ABSTRACT
Khrushchev's efforts to ensure administrative responsibility through unremitting pressure from above and below had placed impossible demands on local officials. This contributed to an economic crisis that undermined Khrushchev's authority, to which he responded by increasing the pressure for immediate results and purging the administrative elite. Although more inclined than Nikita Khrushchev to rely on the private sector and material rewards as a spur to productivity, he was political in his approach to party mobilization in several important respects. Similarly, with respect to administrative reform, Brezhnev was less interventionist than Khrushchev, but more so than those advocating formal restraints on the party's right to intervene in economic affairs. Moreover, differences between these two leaders were evident from the ways in which they legitimized the need for administrative reform. Each of them acknowledged that the focus of economic competition between capitalism and socialism had switched to the realm of technological progress.
