Centralized planning in the USSR was said to have substituted the operation of demand and supply with scientific organization of allocation, production and distribution. Unlike the crisis-prone and wasteful anarchy of the capitalist free market, socialism’s façade of rational organization and functional operation was said to be only affected by minor shortcomings.
Yet, Soviet leaders admitted that tools inherited from capitalism always operated. These “economic levers,” to use a Soviet jargon first introduced in the 1920s and then consistently revived from the late 1940s onwards, were money, prices, trade, credit, profit, bonuses (material stimulation for production), and khozraschet (khoziaistvennyi raschet, “economic cost-accounting,” implying the self-sufficiency and profitability of an economic unit).
After the first attempt by the Bolsheviks to abolish money and trade during the Civil War, these became a major component of NEP. State-owned heavy industry was linked with private o...