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"How Mr Nikolaenko Beat the Soviet Mafia" and "Secrets, Lies, and Half Truths: the Decision to Disclose Soviet Defense Outlays" are no. 54 and no 55 in the PERSA series. Both papers are based on work in the Hoover Archive during the 2008 summer workshop of the Soviet Archives Research Project. Their author is Mark Harrison, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick and a Hoover distinguished visiting fellow.

The first paper narrates the story of a pensioner’s fight against a local mafia of Soviet party officials and farm managers in a remote rural locality in the mid-1950s. This struggle eventually came to the attention of officials in Moscow, who vindicated the protagonist at the expense of the local politicians. The story provides a vivid illustration of historical and political issues that arose as a centralized dictatorship that relied on mass mobilization over a vast territory with sometimes poor communications tried to contain local rent seeking without recourse to mass terror.

The second paper look at Soviet secrecy and the military budget. In the mid 1980s Soviet leaders began to regret the price they were paying in the international arena for extreme secrecy in military affairs. New evidence shows that in the autumn of 1986 they decided in principle to release more information about military force levels and defense outlays. They went on to agonize over this commitment over the next two and a half years. Senior military and other officials resisted and delayed implementation. The new figures that Gorbachev announced in 1989 may not have the whole truth, but were probably better than a half-truth. The episode throws more light on the burdens of secrecy than on the supposed burdens of military spending.

The papers are available free of charge from www.warwick.ac.uk/go/persa.