The Corporation of Pretenders: Shadow Economy and Corruption in Stalin's USSR (Korporatsiya Samozvantsev)

In early 1948, Nikolai Pavlenko, the former chairman of a cooperative construction cooperative, assumed the rank of colonel in the engineering corps for himself and other military ranks for his subordinates, using forged documents to create a shadow organization. This fictitious corporation, variously known as Military Construction Directorate No. 1 and No. 10, entered into numerous contracts with government agencies and, over the course of several years, built dozens of highway and railway sections in the USSR. How was Pavlenko's organization structured? How did it manage to survive for such a long time—from 1948 to 1952? In his book, Oleg Khlevnyuk, using new archival materials, explores Pavlenko's story as an example of social mimicry, adaptation to life under totalitarianism, and, at the same time, as part of the Soviet shadow economy, demonstrating the hidden realities of the country's social development in the late Stalin era.
Oleg Khlevnyuk is a Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, and Chief Research Fellow at the Institute of Soviet and Post-Soviet History at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.