This chapter focuses on the national balance sheet of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has always, apart possibly from a short period of war communism, possessed a reasonably comprehensive financial system with most of the paraphernalia usually associated with it—currency and deposit money; central, short term credit, long term credit and savings banks; and government securities and life insurance. One aspect of the financial system is much more developed and vastly more important in the Soviet Union than in capitalistic countries, the use of the banking system as a control device for the allocation and use of funds. The financial structure of the USSR is in many respects similar, at least in outward appearance, to that of more or less advanced non-Communist countries, although the similarity seems to have diminished rather than increased over the last forty years. The USSR has a central bank, the Gosbank, which issues paper money and keeps the government's deposits as central banks as many other countries do, and operates through a nation-wide system of branches and agencies.
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