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• Black economy in the Soviet Union

  132-140.

  Marianna Pénzes

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  The study is based on G. Mars and Y. Altman, "The cultural bases of soviet Georgia's se-cond economy" (Soviet Studies 1983. Vol. XXXV [4]: 546-560), and G. Mars and Y. Altman, "The cultural bases of Soviet Central Asia's second economy (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan)", 1986 (Central Asian Survey 5 [3-4]: 195-204). The second economy, as the socialist version of the informal economy proposed by Grossman1 , can be defined as the set of economic activities that are aimed at personal gain and are in opposition to the current legal regulations. In this sense, Altman also considers all economic transactions that are in opposition to the current legislation to be informal.2 In the Soviet Union, at least in the period up to Gorbachev's reform, the second economy was a significant area of the economy, forming a continuum where, for example, there was no private ownership of agricultural land, but where goods grown at home (in the backyard) could be sold in markets, and where the kolhoz and the sovhoz (the Hungarian equivalents of the tsz and the state farm) had very different farming conditions.