ABSTRACT
An overview of the East European reformist experience should perhaps begin with some idea of just what is being reformed. The reform-restoration cycle in Eastern Europe has been accompanied by a progressive decline in rates of economic growth. The CMEA economies exhausted most of the factors of "extensive" growth in the 1960s. East European reformism has a history dating to the mid-1950s, when the malfunctioning of the centrally planned system first became manifestly intolerable. As is known, all East European countries embarked at various points on reforms of varying degrees but eventually returned to a slightly altered ancien regime; in the case of Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Poland the restoration was less complete than in the remaining CMEA countries. Whenever reforms in Eastern Europe approached a juncture at which their logic pointed towards radicalization and spillover into the political sphere, the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev moved to prevent such a development.
