Because most people would rather be stricken deaf than voluntarily listen to us, we economists need to seize upon any opportunity to have our eminently sensible ideas reach policymakers and the greater public. Yakov Feygin’s excellent book on the demise of central planning and the Soviet experiment acknowledges that this was true even under communism, and he spends nearly 300 pages detailing how economists attempted to influence the USSR’s development path from the mid-1950 to the 1980s. Feygin’s expansive work examines the shift in Soviet society after the death of Stalin, but in a novel twist, he emphasizes how economists became policy entrepreneurs who tried to convince party apparatchiks that “economics [w]as a science that could win the Cold War” (p. 35).

Detailing the various factions strewn across the Soviet planning apparatus (including ministries, specialized institutes, and the Communist Party itself), Feygin does an excellent job in summarizing the academic debates that came to light in the mid-1950 and that reached an apex in the late 1960s before falling out of favor in the 1970s. While competition with the West became the overarching goal of the new Soviet economy, economists in the USSR hoped that “the theories of academic reformists could suddenly turn into powerful political positions with concrete policy recommendations for radically restructuring the Soviet economy” (p. 66). Ironically heartened by the development of management science in the US (and then, in the 1970s, by systems analysis and forecasting), Soviet economists wanted more in terms of reform, aware that planning itself created “too many plan targets…often contradictory, forcing [enterprises] to work at cross purposes” (p. 84).

Using the transformation of the international landscape under Khrushchev as the catalyst, Feygin argues that the arcane debates that Soviet economists engaged in over prices, capital investment, and efficiency were really philosophical debates about socialism couched in the language of economics. The undercurrent that runs throughout the book, however, is precisely the reality that socialism did not work. Feygin relates a tale of intellectual ferment constrained by the system in which it was encased, as the politics of communism made many of the academic debates that Feygin covers in detail an attempt to reinvent the wheel that capitalism provides. The reader is repeatedly treated to the best and brightest Soviet economists arguing about how “profitability” should exist in a socialist economy and whether it is an adequate benchmark to solve problems for enterprises; how to accurately assess the cost of capital (i.e., interest rates); how to fashion ersatz prices; how to create “contract enforcement” (p. 114) across enterprises; understanding return on investment and how to incorporate it into enterprise planning; and the difficulties in equalizing supply and demand in consumer goods. The herculean efforts by Soviet economists to fashion a “socialist economy” as a new creature while ignoring the existing and functioning building blocks of an actual economy call to mind the quote from Polish economist Stefan Kisielewski, who once joked that socialism “heroically overcomes problems which do not exist under other systems.”

As a piece of Cold War history, the book is lively and engaging, making even some of the driest internecine philosophical debates interesting to the lay reader. But it is able to keep this attractiveness to those of us with more than a passing knowledge of Russia or the Soviet Union, providing new viewpoints on the role of economists under Khruschev and Brezhnev and how stagnation was a choice (p. 149). Perhaps the only weakness that the book evidences is that, focused as it is on the internal debates within Soviet academia, it gives the actual events of the Cold War short shrift. While Feygin touches on the opportunities that the relaxation of tensions with the US provided for economic theorists in Moscow to tackle the issues of competition with the capitalist West, missing are these specific events. Not a word is mentioned of Suez, Cuba, or Afghanistan, and how these confrontations impacted the trajectory of the economic debates within the USSR. While Soviet economists may have already lost faith in the system by the time that Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan, the events in Cuba or Berlin were undertaken by a Soviet Union confident of its abilities. How these specific crises provided an impetus for adoption of specific economic ideas was a missed opportunity.

Fortuitously, this minor point does not detract from the overall contribution of the book. And even more importantly, the book appears to be an important glimpse into Russia today, where places such as the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA—where Feygin and I were at the same time in 2015, although we never met) —face the pressure of politics to innovate an untenable system. Indeed, Feygin’s assertion that the USSR’s “growing economic might could encourage isolationism in American politics…thus weaken[ing] the capitalist alliance” (p. 27) could be written from the Kremlin today, substituting Russia for USSR and “the West” for “capitalist.” In that sense, this book is more than business and economic history: it is a chronicle of slow-motion economic disaster, despite economists standing athwart the machine, yelling “stop!”