Alexei Kosygin — The Minister of Finance: The struggle for hard budget constraints in the post-war Soviet economy

The article is devoted to the activities of A. N. Kosygin as a Minister of Finance of the USSR during the period of 10 months in 1948. The study analyzes the tasks in the field of post-war finance restructuring faced by the Ministry of Finance in the fourth five-year plan period, the main areas of criticism of this ministry, which led to the dismissal of the previous Finance Minister A. G. Zverev, Kosygin’s activities to correct deficiencies in the work of the Ministry of Finance: improving the working conditions of financiers and their level of training, preparing wholesale price reform and the abolition of subsidies to industry, strengthening control over targeted spending, tax mobilization. The article focuses on the reasons for the increase in agricultural tax rates, as well as organizational measures within the central office of the Ministry of Finance aimed at eliminating deficiencies as soon as possible. Measures on activating the control, auditing and tax functions of the Ministry of Finance are seen as tightening budget constraints to overcome dependency attitudes among the leadership of economic ministries and departments. The “shake-up” of the USSR Ministry of Finance, in which Kosygin served as a kind of external manager, shows that in a Soviet-type economy budget constraints can be made quite tight, but this requires the same harsh pressure on the financiers themselves.