The Political Economy of Stalinism.

• Author: Boettke, Peter
• Position: Book review

The Political Economy of Stalinism By Paul Gregory New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x1, 308. $90.00 cloth, $32.95 paperback.

Paul Gregory has long been a leading figure in the field of comparative economic systems and in the analysis of the Soviet system in particular. His textbooks Comparative Economic Systems (7th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) and Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure (7th ed., Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 2000), have been standard texts for close to two decades. In his original research on the Russian and Soviet economies, Gregory, more than his contemporaries in economics (save R. W. Davies), has also exploited the opening up of the Soviet archives after the collapse of communism. He utilizes the archives so effectively in part because he has developed a theoretical framework that employs the insights from property-rights economics, the new institutional economics, and modern political economy in his efforts to make sense of the mountain of data he has unearthed. His books Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), Restructuring the Soviet Bureaucracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (coeditor, Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 2003), and now The Political Economy of Stalinism are required reading for anyone who hopes to learn why the system evolved as it did and how it generated a certain structure of incentives but failed to solve critical coordination problems.

Gregory stresses that the dichotomy between political leadership and the institutional structure of the command economy is a false one. Political leaders were selected within the context of the Soviet command economy, and that structure demanded dictatorship. Soviet misfortune in terms of both political abuse and economic deprivation was a consequence not of bad leadership, but of the institutional structures associated with command and control. In making his argument, Gregory draws on the work of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek concerning the problems of economic calculation that a centrally planned economy confronts and the political logic of central control that provides a mechanism for the worst to get on top. Stalin's rise, in other words, was not an accident, but rather an inevitable consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution. If not Stalin, then...