ABSTRACT
V. I. Lenin’s response to the crisis was to launch the New Economic Policy, thus introducing a third distinct economic system—a species of market socialism. A politically victorious Stalin determined that these institutions were incompatible with his economic and political purposes and decreed their replacement with a radically different set—the institutions of the socialist state-run economy, the fourth distinct economic system. The institutional arrangements of the state-run economy were developed by Stalin in the late 1920s and early 1930s to ensure that the pattern of production and its distribution reflected the preferences of the political leadership. Institutional stability and continuance of the perennial economic problems seem more likely than does fundamental systemic change. In 1965, assault on the perennial problems of the state-managed economy took a new turn, with the launching of the “third great economic reform” in Soviet history, in the words of a prominent Soviet spokesman.
