ABSTRACT
The study of economic reform and competition in socialist countries offers a new and fruitful approach to the historiography of the Cold War. The Kosygin reforms provide a case study of the relationship between competition, legitimacy and ideology in the Soviet Union. The context for the reforms is found, first, in the remarkable continuity of the planned economy from the end of the first Five-Year Plan in 1932 to the beginning of perestroika in 1986, and, second, in the failure of the most advanced Soviet attempts to reform the planned economy successfully after the mid-1950s. 1
