ABSTRACT
During Mikhail Gorbachev’s fifth year in power, the Soviet economy has been described as chaotic more often than at any time during the past six decades, and the prospect for the sixth year offers no certainties. On the one hand, the well-known economists Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov have optimistically called their new book The Turning Point and have offered a strategy to revitalize the Soviet economy. On the other hand, going ahead with radical economic reform was still a very controversial subject at a huge, high-level conference held in Moscow in November 1989—leading Leonid Abalkin, Deputy Prime Minister and head of the Soviet Commission of Economic Reform, to warn the assembled economists, government officials, and enterprise managers that unless the sweeping economic reforms needed were adopted soon, Soviet citizens could face further rationing. 1 Will the sixth year of the Gorbachev era bring the turning point or will reform lead to chaos?
