"Forging Success: Soviet Managers and False Accounting, 1943 to 1962" is no. 56 in the PERSA series. The paper is by Mark Harrison, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, research fellow of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, and a Campbell national fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production appears to have been widespread in some branches of the economy and some periods of time. A feature of cases of false accounting was that they commonly involved the aggravating element of conspiracy. The paper presents new evidence from Hoover archives on the nature and extent of false accounting; the scale and optimal size of underlying conspiracies; the authorities’ difficulty in committing to penalize it and the importance of political connections in securing leniency; and the importance of herd effects, leading to correlated risk taking and periodic asset price bubbles in the socialist market where interpersonal trust was traded. The paper is available free of charge from www.warwick.ac.uk/go/persa.