Administrative Monsters: Yurii Yaremenko’s Critique of the Late Soviet State Adam E. Leeds Terra Incognita In 1983, speaking at a plenum of the Central Committee of the Com- munist Party, General Secretary Yuri Andropov confessed, “If we speak openly, we do not sufficiently know the society in which we live and work, have not fully revealed its inherent laws, especially economic.” Yet two years before Andropov’s admission, a book had appeared that attempted just that. Structural Changes in the Socialist Economy (1981) and its author, Yurii Yaremenko, never achieved much fame or notoriety. Yare- menko wrote first and foremost for higher party leadership, secondarily for other planning economists, and almost never for the general public. He had only a moment of public visibility, when he was elected to the Central Committee in 1990 and appointed an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Yet Yaremenko and his research group began neither from the ide- ology of Soviet planning nor from a comparison or analogy with capitalist markets. His theory was simply a theory of the planned economy on its own terms, buttressed by a unique data set, and analyzed with a novel econometric model. 1 However, it was also more than that. Yaremenko remained a commu- nist and proponent of planning until his death, but his theory contained a History of Political Economy 51 (annual suppl.) DOI 10.1215/00182702-7903264 Copyright 2019 by Duke University Press I thank the participants of the 2018 HOPE conference for comments on earlier drafts, especially Yakov Feygin. Brian Wheaton was of invaluable help with Yaremenko’s econometrics. 1. In this it is best compared to János Kornai’s (1980) contemporaneous work. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/51/S1/127/744794/0510127.pdf by COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY user on 06 March 2020