As far as I know, relatively little attention has been devoted in the
West to the study of various financial problems in the USSR. Among 1 the
works I have seen are Gallik et aI., The Soviet, 1968 -evidently the
most important work on this theme; Powell, "Monetary," 1972, in which
the statistics of monetary circulation in the USSR are examin- ed;
Laulan, Banking, 1973, in which some of the questions I examine are also
addressed; and CIA, The Soviet, 1977, which is about an analysis of the
budget. Moreover, many specialists have turned to the analysis of the
expenditures of the budget in an attempt to determine the amount of
financing of military expenditures-for example, Holzman, Financial,
1975. Due to the scarcity of data a large number of important problems
have remained unstudied in all these works. One of these is the
following. If we believe official Soviet statistics, the state budget of
the USSR regularly comes out with an excess of revenues over expendi-
tures; each year a "budget profit" is formed. This in itself already
seems quite strange. We all know that the Soviet economy, although it
developed quite rapidly (especially in the past), has experienced
constant and serious difficulties; we know that the plans are rarely
fulfilled and that there were years of great crop failures.