State budget

Abstract

This chapter discusses the statistics on state budgets in Russia over the last 200 years. For the collection of data in Soviet times, we used archive materials made available recently. We collected data even in the period from the 1920s through the 1940s. Using these data, we make a preliminary analysis for considering the characteristics of the state budget in Russia. One characteristic is the continuing appearance of budget deficits and efforts of the authorities to hide them. The authorities in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union pretended that they had healthy public budgets. One of the reasons for the budget deficits was increasing defense expenditure. Another was the expenditure on developing the economy to catch up with the developed countries.