Top Highlights

• Chinese-style authoritarian politics could never have supported Soviet economic reform, because the most reactionary institutions
• If communists didn’t keep a firm grip on the commanding heights of the economy, how could they control politics?
• Stalin’s political system was brutal, but the prolific use of violence was effective in two ways. First, by guaranteeing a circulation of elites under Stalin, killings of top party officials prevented the formation of cliques that could oppose Stalin’s decisions. Second, the threat of violence kept officials in line, ensuring, for example, that ent...
• In Stalin’s state socialist economy, violence played the same role that market incentives play in a capitalist economy—a means of ensuring that workers and managers work hard and effectively.
• ministers treated their organizations as personal fiefdoms and referred to their ministry’s possessions as their own: “I have 330 state farms,” she quoted the minister of medium-machine building as saying. “My cows give 6,000 litres of milk.… By volume of production, my ministry is between the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.”