ABSTRACT
The main point of the industrial modernization program, in turn, was a reorientation of investment and structural policy toward an emphatic promotion of advanced branches of production. The industrial modernization program, announced in the course of formulating the 1986-1990 five-year plan, envisions a catalogue of goals and measures intended to complement and reinforce each other. The technical modernization program encompasses a series of administrative measures which are to be concretized and implemented by the bureaucracy in the ministries. The reform of the economic system has run parallel in time but rather independently of the "technical" aspects of modernization. A widely shared Western notion is that the Soviet Union could receive Western "developmental help" in the form of modern machinery which would solve the Soviet Union's economic difficulties. The program of modernization has been viewed with great skepticism by Western experts ever since its announcement.
