This dissertation investigates the workings of the Soviet financial system during the inter-war period. It explores how the bureaucracy under Joseph Stalin came to control the money economy of the Soviet Union, which was a sector that represented the circulation and distribution of loans and cash. Based on archival materials from Ukrainian, Russian, and US archives, this dissertation reveals that the size of the money economy during this period increasingly diverged from the size of the real economy and that the circulation of money and the production of goods entailed inflationary gaps that threatened the planning norms established by the dictator. While recent scholarship tends to illustrate how Stalin’s dictatorship tended towards violence as a result of geopolitical pressures, my work shows that mid-level bureaucratic power in Soviet finance was an important domestic challenge to Stalin’s grip on power, a challenge which gradually radicalized the regime and contributed to a purging of the state economy.By analyzing the financial sources of bureaucratic power and the bureaucratic politics that came to dominate Soviet monetary relations, this dissertation reveals how Moscow’s hostile response towards local bureaucratic clans was conditioned in part by internal contradictions of the Soviet system. When confronted with the corrupt influences of the bureaucratic class, Stalin and the police apparatus tended to increase their surveillance and purges of the Soviet economy. These efforts tried to restrain bureaucratic power and assert the preeminence of the dictator in formulating policy. However, these responses were themselves bureaucratic in character and tended to increase the bureaucracy’s control over economic policy. Monetary relations among the bureaucracy during this period exhibited characteristics of self-seeking profit and fraud, which represented the growing autonomy of the bureaucracy from the Central Committee. This behavior revealed that the bureaucracy was not simply an implementer of economic policy, but in some sense, formulated economic policies independent of the dictator.