Cybernetics for the command economy: Foregrounding entropy in late Soviet planning

Plan, Siphoning, and Corruption in the Soviet Command Economy

This paper reconsiders Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny’s suggestion that a socialist industry will always prefer to cut both price and output relative to a market– clearing equilibrium in order to maximise bribe income. The evidence from recent archival studies of the Soviet economy does not support this conjecture. To understand the evidence we present an analytical framework within which a ...

The Wheels of A Command Economy: Allocating Soviet Vehicles

This paper traces the formal and informal allocation of vehicles by the Soviet administrative-command economy in the early and mid 1930s using the very same documents as did the Soviet dictator some 70 years earlier. Vehicles should present Soviet resource allocation in its most favorable light, since their production and allocation was highly centralized and tightly monitored. This case study,...

Planning the Soviet Defense Industry: the Late 1920s and 1930s*

The paper describes the procedures for planning the Soviet defense industry in the interwar period and analyses its limitations. Three features differentiated the planning of the defense industry from that of the civilian economy. First, the supply of national defense in the broadest sense had high priority and received the close attention of the country’s top leadership. Second, the process of...

Cybernetics and Its Development in the Soviet Union

Soviet Cybernetics Sciences , , 1960 and Computer

The author visited the Soviet Union in June and July, 1960 to at tend the First Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) as an official American delegate and to meet with certain scientists in psychology, physiology, and the cornputer sciences, as well as visit some Russian research institutions doing work in these areas. In this article Soviet research in cybernetic...