ABSTRACT
In a 1981 article in Kommunist, the party's theoretical journal, Politburo member and General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko noted that the party would be judged by how well it recognized the specific interests of each class and each stratum of Soviet society and "correctly combines them with the essential general interests of the entire people, with communist objectives and ideals." Possibly the most critical social problem confronting the new Soviet leadership, and that with the greatest potential for increasing mass dissatisfaction, is the likelihood that resource constraints will sharply diminish its ability to improve living standards to any appreciable degree. Declining rates of population growth, compounded by significant ethnic differentials in birthrates, Soviet policymakers with an additional set of dilemmas in the 1980s. Throughout Soviet history until the 1960s, the tendency for successive cohorts of women to bear fewer and fewer children was partially offset by declining mortality.
