Социализм В Отдельно Взятой Стране: Структурные Дефекты И Распад Ссср[Socialism in One Country: Structural Defects and the Break-up of the USSR]

The USSR did not collapse from any single trigger but from the interaction of two structural defects rooted in its founding choice — building socialism in one country by command rather than market. First, administrative pricing left the economy unable to measure its own internal flows: the question of who subsidized whom has no ruler-independent answer and flips sign between domestic and world prices. Second, the ethno-territorial design — fixed by the 1922 Union Treaty and the 1924 Constitution — embedded nations in bordered republics with the right to exit. Drawing on three independent transfer computations (world-price recalculation, budget transfers, long-run capital flows) and the recovered primary Goskomstat 1988 world-price recalculation, the paper shows the RSFSR was the net donor in world prices and in the budget yet roughly balanced in raw domestic prices — its apparent domestic deficit is entirely a foreign-trade artifact of underpriced energy exports that reverses sign under world pricing. The donor direction is robust; its magnitude is an artifact of non-market pricing, and the same measurement defect extends beyond Soviet borders. The dissolution is presented as a structural consequence of the founding choice — an explanatory model, not a theorem. Data and code are open.