To rethink the premises of growth in the Soviet Union has meant, first of all, sweeping out the remaining intellectual cobwebs of Stalinist dogma on investment and resource use. This is a logical step: A system increasingly preoccupied with scarcity and efficiency must know how much things cost and what alternatives are being forgone or foreclosed by any proposed action. This is the domain of economics. But from the 1930s to the 1950s economics and economists had been systematically driven out of print, out of sight, and in many cases out of existence. Stalin's generation behaved as though they did not want to know how much their approach to industrialization was costing them, - growth was guided by engineers and political administrators – and even today most Politburo members are both. Yet to deal with the problems of a developed economy the Soviet Union can no longer do without the sciences of scarcity, and the leaders know it. Indeed, economics began to revive soon after Stalin's death.

Much has been written in the West about this resurrection. Western observers have followed especially closely the efforts of Soviet mathematical economists to gain a professional place in the sun against the resistance of the old-line political economy (the bastardized form in which the discipline was handed down to the 1950s), to develop a scientific basis for prices in a command economy, and to win acceptance for decision-making tools like cost-benefit studies and input-output analysis. Soviet economists have succeeded so well that for twenty-five years they have been the fastestgrowing scientific specialty in the country.