This article was downloaded by: [Hospital Miguel Servet]On: 21 October 2014, At: 06:57Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Europe-Asia StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceas20

A Cold War Creature which Sat out theWarVladimir Kontorovicha

a Haverford CollegePublished online: 14 May 2014.

To cite this article: Vladimir Kontorovich (2014) A Cold War Creature which Sat out the War,Europe-Asia Studies, 66:5, 811-829, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2014.905009

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

A Cold War Creature which Sat out the War

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH

Abstract

A substantial body of literature argues that government funding motivated by the Cold War shaped

(or distorted) the content of the American academic disciplines. This article tests the impact of such funding

on the academic study of the Soviet economy, a small field created to help fight the Cold War. It documents

the amount of attention given by researchers to the military sector of the Soviet economy, the topic of central

importance for the ColdWar, and finds that their publications largely ignored it. Considerations other than the

interests of the sponsors determined the choice of topics in the discipline.

THIS ARTICLE INVESTIGATES THE IMPACT OF COLDWAR FUNDING ON the academic study of

the Soviet economy. A large literature is devoted to the impact of the ColdWar on the natural

and social sciences in the US. It describes changes in organisation and funding of research

and teaching that can be traced to the national security concerns of the period and argues that

the Cold War shaped (or distorted, depending on the author) the methods and substance

of academic disciplines (Solovey 2001, p. 167; Hounshell 2001, p. 290). This ‘increasingly

influential view’ (Fourcade-Gourinchas 2005, p. 217) has been applied to physics, computer

science, ecology, earth science, anthropology, psychology, political science, and area

studies, among others (Bernstein 2001, pp. 235, 244; Mirowski 2002, pp. 200–1; Edge &

Solovey 2001; Cloud & Reppy 2003). The literature consists of a series of case studies

dealing with specific disciplines.

The study of the Soviet economy is a prime candidate for displaying the effects of the

influence of Cold War funding. It was created in the late 1940s specifically to help in the

conduct of the Cold War and enjoyed Department of Defence and Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) support throughout its lifetime. Our subject lies at the intersection of

economics and Soviet studies, each of which was previously analysed for the Cold War

impact. Mirowski (2002) argues extensively that Defence Department funding, starting

duringWorldWar II and continuing through the ColdWar, is responsible for the prominence

of game theory and general equilibrium in contemporarymicroeconomic theory. Economists

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Earhart Foundation. I benefited from the comments on an earlier

draft by Julian Cooper, Michael Ellman, Richard Ericson, Philip Hanson, Mark Harrison, Peter Rutland,

Vladimir Shlapentokh, and an anonymous referee from a different journal.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES

Vol. 66, No. 5, July 2014, 811–829

ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/14/500811–19 q 2014 University of Glasgow

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

were hired to work on topics of interest to, or approaches considered promising by the

military, and then applied these to the broader discipline.1 Bernstein (2001, pp. 93–106)

makes similar arguments. Goodwin (1998) tentatively points to the post-war government

funding of economics as a factor in the demise of institutionalism and the rise of neoclassical

economics. Morgan and Rutherford (1998b) ascribe this transformation, as well as the

increasingly positive view of the market and the general ‘technical turn’ in economics, to the

Cold War culture, ideology, and political climate.2

The arguments about Cold War funding and politics influencing the scholarly content in

Soviet studies are of longer standing and harsher in tone than in economics. By the 1970s,

critics argued that the Cold War origin not only shaped but tainted the results of research.

Engerman, having summarised the charges in the literature, concedes, ‘There is a strong prima

facie case for indictment of Russian studies as a creature of the ColdWar’ (2004, pp. 465–66).

Critics have pointed out that studies of the impact of the Cold War on economics and

Sovietology, rather than formulate and test hypotheses, use a ‘richly textured narrative’

(Weiman 2004, p. 117). In this narrative, Cold War funding (culture, ideology) never fails to

mould the discipline in question, resulting in ‘Cold War determinism’ (Engerman 2009, p. 6).

Alternative explanations for the events and ideas are not considered (Yonay 2004, pp. 624,

627–28).

In this article I propose to test the Cold War influence on the study of the Soviet economy

by comparing the amount of attention the field devoted to the military sector of the

economy, the part which was the most important from the Cold War point of view, with that

allocated to other sectors. The methods of comparison are explained, and the results

presented, before considering several possible explanations for the findings of the article and

suggesting their implications for the broader issue of the Cold War’s impact on academia.

National security and the study of the Soviet economy

The origin of the field

The Soviet economywas the greatest economic experiment in history. In 1917, a party which

pledged to uproot the entire economic order and replace it with one based on diametrically

opposite principles seized power in a giant country and introduced unprecedented changes—

workers’ councils to manage factories, abolition of money, summary executions for private

sale of bread, and nationalisation of most of the non-agricultural economy. In the 1930s,

comprehensive central planning of the economy, collectivisation of agriculture, and a policy

of rapid industrialisation generated record high reported rates of economic growth with

full employment, a stark contrast to the Great Depression the rest of the world was facing

(Nove 1992). The choice between capitalism and socialism, plan and market, for Western

countries was actively debated in the interwar period.

Yet all the novelty and apparent success of the Soviet experiment was not enough to

inspire its systematic professional study in the US (Engerman 1999). Only three economists

with American doctorates devoted themselves full-time to the study of the USSR between

1Another channel of influence was economists working alongside physicists and mathematicians, whowere also mobilised by the military, and adopting their mindset.

2Bernstein (2001, pp. 107, 235) and Goodwin (1998) also name ideology, culture, and the politics ofMcCarthyism as influences on the content of economics.

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH812

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

1930 and 1949, a period in which more than 2,400 such degrees were granted (Millar 1980,

p. 319; Bowen 1953, p. 212). The great debate about the comparative virtues of socialism

and capitalism, in which von Mises (1922), Lange (1938), Taylor (1929), Hayek (1935) and

Schumpeter (1942) engaged, proceeded practically without reference to the Soviet

experience.3

The systematic study of the Soviet economy emerged in the US only in the late 1940s,

three decades after the Bolshevik revolution and two decades after central planning started

working its miracles. It was created in the space of a few years by private foundations,

leading universities, and the US government as part of general preparations for waging the

Cold War. After World War II large parts of Eurasia fell under the sway of the USSR, while

the European powers and Japan lay devastated, unable to withstand the Soviet military

pressure (Friedberg 2000, pp. 35–39). New weapons put North America itself within the

reach of possible military strikes. The US prepared to face this unprecedented challenge not

only by increasing military spending, but also by building new and thoroughly revamping

old institutions—the military, intelligence agencies, the research and development system,

and military industry (Friedberg 2000).

