Although our knowledge of Soviet affairs and institutions has grown by leaps and bounds over the past four decades, much remains unknown and undescribed in both the Soviet and the Western literature. Relatively speaking, the management of the industrial enterprise and its dealings with the higher economic bureaucracy have been well described and extensively analyzed in the West. The economic bureaucracy itself, however, has for the most part remained a “black box.” We know something of how it interacts with enterprise managers, but we do not know what happens within the black box, among the ministries or between the ministries and the state committees, for example. Paul Gregory's contribution in this volume is to throw beams of light into the black box and to illuminate facets of the interrelations within the economic bureaucracy above the enterprise level.

The study presented in these pages is based on two main sources. One is unique. Gregory was able to interview former members of the Soviet economic bureaucracy about its inner workings. Most of these individuals were located for him by the Soviet Interview Project, which conducted a census of adult emigrants from the USSR to the United States between the beginning of 1979 and the end of 1984 and was able, therefore, to identify individuals who had job experience in the economic bureaucracy. With only a handful of exceptions, the migration did not include persons from the top elite of the bureaucracy; the study focuses, therefore, on the middle elite.