ABSTRACT
The standard Western image of the Soviet "command economy" is one of a state-owned, hierarchically organized, centrally planned and managed, price-controlled, and otherwise regimented system, rigidly geared to the goals and priorities of the Soviet leadership, and operating in compliance with a myriad of state-imposed laws, regulations, and directives. As some scholars define it, the second economy comprises all production and exchange activity that fulfills at least one of the two following tests: being directly for private gain; being in some significant respect in knowing contravention of existing law. Doubtless the most common economic crime in the USSR is stealing from the state, under which we subsume stealing from all official organizations, including collective farms. In an economy with pervasive goods shortages such as exist in the Soviet Union, physical or administrative control over goods often confers both the power and the opportunity for economic gain to the individual, be he or she ever so humble in the formal hierarchy.