A small part of this effort was creating or strengthening a number of scholarly disciplines

with the intent of generating knowledge relevant for prosecution of the conflict. An internal

history of RAND, the birthplace of the study of the Soviet economy and much of the

rest of Sovietology, describes the motivation for its creation in terms almost identical to

those of Friedberg and the early analysts as being ‘spurred by the singular challenges

of containment and nuclear deterrence’ (Pollack 1996, pp. 40–41). The Harvard Russian

Research Center, another pioneering institution in the field, explains the motivation for its

founding:

The sense of urgency that sparked its creation derived largely from the postwar international

situation. The Center’s founders believed not only that Russia and Soviet Communism were of great

intellectual interest, but also that the training of specialists in this field was vital to deal with the

challenge of the Soviet superpower.4

According to Engerman the new field aimed to serve ‘both the national security state and

academic life’ and ‘sat at the heart of the Cold War’ (2009, p. 1).

The motivation for the field was clearly understood by its early practitioners, including

the economists. In the words of the post-Sputnik report prepared by the Committee on

Economic Development, ‘Nothing is more essential than knowing one’s adversary’ (Cowles

1958, p. 9). ‘Because the Soviet system is engaged in a deadly race with the market-oriented

economies . . . it has prompted systematic study by a number of economic researchers . . . ’

(Spulber 1961, p. vii). Campbell, reviewing the progress in the field, noted that ‘The

justification for all this research has been the “need to know” from the national interest point

of view’ (1961, pp. 130–31). This view was shared by Wiles (1961, p. 88) and Zauberman

(1963, p. 455).

3Hayek, in his foreword to Brutzkus (1935), notes the lack of information on the Soviet economy, thoughone of the participants of the debate wrote an early volume on the subject (Dobb 1928).

4See http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/about_us/history.html, accessed 11 November 2004. See alsoKluckhohn (1949, p. 266).

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 813

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Lifetime government funding

The foundational research project in the field was the reconstruction of the Soviet national

accounts. It was performed at RAND Corporation as part of its research for the US Air Force

(Bergson 1961, pp. vii–x).5 Professors and their graduate students worked on this and other

RAND projects as consultants, and RAND employees over time migrated to academia, in a

pattern well documented by Mirowski (2002) for general economics.

The US Air Force financed the Harvard Interview Project, on which Berliner (1957),

among other works, was based. In the 1970s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA) funded the construction of the large-scale econometric model of the

Soviet economy by University of Pennsylvania economists (Green & Higgins 1977).

One can read of a cooling off, if not a divorce, between academic Sovietologists and

military and intelligence agencies in the 1970s, with some of the former refusing funding

from the latter (Dallin 1982, p. 25; Engerman 2004, p. 496; 2009, ch. 9). This does not seem

to have occurred in the study of the Soviet economy. Individual scholars continued working

on contracts funded by the CIA and Defence Department through intermediaries such as SRI

International, Wharton Econometrics, and Plan Econ, Inc., to name just a few. The National

Council for Soviet and East European Research (NCSEER) was established in 1978 at the

behest of the Defence Department, which was also the largest source of its funding (Dallin

1982, p. 18; Harris 1997, p. 454; Engerman 2009, pp. 250–52). This independent, non-profit

organisation was meant to finance social science research with funds provided by the

departments of the federal government.

The federal government also took over the general support of research and training in the

Soviet area.6 Title VI of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 provided financing to

university area studies centres, leading to a significant expansion of Sovietology (Harris

1997, p. 451; Engerman 2004, pp. 494–95). The Soviet and East European Research and

Training Act of 1983 provided approximately $5 million per year for study of the Soviet

Bloc (Harris 1997, p. 455). The study of the Soviet economy was one of the beneficiaries of

funding under this legislation.

Dallin’s conjecture: a test

One of the leaders of the field and its early critic, when considering ‘the difficult question of

whether or not government support distorts or biases academic priorities and findings’,

suggested that ‘it is probably true that, e.g., the interest in certain military or technical topics

on the part of agencies proffering research funds has led some scholars to abandon research

topics they would rather have pursued instead’ (Dallin 1982, p. 25).

Dallin’s conjecture offers a good test for the effects of Cold War funding on the study of

the Soviet economy for three reasons: the military sector was the most important one for the

purposes of the Cold War; its study legitimately fell within the subject of economics; and it

occupied a special position within the Soviet economy which merited much comment on

its own.

5In the words of an in-house history, ‘Soviet studies were invented at RAND’ (Pollack 1996, pp. 40–41).6Most of the early support for Sovietology came from private foundations (Campbell 1961, pp. 129, 131;

Byrnes 1964, p. 63).

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH814

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

The Cold War had many dimensions: diplomacy, propaganda, subversion, but at the core

it was a military contest (Friedberg 2000, pp. 36–40, 81; Bernstein 2001, p. 102). Soviet

participation in this contest would have been impossible without a weapons industry capable

of turning out large quantities of advanced hardware. Understanding the size, organisation,

and performance of this sector, as well as its interaction with the rest of the economy, was

uniquely important for the US government. Government agencies were interested in

academic research on the topic. When the creation of NCSEER was being planned at the

initiative of the Defence Department, defence economy occupied pride of place among the

topics the council was supposed to support. The three sets of policy concerns to be addressed

were ‘the size and burden of the Soviet defence effort . . . the long-term prospects for the

Soviet economy and society . . . and Soviet objectives in long-term political–economic–

military relations with the United States’ (Engerman 2009, p. 251). At about the same time,

a proposal for a CIA-supported research institute by two leading academics, Vladimir Treml

and Herbert Levine, emphasised responsiveness to sponsors’ needs and put military

economy at the top of the list of suggested topics (Engerman 2009, pp. 251–52).

The study of specific sectors is a common approach in economics. This is reflected in the

Journal of Economic Literature classification system, which has 40 categories of industry

studies (L6–L9), and many more categories of sectoral studies scattered under health,

agriculture, natural resources, and other groupings. On the expenditure side of the national

accounts, economists study, along with investment and consumption, defence expenditures.

This includes the value of the output of the military sector purchased domestically. While

not only economists study specific sectors, they would have been expected to take the lead.

The Soviet military sector was unusually large for a country at peace (Kontorovich &

Wein 2009, pp. 1,591–93). It held top priority in the eyes of the rulers and their economic

bureaucrats, and because of that, it received special treatment when interacting with other

sectors. Its large size and special treatment meant that developments in the military sector

had a strong impact on the rest of the economy. The defence industry was organised in a

separate administrative hierarchy, had a separate statistical reporting system, and had

management practices different from those of civilian industry. This industry was also the

most successful in the Soviet economy, turning out products competitive with those

produced in the West. The military sector was important for the understanding of the Soviet

economy on its own terms, quite apart from the Western security concerns.

The near absence of the military sector in Sovietological work

Methodology

Establishing the place of the military sector in the academic study of the Soviet economy

over almost half a century is an exercise in summarising a large amount of information. For

such a summary to be persuasive it needs to rest on a sample of work that is representative of

the field; it must use simple, replicable measures of attention afforded to the military sector

by each publication; and apply explicit standards by which these measures can be judged to

be high or low.

The output of academic research on the Soviet economy, like that of the other fields,

appeared in two main forms, books and journal articles (see the Appendix on how these

were surveyed). This article assures representativeness by including in its assessment all the

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 815

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

books addressing areas of the economy for which the military sector is relevant, and all

articles published in the leading general economics and Sovietology journals. The highest

level of attention an author can afford to a subtopic of his book is to gather all the relevant

material in one place, make it a distinct part of the whole with its own title, and announce it

in the table of contents.7 The number of chapters or index entries on military economy in a

book and the number of journal articles with military economy titles serve as indicators of

attention given to the military sector.

