The Corporation of Pretenders. Shadow Economy and Corruption in Stalin's USSR

 In early 1948, Nikolai Pavlenko, the former chairman of a building cooperative association, illegally assuming a title of the army engineers’ colonel and other titles for his subordinates, created a grey company based on the false documents. This fictitious corporation, called at various times Military Construction Department No. 1 and No. 10, had concluded numerous contracts with the official structures and in a few years built dozens of sections of highways and railways in the USSR. What was the structure of Pavlenko's company? How did he manage to exist for such a long period of time - from 1948 to 1952? Oleg Khlevnyuk, using new archival materials, explores in his book Pavlenko's history as an example of social mimicry, adaptation to life under totalitarianism and at the same time the part of the Soviet shadow economy, demonstrating the hidden realities of social development of the country in the late Stalinist period.