The Economics of Forced Labor The Soviet Gulag

The authors provide both broad overviews and specific case studies as they examine The various forms of coercion and the channels through which coerced labor was distributed under Stalinism's heyday, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s Why the Gulag emerged and its perceived economic rationale The chronology of the Gulag from the first major projects-such as the White SeaBaltic Canal-to the unfinished plans of the 1950s The day-to-day costs of maintaining the Gulag and the great hidden cost of coercion-the loss of productivity How the Soviet leadership desperately sought to find the right balance between extreme coercion and extreme material incentives for the labor force-and how material incentives played an increasingly greater role in later years How Stalin's death provided the excuse for radical reform and the end of the Gulag Seen together, these contributions present an extraordinary portrait of a major aspect of the Soviet approach to economic achievement whose results should provide an invaluable lesson to future generations.

Paul R. Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of twelve books and many articles on economic history, the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography including Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives (Hoover Institution Press, 2008), The Political Economy of Stalinism (2004), Before Command: The Russian Economy from Emancipation to Stalin (1994), Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy (1990, reissued 2006), and Russian National Income, 1885–1913 (1982, reissued 2005). He has edited Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy (2001) and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (2003), both published by Hoover Institution Press and summarizing his research group's work on the Soviet state and party archives. His publications based on work in the Hoover Institution Archives have been awarded the Hewett Book Prize and the J.M. Montias Prize for the best article in the Journal of Comparative Economics. The research of his Hoover Soviet Archives Research Project team is summarized in part in "Allocation under Dictatorship: Research in Stalin's Archive" (coauthored with Hoover fellow Mark Harrison), published in the Journal of Economic Literature.