Harrison, Mark (Department of Economics, University of Warwick ; Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham ; Hoover Institution onWar, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University.)
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The paper tells the story of a pensioner’s fight against a local mafia of Soviet party and government officials and farm managers in a remote rural locality in the 1950s. To Moscow, he was a whistleblower. To the leaders of his local community, he was a troublemaker. Working together, the local people went to extraordinary lengths to suppress his criticisms. Eventually, Moscow intervened to vindicate him. The story illustrates vividly the political and economic issues that arose when a centralized dictatorship that relied on mass mobilization over a vast territory with sometimes poor communications tried to contain local rent seeking while moving away from mass terror as its chief instrument of control.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making N4 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, and Regulation P3 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions
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