Similar measures of attention given to other sectors, such as agriculture, serve as a

standard for comparison. The presence of a chapter on the military sector is more likely,

and its omission more telling, in books that have chapters devoted to particular sectors.

One can write of the military sector both as a sector of origin of the national income,

like agriculture and transport, and as a category of expenditures, like consumption and

investment. Accordingly, I note the presence of chapters devoted to both types of sector in

the books surveyed. For periodicals, I compare the number of articles about the military

sector to that of all articles on the Soviet economy and articles on its specific sectors in

a journal.

While some analysis of the substance of the surveyed texts is used to supplement the

bibliometric approach and help to interpret its results, the stress is on the formal indicators

described above. This approach is based on the well known idea that to be credible, a signal

needs to be costly to the sender. A sentence announcing the supreme importance of the

military sector in the middle of a text that deals exclusively with the civilian economy

carries no weight in this investigation, because ‘talk is cheap’. Such a sentence is likely to be

discounted by the reader. On the other hand, a chapter or a section with a military-related

title counts in this analysis independent of its content.

Textbooks

In 1980, 11.9% of colleges and universities with an economics major offered courses on the

economics of the USSR; 3.7% taught planning; and 3.5% had Chinese economics courses

(Siegfried & Wilkinson 1982, p. 133). Textbooks and readers on the Soviet (or socialist, or

planned) economy were the most frequently written books in the discipline, with 47 separate

editions appearing between 1948 and 1992.8

Textbooks are supposed to survey all the aspects of the economy deemed important by

their authors. The extent to which a sector or issue is covered may therefore be taken as an

indicator of its perceived importance in the big picture. Comprehensive coverage also

means that much of a textbook’s subject matter lies outside the author’s immediate area of

competence and thus reflects his reading of the state of knowledge in the discipline.

In mature sciences, textbooks are the carriers of the reigning paradigm (Kuhn 1970, pp. 10,

136–37).

All but one out of 47 textbooks had chapters on at least one civilian sector, for a total of

141 chapters.9 Almost every textbook had a chapter on agriculture (41 chapters), a generally

unsuccessful sector. More than half (28) had chapters on foreign trade, which made up

7For brevity, I will call any entry in a book’s table of contents a chapter.8Two or three titles included here may arguably be classified as popular books, rather than textbooks.9See Table S1 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version at

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH816

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

a much smaller share of national product than military expenditures.10 Under the most

generous definition, I found only eight chapters on the military sector, the same number as

chapters on banking and on finance, the secondary sectors in the economy built on planning

and allocation in natura.

The first textbook on the Soviet economy in our sample, Schwartz (1950), published at the

height of the Cold War, contained a two and a half page section on the military sector within

a chapter on growth of industrial production.11 Expanded to six pages in the second edition

(Schwartz 1954), the section noted the high technical level of Soviet weapons. According to

Schwartz, ‘Much of the industrial development since 1928 has been aimed at providing the

raw materials and machinery needed to equip and supply this armament industry from

domestic sources alone’ (Schwartz 1954, p. 276). There were five pages of various Western

estimates of the changing output of the military industry and the discussion of the progress

of the nuclear programme. The author of the textbook, though an academic at the time of

the first edition, was working for the New York Times by the time of the second edition.

He belonged to a generation preceding the creation of Sovietology.

No chapter on themilitary sector appeared in 27 textbooks published over the next quarter of

a century, though they had chapters on such low-priority and medium-priority sectors as

housing, light industry, and banking. Curiously, Schwartz himself dropped the military section

from his subsequent textbooks, published in 1965 and 1968. The next textbook to have a

military sector chapter was Krylov (1979), written by an outsider who lectured at the USArmy

Institute in Germany and had neither Western nor Soviet economics training (Birman 1980).

Texts with military chapters written by academics appeared only in the last ten years of

the system’s existence. Two of them dealt with the military sector in a tangential way in the

context of international relations. A reader (Bornstein 1981) reprinted a paper by two CIA

analysts on Soviet economic and military aid to foreign countries. The paper dealt with the

foreign policy effects of military deliveries, rather than the sector that supplied them.

Holzman (1982) had a three page ‘Military Expenditures’ chapter, half of which was

devoted to arguing that the CIA exaggerated the burden of defence, and the rest of which

dealt with international relations topics.

The first and only textbook written by active academics to incorporate a substantive

military chapter was Gregory and Stuart (1981), the second edition of a text that was also

published in 1986 and 1990, and is therefore counted thrice in our survey. A four-and-a-half

page section—‘Soviet military power’—was located in the second of two chapters

discussing the economy’s performance. The first of these dealt with growth, efficiency,

equity, consumer welfare, and stability, while the second, in addition to military power,

discussed technology and environment.

Textbooks without a military sector chapter may still be saying something on the subject.

I count the number of pages on which, according to the books’ indexes, military-economic

terms can be found.12 Out of 41 books with an index, six do not have a single entry on

10Pryor (1985, p. 217) estimated the arithmetic average of import and export at 4.1% of GDP in 1970;OECD (1993, pp. 68, 71) implied 7.6% in 1988 using a different valuation. The share of military expendituresin the GDP was estimated by various sources to be in the double digits.

11Not indicated in the extremely concise table of contents.12If more than one military term occurs on the page (both defence industry and defence spending), the page

is still counted only once. I tried to exclude from the count uses of military terms in discussion of foreign ordefence policies, World War II (see the Appendix), and Western economies.

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 817

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

military subjects. Half of the books have four or fewer pages with military entries, while a

few books with many such pages pull the average number of pages up to seven.13 To have a

sense of what these numbers mean, I turn to the actual text of several books.

Campbell (1966) indicates five pages with military terms in its index, though I found only

three (out of the total of 180 pages). In the section on growth there are two sentences about

the military programme being the fastest growing end-use category between 1928 and the

early 1960s. In the section on end-use composition of GNP in the early 1960s, there is a

discussion of officially reported military expenditures being too low, and the informed guess

putting it at about 9–10% of GNP, the same share as in the US at the time.

Millar (1981) has the largest number of pages with military terms relative to the total

number of pages.Most of these are casual references, one-liners, and not part of any sustained

discussion or description. Thus, military expenditures are mentioned in the list of budget

outlay categories, and military organisations in the list of various other state organs. Priority

accorded the production of military output; military considerations which limit reliance on

foreign trade and contribute to autarky in natural resources; heavy military claims on output;

and the status of the USSR as the second-ranking military power are all mentioned in passing

in different parts of the bookwithout elaboration, follow up, or connection to one another. The

only sustained discussion (about half a page long) is on page 198, stating that the post-World

War II Soviet military strength was exaggerated, while the pre-war strength underestimated,

but no evidence or references to sources is supplied to support these conclusions.

