The Political Economy of Repression: Stalin and His Organs of State Security

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This research studies new acquisitions to the Soviet state archives to study the use of repression as an economic and political instrument by one of the world's most brutal and long lasting dictatorships. It will result in the publication of monographs and scholarly articles that will be of value to those studying economics of dictatorships. These archives will be studied in Moscow and at the Hoover Institution archives. This research applies methods of political economy to study non-economic incentives/repression by the state security apparatus and by the Gulag administration under the Stalin dictatorship. It uses significant new acquisitions from the Soviet state and party archives that are now accessible as a basis for this study. All economic systems use material incentives or ideological/moral incentives to motivate economic agents. A striking feature of totalitarian systems is the use of punishment (repression) to achieve economic and political results. In this research the investigators use what is now the world's best documented dictatorship, Stalin's Soviet Union, to study the dictator's use of repression to achieve his goals. The methodology is simple principal-agent models, fair wage models, and economic models of crime and punishment. The data is drawn from millions of pages of decrees, correspondence, reports, and statistics provided by these new materials from the official archives. Broader Impacts Resulting from the Proposed Activity: This research fits within a broader family of empirical and theoretical studies of dictatorship and serves as a well-documented case study. Although the number of "non-free" countries fell to 45 in 2005 according to Freedom House measures, the predominance of democracy over dictatorship is a relatively new phenomenon and under constant threat of reversal. It is therefore crucial to understand the inner workings of totalitarian dictatorships. Given the tendency of dictatorships to conceal information, the study of the internal records of a long lasting (and extremely brutal) dictatorship should shed light on totalitarian regimes of other times and places. This research seeks to answer universal questions, such as the sources of stability and instability of dictatorships, whether the dictator's goals are economic or political, the working arrangements whereby the dictator controls his agents, and whether totalitarianism and repression are intertwined. This work will be of interest to economists, economic historians, political scientists and policy makers interested in the economics and politics of dictatorship. It should be especially interesting to scholars and policy makers in Russia where the political structure remains to be settled.