Secret Incomes of the Soviet State Budget

As far as I know, relatively little attention has been devoted in the West to the study of various financial problems in the USSR. Among 1 the works I have seen are Gallik et aI., The Soviet, 1968 -evidently the most important work on this theme; Powell, "Monetary," 1972, in which the statistics of monetary circulation in the USSR are examin- ed; Laulan, Banking, 1973, in which some of the questions I examine are also addressed; and CIA, The Soviet, 1977, which is about an analysis of the budget. Moreover, many specialists have turned to the analysis of the expenditures of the budget in an attempt to determine the amount of financing of military expenditures-for example, Holzman, Financial, 1975. Due to the scarcity of data a large number of important problems have remained unstudied in all these works. One of these is the following. If we believe official Soviet statistics, the state budget of the USSR regularly comes out with an excess of revenues over expendi- tures; each year a "budget profit" is formed. This in itself already seems quite strange. We all know that the Soviet economy, although it developed quite rapidly (especially in the past), has experienced constant and serious difficulties; we know that the plans are rarely fulfilled and that there were years of great crop failures.