The Missing Sector

Abstract

This chapter surveys books and articles on the Soviet economy published in 1948-1991 and finds that Sovietologists afforded the military sector little attention, both relative to its importance and relative to the attention lavished on the other, lower-priority sectors. Literature on Soviet economy contains few chapters, articles, and books on the military sector, compared to other sectors. Thus, textbooks on the Soviet economy have 136 chapters on civilian sectors, and only eight on the military sector. Disproportionately many of those appeared in the final years of the USSR, and few of the military economy publications have been produced by American Sovietologists. Post mortem writings on Sovietology have not detected this gap in the scholarship. A survey of comparative systems and introductory economics textbooks shows that Sovietologists failed to persuade other economists that the military sector was merited a mention in popular treatments of the Soviet economy.