>Economic planning was (mostly) centralized in Moscow, but there were of
>course feedback mechanisms on the municipal, local and republican level.
It's been a long time since I read Hewett and Nove and the like, but as I remember, the planning mechanism wasn't anything like the rigid top-down caricature it was rendered as in the West. There was "market" feedback - not in price form, but more in volume form (e.g., no one bought the hideous shoes). And there was more interplay between center and periphery than the caricature says. In a better world, they'd have experimented with opening up the process, democratizing it, adding in lots of computers too, instead of junking it, which was a disaster.
Doug