The Secret Leviathan: Soviet Communism: Secrecy and State Power
The Secret Leviathan: Soviet Communism: Secrecy and State Power
14.99 €
The Soviet regime was one of the most closed in modern history, its potential determined by the power of the party elite and the secret services, censorship, and conspiracy that permeated all spheres of public life. While noting these characteristics, modern historiography often ignores the question of the cost of this total control for the state as a whole.
M. Harrison's book is the first comprehensive, analytical, and multifaceted history of Soviet secrecy, shedding light on its dual nature. While ensuring all-encompassing control over productive and human capital, it simultaneously increased transaction costs, provoked managerial indecisiveness, reduced operational efficiency, undermined citizens' trust in institutions and each other, and fostered an uninformed elite. How did autocrats seek a balance between secrecy and efficiency, and was such a balance even possible? The author seeks answers to these questions by analyzing a vast array of data to understand how historically changing regimes of secrecy influenced the economic potential of the Soviet state from the Bolshevik Revolution until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Mark Harrison is an economic historian, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick (UK), and a Fellow of the British Academy.
M. Harrison's book is the first comprehensive, analytical, and multifaceted history of Soviet secrecy, shedding light on its dual nature. While ensuring all-encompassing control over productive and human capital, it simultaneously increased transaction costs, provoked managerial indecisiveness, reduced operational efficiency, undermined citizens' trust in institutions and each other, and fostered an uninformed elite. How did autocrats seek a balance between secrecy and efficiency, and was such a balance even possible? The author seeks answers to these questions by analyzing a vast array of data to understand how historically changing regimes of secrecy influenced the economic potential of the Soviet state from the Bolshevik Revolution until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Mark Harrison is an economic historian, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick (UK), and a Fellow of the British Academy.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series Historia Rossica