Chronologically the last representative of the genre, Kornai (1992), is a 600-page

overview of Soviet-type economies with a 45-page long bibliography. It is based on the

course the author taught at Harvard. There are five pages with military subjects in the index.

One of those mentions military industry as number seven among 11 priorities in the

allocation of investment. The rest are passing references to military expenditures and to

political control over armed forces. I also followed references to military-economic terms in

Dyker (1985) and Nove (1986), two texts with the typical number of index entries; Kaser

(1970), with triple the usual number of index entries; and Hutchings (1982), with the second

largest number of index entries. They present a picture similar to the books reviewed here.

In conclusion, an index entry usually does not refer to a full-page discussion of the

subject, just to a sentence or two, at most a paragraph, where the military sector is

mentioned. Most of these mentions are casual uses of military sector terms, referring to the

official budget items, or to domestic and international policy considerations. Occasional

statements on the military sector’s outstanding features, such as an estimate of 12–15%

per year growth of military expenditures over 1928–1961 (Campbell 1966, p. 125), or

pervasiveness of military considerations in planning (Millar 1981, pp. 134, 147), appear as

single sentences scattered throughout the text, without explanation or development, and in

the context of discussion on some other topic. Even a large number of such mentions do not

paint a coherent picture of the sector and its role in the economy.

Research volumes

Work on planning, enterprise management, growth, and national accounting formed the core

areas of research into the Soviet economy. Military production and spending were directly

13See Table S1 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH818

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

relevant to each of these four research areas. The top priority afforded the military sector

meant that it was at the centre of the planning process. Military industry was a large

component of industry with distinct and apparently effective managerial practices. Some of

the prominent innovations in planning and management, such as ‘automated management

systems’ (Cave 1980), originated in the military (Maslyukov & Glubokov 1999, p. 89). The

relationship between the growth of aggregate income and that of its use for consumption,

investment, and military expenditures has been a longstanding concern of economists.

National income and product accounting had to cover military expenditures as one of the

largest items of aggregate spending, alongside consumption and investment.

There is not a single chapter on the military sector in 36 volumes on planning,

management, and growth.14 However, 15 out of 18 books on planning and seven out of ten

books on growth have a total of 38 chapters on particular civilian sectors and end-use

aggregates, including 11 chapters on agriculture, nine on foreign economic relations, seven

on investment, and a chapter each on services, healthcare, and banking.

Threequarters of the books onplanningwhichhavean indexdonot evenmention themilitary

sector.15 As far as the literature on planning was concerned, the military sector did not exist.

Atypically, Kushnirsky (1982) has seven references, all extremely brief, one of them noting the

top priority afforded themilitary needs in the process of planning.The other two books haveone

and two references, respectively. No mention of the military sector is to be found in five out of

eight books on management.16 The book with the most index entries (12 in total) is by the sole

non-economist among the authors of management volumes (Beissinger 1988).

Growth literature was more cognisant of the existence of the military sector, with only a

third of the books failing to mention it in the index.17 Books on national income accounting

and statistics stand out from the core literature, in that four out of 11 have chapters on the

military sector, and only one fails to mention it in the index.18 The unusually high degree of

attention to the military sector in this line of research is not a matter of the authors’ choice.

The accounting system forces anyone trying to estimate national product or output of

industry to address the military sector for the sake of consistency.19

Books in four additional fields may be expected to address the military sector. The works

taking a general view of the Soviet economy should be more likely to mention its most

important sector. This includes economic histories dealing with the economy or industry as

a whole after 1928, and general books on Soviet and socialist economics.20 The other two

categories are books on Gorbachev’s reforms and those on research and development.21

14See Tables S2–S4 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online versionat http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

15See Table S2 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

16See Table S3 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

17See Table S4 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

18See Table S5 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

19Similarly, the budgetary system forces the consideration of military expenditures in books on finance (notexamined here).

20These are mostly books with a general title collecting chapters on disparate subjects.21Books on research and development and the related activities of innovation and technology transfer from

abroad are called here R&D books for brevity.

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 819

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

The reforms were arguably motivated in part by the international strategic rivalry and the

heavy burden it imposed on the economy, and led to radical shifts in military-economic

policy. The R&D sector predominantly served the military industry.

Three out of 28 general-focus books have military chapters, though there are a total of

32 chapters on civilian sectors, including ten on agriculture.22 Only one out of 16 books on

Gorbachev’s reforms has a military chapter, while ten books have 24 chapters on various

civilian sectors, with agriculture and foreign trade in the lead.23 Economic history books

have four military chapters, compared to 27 chapters on civilian sectors (seven of them on

agriculture). All but one of the military chapters in these volumes appeared after 1988:

three in 1989 and another four in 1991–1992.24 By that time, the Cold War was over, and

the Soviet regime itself was disintegrating.

Seven books from the general category do not mention the military sector in their indexes,

but this may be due to my overgenerous interpretation of how general some of these books

are. More tellingly, two books on Gorbachev’s reforms make no mention of the military

sector in their indexes.

Literature on R&D stands out in that it has the largest proportion of books with military

chapters (one half) of all the books’ categories. And unlike the other book categories,

military chapters do not all date from the few final years of the subject’s life, but rather start

in 1965 and continue appearing through the 1970s and 1980s.25

Journal articles on the military sector

I surveyed ten general economics journals that existed at the time of the birth of the study of

the Soviet economy and which are now among the most prestigious in the profession

(Laband & Piette 1994); two leading journals devoted to centrally planned economies,

and two leading area studies journals. For each, I identified articles on the Soviet or

socialist economy and noted if any were related to the military sector by examining their

titles.26

Between 1948 and 1991, nine leading general economics journals published 207 articles

on the Soviet economy. Of these, only one article (Okamura 1991) was devoted to the

military sector, and then only indirectly. Over the period 1948–1972, there were 43 papers

on the Soviet or socialist economies in the Papers and Proceedings of the American

Economic Association’s annual meetings, of which one was devoted to the military sector

(Kershaw 1951).

Most of the specialised periodicals did little better. The leading area studies journal,

Slavic Review, published 126 articles on the Soviet economy between 1948 and 1991, 40%

of them devoted to particular sectors or components of aggregate spending, yet none about

22See Table S6 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

23See Table S7 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

24See Table S8 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

25See Table S9 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

26The results are summarised in Table S10 in the supplementary material for this article which can be foundin the online version at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH820

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

the military sector.27 The leading periodical on centrally planned economies, the Journal of

Comparative Economics, only started publication in 1977 and by 1991 had 52 articles on

particular sectors, including one on the military sector in East European countries (Crane

1988).28 As I noted in surveying the books, the number of publications on the military sector

increased in the final years of the USSR. Comparative Economic Studies and Soviet Economy,

which started publication the same year Gorbachev came to power, each had two military

sector articles (Kontorovich 1988; Kushnirsky 1991; Kaufman 1985; Weickhardt 1986).

Soviet Studies stands out among the periodicals in having published 15 articles on the

military sector. They started appearing after 1972, and were not all concentrated exclusively

in the few final years of the USSR, as has been the case with most other publications.

As with the rest of the literature, agriculture and foreign economic relations were by and

large the favourite sectors to write about here, with 77 and 25 articles respectively.

