ABSTRACT
The initial reform package launched by Aleksei N. Kosygin in 1965 was followed by a steady stream of reorganisations and ad hoc measures that prompted Gertrude Schroeder to write of 'the Soviet economy on a treadmill of "reforms"'. The economic system performed poorly for Soviet citizens as consumers in part because it demanded so little from them as producers. Soviet leaders in the late 1980s ultimately proved unwilling or unable to abrogate the social contract. Like Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev sought both to enhance the performance of the perennially weak agricultural sector and to give the country's long-suffering peasantry a better deal. Soviet leaders attached a very high priority to importing advanced western production technologies but, with few exceptions, they seem to have been oblivious to the need to import western management techniques.
