We review some “myths” of the Great War of 1914 to 1918: that the war broke out inadvertently, that the western front saw needless slaughter, that the Allies used the food weapon to strangle Germany, and that the peace treaty that ended the war caused the rise of Hitler and the still greater...

This paper describes the main trends of the Russian economy through the Great War (1914 to 1917), Civil War (1918 to 1921), and postwar famine (1921 to 1922) for the general reader. During its Great War mobilization the Russian economy declined, but no more than other continental economies under...

The nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of capitalism; the twentieth century saw the bloodiest wars in history. Is there a connection? The paper reviews the literature and evidence. It considers first whether capitalism has lowered the cost of war; then, whether capitalism has shown a...

The Soviet dictatorship used secrecy to shield its processes from external scrutiny. A system of accounting for classified documentation assured the protection of secrets. The associated procedures resemble a turnover tax applied to government transactions. There is evidence of both compliance...

In this paper I should like to draw some links between a theoretical debate in which I have taken part, and the struggle for socialist agriculture in the USSR in the 1920s. The last ten to fifteen years have seen a particular theoretical discussion in the West on the concept of ‘Peasant...

Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production appears to have been widespread in some branches of the economy and...

We are working towards filling the last remaining gap in the historical national accounts of Russia and the USSR in the twentieth century. The gap includes the Great War (1914 to 1917), the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War and War Communism (1918 to 1921), and postwar recovery under the New...

By the end of World War II the USSR had become the strongest nation in Europe and a first rate military power. Behind Soviet victory lay her economic achievement, sustaining not only a 12 million strong army but also defence industries which mass produced modern weapons on a scale unimaginable...

The paper provides a rare case study of terrorism and counter-terrorism within a closed society, carried out under a blanket of official secrecy. This case is unexpectedly revealing in what it tells us about terrorism, counterterrorism, and the relative strengths of open and closed societies....

The ides of 'primary' (sometimes called 'primitive') socialist accumulation was first developed by Preobrazhensky, the Bolshevik economist and spokesman for the Trotskyist opposition in the USSR in the 1920's. The idea was based on an analogy with Mark's writing on primary capitalist...