“Economic levers” in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s: From “workarounds” to tools for reform and the construction of communism

The article focuses on the economic and theoretical aspects of “economic levers” — money, prices, trade, credit, profit, bonuses and khozraschet (“economic cost-accounting”) — in the Soviet Union. Using original archival sources, it specifically looks at the late 1940s and argues that between 1946 and 1949, the stated goal of strengthening “economic levers” had meaningful practical and theoretical implications. The article demonstrates how policies aimed at further expanding reliance on costs, prices, profits, and bonuses, albeit soon reversed together with their ideological ramifications, highlighted the existing tension between such “levers” and centralized administrative planning. This study contributes to our understanding of structural tensions within the Soviet economy and of early attempts to remedy the command system’s increasingly macroscopic distortions through “economic levers.”