Lesson plan
Administrative-command system
The administrative-command system ( ), also known as the command-administrative system, is the system of management of an economy of a state characterized by the rigid centralization of economic planning and distribution of goods, based on the state ownership of the means of production and carried out by the governmental and communist party bureaucracies ("nomenklatura") in the absence of a market economy. The term is used to describe the economy of the Soviet Union and the economies of the Soviet Bloc which closely followed the Soviet model. In his 2004 book The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives, Paul Roderick Gregory argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to the inherent drawbacks of the system, namely poor planning, low expertise of planners, unreliable supply lines, conflict between planners and producers and the dictatorial chain of command. Gregory writes that "the system was managed by thousands of 'Stalins' in a nested dictatorship". Historian Robert Vincent Daniels regarded the Stalinist period to represent an abrupt break with Lenin's government in terms of economic planning in which a deliberated, scientific system of planning that featured former Menshevik economists at Gosplan had been replaced with a hasty version of planning with unrealistic targets, bureaucratic waste, bottlenecks and shortages.…
Article summary
The administrative-command system ( ), also known as the command-administrative system, is the system of management of an economy of a state characterized by the rigid centralization of economic planning and distribution of goods, based on the state ownership of the means of production and carried out by the governmental and communist party bureaucracies ("nomenklatura") in the absence of a market economy. The term is used to describe the economy of the Soviet Union and the economies of the Soviet Bloc which closely followed the Soviet model. In his 2004 book The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives, Paul Roderick Gregory argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to the inherent drawbacks of the system, namely poor planning, low expertise of planners, unreliable supply lines, conflict between planners and producers and the dictatorial chain of command. Gregory writes that "the system was managed by thousands of 'Stalins' in a nested dictatorship". Historian Robert Vincent Daniels regarded the Stalinist period to represent an abrupt break with Lenin's government in terms of economic planning in which a deliberated, scientific system of planning that featured former Menshevik economists at Gosplan had been replaced with a hasty version of planning with unrealistic targets, bureaucratic waste, bottlenecks and shortages.…
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.