How much does the Soviet Union spend on defense, economic development, social welfare, and education? How does it finance the enormous scale of its expenditures under all these heads? What typical sequences are disclosed, and how do they mesh with other types of behavior in the Soviet economy? Can one even believe the official figures? If so, what do they tell us? If not, in which directions may they need to be corrected? Has the degree of secretiveness varied over time? (Evidence is adduced to show that it has.) What are the branch and territorial components of the budget, and how are they put together, under which pressures and within which timescale? What is the budget s legal status, and how is it affected by legislative procedures? In this in-depth investigation into the scope, structure, and meaning of the Soviet budget, Raymond Hutchings answers these questions. Based largely on an intensive analysis of quantitative series built up over a very long period, this book contributes to understanding the Soviet economy from an angle made possible by no other approach. Students of the Soviet economy, economists, and specialists in international affairs will find the book s data, conclusions, and methods of analysis extremely useful."

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.

During the Cold War, when the United States' intelligence efforts were focused on the Soviet Union, one of the primary tasks of the Central Intelligence Agency was to estimate Soviet defense spending. In Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950-1990, Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, who spent much of their long CIA careers estimating and studying Soviet defense spending, provide a closer look at those estimates and consider how and why they were made. In the process, the authors chronicle the development of a significant intelligence analytic capability. Firth and Noren also explain what the CIA has learned since the collapse of the Soviet Union about the USSR's actual military spending during the Cold War.

This study develops and applies a comprehensive framework for estimating all of the economic costs incurred by the Soviet Union in acquiring, maintaining, and expanding its empire. The bulk of the study is devoted to estimating the total and component costs of the Soviet empire (CSE) for the period from 1971 through 1980. The principal components include implicit trade subsidies; export credits; military aid deliveries; economic aid deliveries; incremental costs of Soviet military operations in Afghanistan; and costs of Soviet covert and related activities that can be reasonably imputed to the empire, rather than to maintenance of the Soviet system at home. These costs are expressed in current and constant dollars and rubles, and scaled in relation to Soviet GNP and military spending. After considering total costs and their changes over the 1970s, the cost of each component is examined separately. Finally, the question of whether CSE will be higher or lower in the 1980s than in the 1970s is considered, as well as several policy issues relating to the burden imposed by CSE on the Soviet economy, the relative size of comparable U.S. costs, and the desirability and feasibility of U.S. policies for raising CSE.