Books on the military sector

No books on the military sector of the Soviet economy were published before 1975. By that

time, 23 books on agriculture and ten books on foreign trade had already appeared, as well

as a book each on steel, the chemical industry, oil and gas, transport (three books), cement,

banking, the service sector, marketing (two books), and advertising. It almost looks like, in

their choice of topics, the students of the Soviet economy were guided by the inverse priority

principle.29

Books on agriculture and foreign trade also outnumbered those on the military sector in

the 1970s and 1980s, though by that time the former subjects must have been thoroughly

explored.30 Altogether, 20 books on the Soviet military sector, along with 49 books on

agriculture and 37 books on foreign trade were published in the West between 1948 and 1992.

Half of all the books on the military sector were published in 1988–1992, when the

Cold War was coming to an end.31 Less than half of these were authored by academic

economists, with political scientists being almost as numerous. Unavoidably, their books,

while containing valuable chapters on the military sector, were focused elsewhere—on

international relations or internal Soviet politics.

Summary of the situation in US academia

Academic study of the Soviet economy treated the Soviet military sector as peripheral, at

best.32 While textbooks on the Soviet economy devoted chapters to a variety of economic

27See Table S11 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009. Another American area studies journal, Russian Review,also occasionally published economics articles. I failed to identify a single one devoted to the military sectorfrom 1948 to 1966.

28There was an earlier piece on military spending in the OECD countries (Smith 1980).29The bibliography on which this section is based can be found at: http://www.haverford.edu/economics/

faculty/vkontoro/Western%20books.pdf, accessed 17 February 2014.30Not all of the agriculture books counted here are about the USSR, while all military books are.31See Table S12 in the supplementary material for this article which can be found in the online version at

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.905009.32I started documenting this phenomenon in a 1996 paper ‘Economists and the collapse’, available at: http://

www.haverford.edu/economics/oldsiteOct2008/Faculty/Kontorovich/FAIR2.pdf, accessed 17 February 2014.It has also been noted by Odom (1998, pp. 55, 430), Hanson (2003, p. 31), and Rosefielde (2005).

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 821

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

sectors, including many of little importance, only a few had chapters on the military sector,

and even then, only in the last decade of their subject’s existence. About one seventh of the

textbooks with indexes do not mention the military sector there, and of those that do, most

have only passing references to it.

There were no chapters on the military sector in research volumes devoted to the three

core areas of Soviet economics: planning, management, and growth, though these books had

numerous chapters on other sectors. Between one third and three quarters of books in these

categories failed to even mention the military sector in their indexes. Books on economic

history, Gorbachev-era reforms, and general Soviet economy volumes included a few

chapters on the military sector, but they mostly appeared in the final years of the USSR,

when the Cold War was over.

There were practically no articles on the military sector among the more than 400 pieces

on the Soviet economy published in the top general economics journals, the leading Russian

area studies journal, and the leading comparative economics journal. Books on the military

sector were also vastly outnumbered by those on agriculture and foreign trade, and were

mostly published in the period 1987–1992.

The situation outside the US

Non-Americans account for a large share of publications on themilitary sector. Books onR&D

stood out in the literature in that they had as many chapters on the military sector (12) as all

other research volumes combined. Half of these chapters were written by non-American

authors;33 sowere three out of four economic history bookswith chapters on themilitary sector,

and the only such book onGorbachev-era reforms. Altogether, at least a third of the chapters on

themilitary sector in textbooks and research volumeswerewritten by non-Americans. Scholars

connected to the University of Birmingham (R. W. Davis, J. Cooper, and D. Holloway) stand

out as major contributors on military economy topics. Almost half of all the books on

the military sector were authored by non-Americans. Soviet Studies, the only periodical with a

non-negligible number of articles on the sector, was published in Britain at the University of

Glasgow.

As the main Western player in the Cold War, the US was home to by far the largest

contingent of scholars studying the Soviet economy. Britain was a distant second, with other

countries having very few specialists in the field. The role of the otherWestern countries in the

ColdWar was different. So was the role of the ColdWar in the development of the study of the

Soviet economy in these countries.34 National security is not mentioned in the statement of

Soviet Studies’ mission (Editorial 1949, pp. 1–2). In the recollections of the journal’s first

co-editor about its founding, the ColdWar was not a reason to have a periodical devoted to the

USSR, but rather for everyone to shun the idea of such a journal. According to one of them,

both of the original co-editors were communists, not ColdWarriors (Miller 1973, pp. 167–68).

Not only did American scholars, in their Cold War-inspired discipline, mostly neglect the

topic central to the Cold War; what little was done on the topic resulted disproportionately

from the efforts of a subset of British and other foreign scholars who were under no Cold

War pressure to study the sector.

33In this count Antony Sutton is considered American and David Holloway is considered British.34Philip Hanson, personal communication concerning Britain and France.

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH822

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Interpretation of the results

This paper tested Dallin’s conjecture that government funding distorted academic research

by stimulating work on military topics at the expense of the civilian ones. The result of the

test, for the case of the study of the Soviet economy, is negative. In this section, I consider

two explanations of this result (suggested by the readers of the earlier drafts of this paper):

that Soviet secrecy made work on the military sector impossible; or that my sampling of

publications missed the actual work on the sector that was being done.

The near-absence of the military sector from publications on the Soviet economy could be

explained by Soviet secrecy making such work impossible. A convincing evaluation of this

argument requires a review of the specific sources of information, and does not fit into the

space of this paper. It is addressed in a separate paper (Kontorovich 2009).

In the preceding section, we noted scholars who used Soviet and Western sources to write

at length about the military sector. Soviet secrecy cannot explain why there were so few of

them. Secrecy made some types of data-intensive research into the military sector

impossible, for example the estimation of its production function. However, the bulk of

publications on the Soviet economy were descriptive in nature (Ellman 2009, p. 5). True,

data on the sector were more dispersed, and thus more costly to collect, than those for a

civilian sector. But this higher cost should have been balanced by the value the sponsors of

research put on knowledge of the most important sector. Soviet secrecy cannot explain the

absence of a chapter on the military sector, or even its mention, from so many textbooks.

It may be argued that academic researchers did the government’s bidding to study the

military sector, but wrote up the results of their efforts in just one medium, research reports.

This paper then misses the Cold War deformation in the study of the Soviet economy by

focusing solely on books and journal articles. Even if true, this suggestion misses the point.

I am testing the impact of Cold War on academia. The core activities of academics are

teaching and publishing books and articles. The absence of the military sector from the

textbooks and from the primary scholarly media, books and journal articles means that it

was not taught to students and played no role in the academic analysis of the Soviet

economy. Massive work by academics on the military sector not reflected in their academic

publications would not change the outcome of the test.

Normally, contract research by academics filters into their publications. Thus, according

to Mirowski (2002), economists, having worked on projects sponsored by the military at

RAND and elsewhere, carried the methods developed there into their academic research.

If economists worked excessively on Soviet military economy topics under contract with the

government, and this work left no trace in their publishing and teaching, this itself would

call for an explanation.

