The Price of the Past: Russia's Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy

by Clifford G. Gaddy

Book Overview

"For nearly sixty years, the Soviet Union had the most militarized economy in history. The sheer volume of arms produced, and the physical and human dimensions of the industrial apparatus used to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815730160
• ISBN13: 9780815730163
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Innovative and informative

Gaddy's study focuses on three important issues - the precise size of the Soviet military-industrial complex, the shape and effect of reforms targeting this sector under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and the multifarious effects of the oversized defense sector on the present-day Russian economy. The first question is discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Gaddy chooses to measure the relative size of the defense sector through estimating the number of people it employed. Unfortunately, Gaddy dramatically overestimates the economic importance of the sector as, surprisingly for an economist, he fails to recognize that any direct conclusion about size based on the number of employees has to take into account the fact that the Soviet economy was labor-intensive. Comparison of numbers of people employed in any branch of industry (not just the military-industrial complex) would have yielded similar results in comparison with the same figures in the US. Thus while 10 or, according to the most inclusive estimate, 15 to 18 percent of the Soviet labor force appears to have been employed in the defense sector, it is difficult to draw any meaningful conclusion about the relative burden of that sector on the economy. Chapter 3 discusses the evolution of the military doctrine of the Soviet Union as it pertains to the economy. The earlier view, elaborated in the 1950s, called for a massive defense industry, geographically remote from the front lines of a possible future conflict and for maximally self-sufficient enterprises that would be able to move to a full military mode of production at a short notice. In the absence of meaningful measure of costs in the Soviet economy which, in Gaddy's view, would have indicated the burden of implementing such a program, the Soviet economy did follow the imperatives derived from the doctrine. The costs, in Gaddy's view, were transferred downward in the hierarchy -- to the Soviet citizens themselves, who had to put up with the secondary status and shoddy quality of civilian production under the Soviet system. The more modern version of the doctrine emerged only in the 1980s and it called for a dynamic economy which could be readily adjusted to rapid technological changes. The weakness of this chapter, which surfaces elsewhere in the study as well, is that Gaddy falls victim to a view of decision-making capacity and bureaucratic capability of the Soviet system that has long been rejected. He gives the impression of systematic and rational (in the Soviet context) pursuit of goals without much conflict. In fact, the Soviet elite, we now know, was far from monolithic, and its grip on the bureaucracy progressively weakened thus impairing both its ability to formulate relevant policies (due to lack of information) and its ability to put any policies to work. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the fate of the military-industrial complex under Gorbachev's perestroika and, after 1991, under the various Russian governmen