Harrison, Mark, 1949- (2009) Whistleblower or troublemaker? How one man took on the Soviet Mafia. Working Paper. University of Warwick, Department of Economics, Coventry.

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Abstract

The paper tells the story of a pensioner’s fight against a local mafia of Soviet party and government officials and farm managers in a remote rural locality in the 1950s. To Moscow, he was a whistleblower. To the leaders of his local community, he was a troublemaker. Working together, the local people went to extraordinary lengths to suppress his criticisms. Eventually, Moscow intervened to vindicate him. The story illustrates vividly the political and economic issues that arose when a centralized dictatorship that relied on mass mobilization over a vast territory with sometimes poor communications tried to contain local rent seeking while moving away from mass terror as its chief instrument of control.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Whistle blowing -- Soviet Union, Mafia -- Soviet Union, Corruption -- Soviet Union, Soviet Union -- Economic conditions -- 1945-1955, Soviet Union -- Economic conditions -- 1955-1965
Series Name:	Warwick economic research papers
Publisher:	University of Warwick, Department of Economics
Place of Publication:	Coventry
Date:	26 January 2009
Number:	No.890
Number of Pages:	16
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
References:	Getty, Arch. 1997. Pragmatists and Puritans: The Rise and Fall of the Party Control Commission. The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies no. 1208. University of Pittsburgh, Centre for Russian and East European Studies. Lampert, Nicholas. 1985. Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union: Complaints and Abuses under State Socialism. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Livshin, A.Ia., and I.B. Orlov, eds. 1998. Pis’ma vo vlast’. 1917-1927. Zaiavleniia, zhaloby, donosy, pis’ma v gosudarstvennye struktury i bol’shevistkim vozhdiam. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Livshin, A.Ia., I.B. Orlov, and O.V. Khlevniuk, eds. 2002. Pis’ma vo vlast’. 1928-1939. Zaiavleniia, zhaloby, donosy, pis’ma v gosudarstvennye struktury i sovetskim vozhdiam. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. 1975. Hope Against Hope: AMemoir. London: Penguin. Markevich, Andrei. 2007. How Much Control is Enough? Monitoring and Enforcement under Stalin. PERSAWorking Paper no. 53. University of Warwick, Department of Economics. Sokolov, A.K., ed. 1998. Golos naroda. Pis’ma i otkliki riadovykh sovetskikh grazhdan o sobytiiakh 1918-1932 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Viola, Lynne. 1987. The Best Sons of the Fatherland:Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. New York: Oxford University Press.
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1327

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