Why Cold War money could not buy research into military economy

When the leaders of the field put together proposals for government support, such as the

establishment of the NCSEER and a CIA-supported research institute (as noted above), they

listed work on the military sector first among the suggested topics.35 I take this to reflect the

veteran researchers’ understanding of the government priorities. Yet when it came to the actual

work done by American academics, the military sector was barely mentioned. How could they

35See the section above on Dallin’s conjecture.

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 823

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

ignore the priorities of the sponsors, and why would they want to do so? Here I pose a tentative

answer to the first question, and a more empirically grounded answer to the second.

The interests of the sponsor may influence the choice of topics and methods in science

(Diamond 1996, pp. 24–25), but there are theoretical grounds for explaining why this is not

always the case. Research has characteristics of a credence good, meaning that the expert

provider ‘knows more about the type of good or service the consumer needs than the

consumer himself’ (Dulleck & Kerschbamer 2006, p. 5). A consumer seeking such a service

asks an expert—for example a medical doctor or a car mechanic—for a diagnosis, a

determination of what it is that he should buy. If the expert is also a provider of the service,

as is frequently the case, the supplier may end up dictating what the demand should be.

Profit-maximising suppliers may use this information asymmetry to sell services other

than those the consumer needs, such as unnecessary surgeries or car repairs (Dulleck &

Kerschbamer 2006, p. 6). Academics, when performing research for a customer, can also be

expected to exploit their information advantage to serve their own objectives. For example,

they may do what they would have been doing anyway in their academic capacity, and

present it to the government in ColdWar packaging, as suggested by Samuels (2002, p. 914)

concerning general economics. If, in addition to the principal being poorly informed, public

funding comes in the form of support for the whole field, rather than a specific contract, then

ignoring the interests of the funders becomes even easier. In all of these cases, while the

Cold War funding has contributed to the development of a discipline by augmenting its

resources, it cannot be said to have influenced its content in any specific direction.

Researchers would evade the sponsor’s direction when their objectives differ from those

of the sponsor. The standard list of objectives mentioned in economics of R&D includes, in

addition to remuneration, satisfying one’s curiosity and earning recognition (Diamond 1996,

p. 8; Stephan 1996, pp. 1,202–3). In academia, the latter is normally accomplished by

working on topics deemed important by one’s peers, and using the latest techniques. For the

study of the Soviet economy, a tiny subfield of economics, this translated into working on

the topics and using methods current with the larger discipline. An influential survey of the

field confirmed this tendency: ‘The Soviet economy is treated as much less of an exotic type

of economy today than it used to be, and much of what the fourth generation [of researchers]

is discovering is the extent to which the Soviet economy exhibits traits common to all

developed, industrialised economies’ (Millar 1980, p. 326).

The topics of importance for the Cold War which American academics did pursue

were those that happened to be highly valued by the economics profession. The lion’s share

of effort in the first two decades after the discipline’s founding went into estimating the

Soviet national income (Bergson 1961, pp. vii–x; US Congress 1982, p. 11). This allowed

for the assessment of the comparative size of the Soviet economy, its growth rate, and the

comparative level and rate of change of productivity (Bergson 1978). Such assessments

were of crucial interest for the conduct of the Cold War, for they established the overall

Soviet economic capability.

These were also topics considered important by the broader discipline. National income

accounting was a new technique at the time (Samuelson 1950, p. 1; Ruggles 1983, p. 17).

There was a surge of interest in growth after World War II (Abramowitz 1989, p. 3). The

Soviet experience, as understood at the time, exerted much influence on thinking about

growth in general (Easterly 2001, p. 32). The question of the relative merits of socialism and

capitalism was still intriguing, and the Soviet growth record was relevant for resolving it.

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH824

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

On the other hand, defence economics, after a brief spike of interest in the early 1960s,

remained an obscure speciality within American academia (Leonard 1991, pp. 280–81).

Consistent with our hypothesis, students of the Soviet economy did not find it interesting

either. The articles reviewing the progress of research on the Soviet economy, when listing

the obligatory gaps in knowledge and areas requiring more research, never named the

military sector among their diverse suggestions (Kontorovich 2009). A 1973 questionnaire

asked American economists studying the USSR about the desired allocation of research

effort across 51 topics. For each topic, the number of responses that it deserved less attention

was subtracted from the number of those saying more work was needed, and topics were

ranked according to this difference. Defence economics ranked 32nd, sharing this rank with

history of economic thought (Bahry & Millar 1975).

Emulating the larger discipline was not the only motive suppressing interest in the study

of the Soviet military sector. Leonard (1991, p. 281) suggested that the general academic

aversion to politically charged military issues helps to explain the marginal status of

research on defence in American economics.36 The same consideration applied to work on

the Soviet economy. Thus, a pioneering study of technology transfer from the West to the

USSR (Sutton 1971) concluded that it was used by the recipient to build up military

capability. While no reviewer noted that the book attempted to bypass Soviet-imposed

secrecy, a leading specialist on the economics of innovation dismissed the concerns

animating the study as ‘extremely parochial and very much in the Cold-War tradition of the

fifties’ (Freeman 1973, p. 511). The politically incorrect status of the topic could account for

the unwillingness (alleged above) to turn research reports on the military sector into

publications. And the heavy attention devoted to agriculture was due in part to the relative

abundance of information supplied by Soviet sources.

The fear of the military sector’s capabilities motivated the founding and continuing

public support for the study of the Soviet economy in the US. Yet the new discipline paid

little attention to the sector that was its raison d’etre. A small field especially created,

and continuously supported for Cold War purposes, managed to avoid work on the topic of

crucial importance for the waging of the conflict.37 This increases the burden of proof on

those claiming that more established disciplines, with richer conceptual apparatus, were

bent out of shape by their Cold War funding.

Haverford College

References

Abramowitz, M. (1989) Thinking about Growth and Other Essays on Economic Growth and Welfare(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Bahry, D. & Millar, J. R. (1975) ‘An Evaluation of Research Opportunities and Allocations in Studies of theSoviet and East European Economies’, The ACES Bulletin, 17, 1.

Balzer, H. D. (1989) Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform (Boulder, CO, Westview Press).Becker, A. S. (1969) Soviet National Income, 1958–1964: National Accounts of the USSR in the Seven-Year

Plan Period (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press).

36Higgs (1994, p. 283) noted the absence of the Cold War from American economic history books.37Of course, a study of any sector or institution that contributed to the understanding of the USSR had some

utility for the conduct of the Cold War. Still, the relative importance of different topics for the Cold Wardiffered greatly, and the one that should have been top priority received scant attention.

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 825

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Beissinger, M. R. (1988) Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power (Cambridge, MA,Harvard University Press).

Bergson, A. (1961) The Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1928 (Cambridge, MA, HarvardUniversity Press).

Bergson, A. (1978) Productivity and the Social System: The USSR and the West (Cambridge, MA, HarvardUniversity Press).

