You open the book and you are quite immediately invited to ponder “why bother with the writings on a defunct economy by authors now at best retired?” (xiii). No dramatic statement of historical significance and contemporary value, but rather almost an admonition reminiscent of the children's author Lemony Snicket that you might be better off reading something else. You realize you are not in the hands of a historian.

And yet the book stands somewhere in the intersection of history and historiography. It builds its case slowly in the course of its three parts, rather than in its introduction. The problem economist Vladimir Kontorovich proposes is self-evidently important as soon as it is expressed. Why did Sovietological economists elide robust analyses of the military sector of the Soviet economy? The sector was, after all, not incidental, but the single most important and largest sector of the economy. Significantly, it was politically and socially organized very differently than the rest of the economy, and it was also the most effective by any number of parameters, all of which the author brings to bear. To be clear, Kontorovich is not here concerned with how our interpretations of Soviet economic life or of socialism more broadly might be challenged were we to finally give the military sector its due—the kind of intervention Kate Brown made to such insightful effect in Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013). Kontorovich seems more concerned with critiquing the field of Sovietological economics broadly for not engaging with its original Cold War task of assessing precisely the central feature of the Soviet challenge to US global power: its military-industrial complex.

The first two thirds of the book are invested in establishing two points this reviewer found incontrovertible: firstly that the military sector of the economy was important enough to deserve the attention of Sovietological economists and, secondly, that economists failed prodigiously to analyze that sector while the Cold War was a running concern—a point Kontorovich proves by carefully accounting for the number of chapters and pages in textbooks on the Soviet economy and articles in relevant journals devoted to the military sector. Instead economists engaged in what he terms civilianization, or “the peaceful reinterpretation of the features of the economy that the Soviets themselves revealed to be of military significance” (87). The two chapters on the extent of this civilianizing by economists will no doubt be the most contentious and the most interesting for that. The industrialization drive was not growth for the sake of growth, or the material base for the formation of a new man, the author argues: it was driven by clear military goals, and this by the Soviets’ own account.

Kontorovich has a down-to-earth attitude over the question of ideology as something defined and continuously redefined by power: “creating a proletarian base for the party superstructure,” he writes in response to Malia's ideological determinism, “meant, in economic terms, recruiting, training, and breaking in the workforce for the industrial sectors supporting the production of aircraft engines and tank turrets” (122). Ideology was malleable, Kontorovich argues, unlike the production of an effective military, which had to be accounted for, assessed comparatively with that of the enemy, and ultimately tested in war. Economic developmentalism, modernity, class warfare, whichever your flavor of historical motor “unnecessarily intellectualizes the Soviet episode of military industrialization” (119), Kontorovich deadpans.

Which is why the third and final part of the book is something of an anticlimax. After establishing the problem so thoroughly, Kontorovich fails to make a case for the ways in which a turn to Soviet military affairs, now necessarily an endeavor of the historical discipline, would enrich our interpretations of the Soviet past. He continues his reprimands instead, arguing that the oft-used excuse of Soviet secrecy regarding information on military issues was no excuse at all, and that civilianization was the result of academic politics and practices of risk-aversion. He seems to think that a focus on the Soviet military sector would naturally recover long discarded notions of Soviet expansionism and aggression. The book ends, unexpectedly, on a passionate homily on the importance of military history generally.

Kontorovich's text is full of interesting and important historiographical reminders, like this one on page 54: “Textbooks and readers on the Soviet (or socialist, or planned) economy were the most frequently written books in the discipline, with 47 separate editions appearing between 1948 and 1992.” Perhaps economics too should be revived, and put in conversation with other Sovietological fields, a practice economists famously shun, as demonstrated in Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan, “The Superiority of Economists,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29:1 (2015): 89–114. As the authors might have predicted, Kontorovich here engages only economists. With robust historiographical dispute receding as a thing of the past, here's hoping this vigorously argued intervention finds the debate it seeks.