“Corruption could be the most important of all the understudied topics in Soviet history, but James Heinzen has found a way to illuminate this dark terrain with brilliant research. His cogent analysis built upon startling archival finds enlarges the pioneering work of the great Gregory Grossman, and provokes a rethinking of Soviet legal machinery, the state, and the society.”—Stephen Kotkin, author of Stalin “A magnificently researched, archivally based study of bribery and corruption under high Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The analysis is carefully drawn, fully persuasive, and makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Soviet Union and the comparative study of corruption and bribery.”—Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University “Stunning …. Bribery was not peripheral or alien to the Stalinist command economy but an essential consequence…. Heinzen's study is bigger than its ostensible subject, for it gives a deeply textured view into how Soviet society actually worked.”—Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan “In Stalin’s Russia, where the party ruled every aspect of life, to give or take a bribe was to be human. Heinzen’s fascinating study shows how and why it was done.”—Mark Harrison, University of Warwick "This deeply researched and thoughtful book sheds new light on corruption in the late Stalin years, newly illuminating the limits to Stalin’s power and the Soviet legal system."—Deborah Kaple, Princeton University