Berliner, J. S. (1957) Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).Bernstein, M. A. (2001) A Perilous Progress: Economics and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America

(Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press).Birman, I. (1980) Review of Constantin A. Krylov, The Soviet Economy. How It Really Works. Soviet Studies,

32, 4.Bornstein, M. (ed.) (1981) The Soviet Economy. Continuity and Change (Boulder, CO, Westview Press).Bowen, H. R. (1953) ‘Graduate Education in Economics Supplement’, American Economic Review, 43, 4.Brutzkus, B. (1935) Economic Planning in Soviet Russia (London, Routledge).Byrnes, R. F. (1964) ‘USA: Work at the Universities’, Survey, 50.Campbell, R. W. (1961) ‘Research on the Soviet Economy—Achievements and Prospects’, in Spulber, N.

(ed.) Study of the Soviet Economy. Direction and Impact of Soviet Growth. Teaching and Research inSoviet Economics (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press).

Campbell, R. W. (1966) Soviet Economic Power. Its Organization, Growth, and Challenge, 2nd edn(Cambridge, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company).

Cave, M. (1980) Computers and Economic Planning: The Soviet Experience (Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press).

Cloud, J. & Reppy, J. (eds) (2003) Earth Sciences in the Cold War, a special issue of Social Studies of Science,33, 5, available at: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/33/5/629.full.pdfþhtml, accessed 12 March 2014.

Cowles, G. (1958) ‘Foreword’, in Committee for Economic Development, Soviet Progress vs. AmericanEnterprise (Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company, Inc.).

Crane, K. (1988) ‘Military Spending in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland’, Journal of ComparativeEconomics, 12, 4.

Dallin, A. (1982) ‘Soviet and East European Studies in the United States’, in Buchholtz, A. (ed.) Soviet andEast European Studies in the International Framework (Dobbs Ferry, NY, Transnational Publishers,Inc.).

Diamond, A. M., Jr (1996) ‘The Economics of Science’, Knowledge and Policy: The International Journal ofKnowledge Transfer and Utilization, 9, 2 & 3.

Dobb, M. (1928) Russian Economic Development since the Revolution (New York, E. P. Dutton andCompany).

Dulleck, U. & Kerschbamer, R. (2006) ‘On Doctors, Mechanics, and Computer Specialists: The Economicsof Credence Goods’, Journal of Economic Literature, 44, 1.

Dyker, D. A. (1985) The Future of the Soviet Economic Planning System (Armonk, NY, M. E. Sharpe).Easterly, W. (2001) The Elusive Quest for Growth (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).Edge, D. & Solovey, M. (eds) (2001) Science in the Cold War, a special issue of Social Studies of Science, 31,

2, available at: http://sss.sagepub.com/content/31/2/163.full.pdfþhtml, accessed 12 March 2014.Editorial (1949) Soviet Studies, 1, 1.Ellman, M. (2009) ‘What did the Study of the Soviet Economy Contribute to Mainstream Economics?’,

Comparative Economic Studies, 51, 1.Engerman, D. C. (1999) ‘New Society, New Scholarship: Soviet Studies Programmes in Interwar America’,

Minerva, 37, 1.Engerman, D. C. (2004) ‘The Ironies of the Iron Curtain’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 45, 3–4.Engerman, D. C. (2009) Know Your Enemy. The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, Oxford

University Press).Fourcade-Gourinchas, M. (2005) ‘The Sociology of Economics’, in Beckert, J. & Zafirovski, M. (eds)

International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology (London, Routledge).Frank, V. S. (1964) ‘Soviet Studies in Western Europe: Britain’, Survey, 50.Freeman, C. (1973) Review of Antony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development,

1930–1945. The Journal of Political Economy, 81, 2.Friedberg, A. L. (2000) In the Shadow of the Garrison State (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press).Goldman, M. I. (1983) USSR in Crisis. The Failure of an Economic System (New York, W. W. Norton &

Company).Goodwin, C. (1998) ‘The Patrons of Economics in a Time of Transformation’, in Morgan, M. S. &

Rutherford, M. (eds) (1998a).Green, D. W. & Higgins, C. I. (1977) SOVMOD I. A Macro-econometric Model of the Soviet Economy (New

York, Academic Press).

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH826

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Gregory, P. R. & Stuart, R. C. (1981) Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 2nd edn (New York,Harper & Row).

Gregory, P. R. & Stuart, R. C. (1986) Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 3rd edn (New York,Harper & Row).

Gregory, P. R. & Stuart, R. C. (1990) Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 4th edn (New York,Harper & Row).

Hanson, P. (2003) The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy (London, Pearson Education Limited).Harris, C. D. (1997) ‘Russian, Slavic, and Soviet Studies in the United States: Some Memories and Notes’,

Russian History/Histoire Russe, 24, 4.Hayek, F. A. von (ed.) (1935) Collectivist Economic Planning; Critical Studies on the Possibilities of

Socialism (London, Routledge).Higgs, R. (1994) ‘The Cold War Economy: Opportunity Costs, Ideology, and the Politics of Crisis’,

Explorations in Economic History, 31, 3.Holzman, F. (1982) ‘The Soviet Economy Past, Present, and Future’, Foreign Policy Association Headline

Series, 260, September–October.Hounshell, D. A. (2001) ‘Rethinking the Cold War; Rethinking Science and Technology in the Cold War;

Rethinking the Social Study of Science and Technology’, Social Studies of Science, 31, 21.Hutchings, R. (1982) Soviet Economic Development, 2nd edn (New York, New York University Press).Kaser, M. (1970) Soviet Economics (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company).Kaufman, R. F. (1985) ‘Causes of the Slowdown in Soviet Defense’, Soviet Economy, 1, 1.Kershaw, J. A. (1951) ‘The Economic War Potential of the USSR’, American Economic Review, 41, 2.Kluckhohn, C. (1949) ‘Russian Research at Harvard’, World Politics, 1, 2.Kontorovich, V. (1988) ‘Prototype Statistics as Indicators of Soviet R&D Priorities in Civilian and Military

Machinebuilding’, Comparative Economic Studies, 30, 3.Kontorovich, V. (2009) ‘Secrecy and Western Study of the Soviet Military Sector’, presented at the 41st

National Convention of the AAASS, Boston, MA, 14 November, available at: http://www.haverford.edu/economics/faculty/vkontoro/WhatCouldBeKnown97.pdf, accessed 17 February 2014.

Kontorovich, V. & Wein, A. (2009) ‘What Did the Soviet Rulers Maximize?’, Europe-Asia Studies, 61, 9.Kornai, J. (1992) The Socialist System (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press).Krylov, C. A. (1979) The Soviet Economy. How it Really Works (Lexington, MA, D. C. Heath and Company).Kuhn, T. S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press).Kushnirsky, F. I. (1982) Soviet Economic Planning, 1965–1980 (Boulder, CO, Westview Press).Kushnirsky, F. I. (1991) ‘Conversion, Civilian Production, and Goods Quality in the Soviet Economy’,

Comparative Economic Studies, 33, 1.Laband, D. N. & Piette, M. J. (1994) ‘The Relative Impact of Economics Journals: 1970–1990’, Journal of

Economic Literature, 32, 2.Lange, O. (1938) ‘On the Economic Theory of Socialism’, in Lippincott, B. E. (ed.) On the Economic Theory

of Socialism (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press).Leonard, R. J. (1991) ‘War as a Simple Economic Problem: The Rise of an Economics of Defense’,

in Goodwin, C. D. (ed.) Economics and National Security. A History of Their Interaction (Durham, NC,Duke University Press).

