"THE SOVIET ECONOMY 1917-1991:
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED ABOUT ITS PAST? MIGHT IT HAVE A FUTURE?"

WITH PROFESSOR MARK HARRISON

In economics, one legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution was the idea of a command economy, largely state-owned government-controlled, in a permanent state of mobilization. What did Bolshevik leaders think they were doing when they built a command economy in the Soviet Union, and what did they hope to achieve? Where did they succeed and where did they fail? What explains the Soviet economy's eventual collapse? After the collapse, what did the exposure of its inner secrets teach us about the inner workings of this system? In the light of the nostalgia with which many Russians now look to the past, might the Soviet type economy have a future?

Having just retired as professor of economics at the University of Warwick, Mark Harrison is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Birmingham. He was one of the first Western economists to work in the Russian archives following the fall of Soviet communism, His research has brought new knowledge about the Soviet economy into mainstream economics and international economic history, especially through projects on the two world wars. His work on Russia's historical national accounts in wartime was recognized by the Alec Nove prize of the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies (1998) and the Russian National Award for Applied Economics (2012). His current research is on state security, secrecy, and surveillance in the Baltic under Soviet rule. His latest book is "One Day We Will Live without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State "(2016). Professor Harrison was recommended to us by Professor Philip Hanson as Britain's pre-eminent expert on the history of the Soviet Economy.

This is a GB Russia event and tickets are only available from the GB Russia Society website at: www.gbrussia.org