs of the Soviet Communist Party in economic management from 1970 to 1990. Using a range of political and economic journals, newspapers and academic publications, he examines interventions in the construction industry, energy, transport, consumer goods and agriculture. Rutland argues that party interventions hindered rather than assisted the search for efficiency in the Soviet economy, and repeated attempts to introduce more economically rational management methods failed to alter these traditional patterns of party intervention. He further demonstrates how as the Soviet economy matured and grew more complex over the last three decades, party interventions became increasingly out of tune with the needs of the economy. Yet even the calls for radical reform of the economy since 1985 were not accompanied by any decisive changes in this pattern of party intervention; this, argues Peter Rutland, casts serious doubts on the political feasibility of economic reform in a Soviet-type system.

"...valuable background reading for students and scholars trying to understand the economic reform process taking place today in Russia and the other former republics." J. L. Twigg, Choice

"This volume provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas of economic management in the post-stalinist Soviet Union. Using a wide range of Soviet academic and mass-media sources, Rutland's analyses offer a comprehensive examination of the Communist Party's intervention into all realms of Soviet economic life....This volume will be especially useful to Soviet and post-Soviet studies specialists, as well as social scientists interested in the evolution of the stalinist system. Students and others with an interest in the late Soviet experience will also benefit from the analyses presented here. All will find convincing Rutland's assertion that the economic decline of the USSR's final decades was firmly rooted in the Soviet system of political management of the country's economic life." John P. Willerton, Slavic Review

"Sovietologists and post-Sovietologists should find much of value in this monograph. Rutland has probably written one of the final Sovietological studies of party-management relations, synthesizing the major findings from the existing literature...Rutland has established a solid base on which future historians and social scientists can build..." Philip G. Roeder, American Political Science Review

"...an authoritative, deeply researched study of the role of regional Communist party officials in the Soviet economy from 1975 to 1990....This important book highlights some of the intractable problems of the Brezhnev system to which scholars should have devoted more attention, and is essential reading for both specialists and graduate students." Linda J. Cook, Journal of Politics