Maslyukov, Iu. D. & Glubokov, Ie. S. (1999) ‘Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti vSSSR’, in Minaev, A. V. (ed.) Sovetskaya voennaya moshch’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva (Moscow,Voennyi parad).

Millar, J. R. (1980) ‘Where are the Young Specialists on the Soviet Economy and What are They Doing?’,Journal of Comparative Economics, 4.

Millar, J. R. (1981) The ABCs of Soviet Socialism (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press).Miller, J. (1973) ‘The Origins of Soviet Studies: A Personal Note’, Soviet Studies, 25, 2.Mirowski, P. (2002) Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York, Cambridge

University Press).Morgan, M. S. & Rutherford, M. (eds) (1998a) From Interwar Pluralism to Postwar Neoclassicism (Durham,

NC, Duke University Press).Morgan, M. S. & Rutherford, M. (1998b) ‘American Economics: The Character of Transformation’,

in Morgan, M. S. & Rutherford, M. (eds) (1998a).Nove, A. (1986) The Soviet System, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, Allen & Unwin, Inc.).Nove, A. (1992) An Economic History of the USSR 1917–1991, 3rd edn (London, Penguin Books).Odom, W. E. (1998) The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press).OECD (1993) National Accounts for the Former Soviet Union. Sources, Methods and Estimates (Paris,

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development).Okamura, M. (1991) ‘Estimating the Impact of the Soviet Union’s Threat on the United States–Japan

Alliance: A Demand System Approach’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 73, 2.

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 827

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

Pollack, J. D. (1996) ‘International Studies’, in Project Air Force 50th, 1946–1996, report CP-303 (SantaMonica, CA, Rand Corporation).

Pryor, F. L. (1985) A Guidebook to the Comparative Study of Economic Systems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ,Prentice Hall, Inc.).

Rosefielde, S. (2005) Russia in the 21st Century: The Prodigal Superpower (Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press).

Ruggles, R. (1983) ‘The United States National Income Accounts, 1947–1977: Their Conceptual Basis andEvolution’, in Foss, M. F. (ed.) The US National Income and Product Accounts. Selected Topics(Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press).

Samuels, W. J. (2002) Review of Philip Mirowski,Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science.Journal of Economic History, 62, 3.

Samuelson, P. A. (1950) ‘Evaluation of Real National Income,’, Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 2, 1.Schumpeter, J. A. (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, Harper and Row, Publishers).Schwartz, H. (1950) Russia’s Soviet Economy (New York, Prentice Hall, Inc).Schwartz, H. (1954) Russia’s Soviet Economy, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, Inc.).Schwartz, H. (1965) The Soviet Economy Since Stalin (Philadelphia, PA, J. B. Lippincott Company).Schwartz, H. (1968) An Introduction to the Soviet Economy (Columbus, OH, Charles Merrill Publishing

Company).Siegfried, J. J. & Wilkinson, J. T. (1982) ‘The Economics Curriculum in the United States: 1980’, American

Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 72, 2.Smith, R. P. (1980) ‘Military Expenditures and Investment in the OECD Countries, 1954–1973’, Journal of

Comparative Economics, 4, 1.Solovey, M. (2001) ‘Science and the State during the ColdWar: Blurred Boundaries and a Contested Legacy’,

Social Studies of Science, 31, 2.Spulber, N. (ed.) (1961) Study of the Soviet Economy. Direction and Impact of Soviet Growth. Teaching and

Research in Soviet Economics (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press).Stephan, P. (1996) ‘The Economics of Science’, Journal of Economic Literature, 34, 3.Sutton, A. C. (1971) Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1930 to 1945 (Stanford, CA,

Hoover Institution Press).Taylor, F. M. (1929) The Guidance of Production in a Socialist State. American Economic Review, 19, 1.US Congress (1982) US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, USSR: Measures of Economic Growth and

Development (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office).Weickhardt, G. G. (1986) ‘The Soviet Military–Industrial Complex and Economic Reform’, Soviet Economy,

2, 3.Weiman, D. F. (2004) Review of Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economics and Public Purpose

in Twentieth-Century America. Journal of Economic Literature, 42, 4.Wiles, P. (1961) ‘Communist Economics and our Economics Textbooks’, in Spulber, N. (ed.).von Mises, L. (1922) Socialism (Indianapolis, IN, Liberty Classics).Yonay, Y. (2004) ‘Whose Dreams?’, Social Studies of Science, 34, 4.Zauberman, A. (1963) Review of Nicolas Spulber, The Soviet Economy. International Affairs, 39, 3.

Appendix. How the literature was surveyed

I surveyed all the English-language books published in 1948–1992 that dealt with the Soviet,

socialist, or planned economy as a whole, or addressed an aspect of it (such as planning, growth,

or history), for which the military sector played an important role, as explained in the text. I also

considered all articles on the Soviet or socialist economy published in the period 1948–1991 in

leading economics and Sovietological journals. Books were located by searching the Harvard

and Princeton library catalogues for the keywords ‘Soviet economy’, ‘command economy’, and

‘planned economy’. I considered multiple editions of a title to be separate books.

This article is about the impact of the Cold War on the academic study of the Soviet economy

in the US. For this reason, I surveyed the standard outlets of academic research, books and

scholarly journals. This approach missed government and think tank publications, unpublished

reports, and oral briefings by the academics. This omission was justified because the goal was not

a complete catalogue of work on the military sector; books and articles were common primary

VLADIMIR KONTOROVICH828

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

criteria for evaluating academic output, unlike reports and briefings; and the work academics did

for the government and think tanks, if important, found its way into their publications.

I did not limit this survey to publications by academics; rather, I studied everything appearing

in ‘academic’ outlets—books and journals. This allowed me to avoid the inevitably arbitrary

classification of authors whose career spanned both academia and other institutions. It also

‘contaminated’ the sample with the output of the very few individuals who never held academic

jobs.

My sample included the publications of non-American students of the Soviet economy. Their

countries played a different role in the Cold War and probably had different expectations for their

Sovietologists than did the US. Relevant differences in the treatment of the military sector

between the American and other researchers are noted in the text. The dates of the survey were

1948–1992 for the books (an additional year for the publication lag) and 1948–1991 for articles.

A book or an article was considered to be about the Soviet economy based on its title. Most

authors of such books were economists, though some were affiliated with other social science

disciplines. I tried to limit the survey to writings about the economy, as opposed to international

affairs, social history, military issues, or other angles in which the military sector can come up.

Books, chapters, and articles dealing with, and references to the World War II military

economy were not counted here, because this period pre-dated the Cold War, and also because

the distinctive feature of the Soviet economy was the size and the role of military industry in a

peacetime economy.

A COLD WAR CREATURE WHICH SAT OUT THE WAR 829

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Hos

pita

l Mig

uel S

erve

t] a

t 06:

57 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014