Ebook: The Strange World of Ivan Ivanov

An examination of the impct of government controls on the life of the average citizen in the Soviet Union and the limits they placed on his rights and privileges. [World Pub. Co; First Edition edition (1969)]

“It is the bitter lesson of history that society cannot rely on the scruples of a powerful ruler to restrain him from exercising his power over the lives of his subjects. The only safeguard of liberty is the restraint of power itself.”~G. Warren Nutter

Economist G. Warren Nutter provided one of the lone dissenting voices to challenge what had become a matter of conventional wisdom among Sovietologists.

Whereas others perceived vibrancy and vitality in the socialist society’s industrial growth, Nutter recognized its long-term economic decline concealed behind a politically crafted veneer of propaganda about socialist industrial prowess.

From 1956 until its first publication in 1969, he labored on providing a statistical corrective that painted a picture of a society gradually succumbing to the weight of its own central planning in _The Strange World of Ivan Ivanov_.

Though generally well-received in the Cold War environment of its publication, _Ivan Ivanov_, drifted from memory along with its own Soviet subject matter.

In this new edition, the text is accessible again—both as a record of the daily personal hardships experienced under an actual Marxian-socialist state and a warning for a time when socialism’s reputation has become detached from its own track record.

The poverty, fear, and coerced subordination of Ivan Ivanov’s life were not aberrations of a socialist revolution gone astray—they were the entirely predictable results of that same socialist system. And as its human toll stretches from the Eastern Bloc to China to Cuba to Venezuela, they continue to repeat with alarming certainty whenever and wherever socialism is attempted.

The American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was founded in 1933 as the first independent voice for sound economics in the United States. Today it publishes ongoing research, hosts educational programs, publishes books, sponsors interns and scholars, and is home to the world-renowned Bastiat Society and the highly respected Sound Money Project. The American Institute for Economic Research is a 501c3 public charity.

"At the midcentury mark, economist G. Warren Nutter (1923–79) provided one of the lone dissenting voices to challenge what had become a matter of conventional wisdom among Sovietologists. Whereas others perceived vibrancy and vitality in the socialist society’s industrial growth, Nutter recognized its long-term economic decline concealed behind a politically crafted veneer of propaganda about socialist industrial prowess. From 1956 onward, he labored on providing a statistical corrective that painted a picture of a society gradually succumbing to the weight of its own central planning and the wasteful accretions of a graft-riddled and politically repressive bureaucracy.2 The early reception of Nutter’s work expressed doubt about its accuracy compared to more optimistic portrayals from the textbooks and accompanying Sovietology literature, yet history proved him right. Nutter had scooped the field and accurately identified an economy with deep structural problems—most of them directly traceable to its destruction of a functional price mechanism through the tools of state management.
Nutter’s assessment was no abstraction, but rather the result of years of close study of the relationship between state policy and industrial concentration in the United States - the subject of his dissertation at the University of Chicago. But he also possessed an uncommonly keen eye for extracting observations from his surroundings. He deployed the latter during a twenty-eight-day visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 as a self-described “tourist” researcher, which he contrasted with other American experts whose longer visits occurred under the heavy scrutiny and management of handlers from the Soviet government.3 Whereas others largely picked up on what the Soviets wanted them to see and incorporated curated factory tours and contrived statistical claims into their assessments, Nutter apparently had a knack for looking beneath the surface through everyday observations of his surroundings - simply by keeping an eye on the types of goods in the shop window, the patterns of workers entering the factory in the background, and the way that the people he encountered described even the most mundane economic transactions of their daily lives.4"

- Introduction
I. I Choose Capitalism
II. The Bulwarks of Liberty
III. Peaceable Assembly
IV. Consent of the Governed
V. Due Process of Law
VI. An Informed Citizenry
VII. The Pursuit of Happiness
VIII. Creative Diversity
IX. The General Welfare
X. Prosperity and Progress
XI. War and Peace
- About the Author
- About AIER
- Index