Setting the stage

Economic stagnation and social decline were prominent features of Soviet development during the late Brezhnev era and during the period of interregnum under Andropov and Chernenko. Before the introduction of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, this proposition would have been subject to some considerable controversy. Since then, however, the new General Secretary and his top economic advisors, together with leading representatives of the cultural intelligentsia, have presented us with a picture of past development which in many respects is even gloomier than most Western ‘crisis-mongers’ had suspected. At the June 1987 plenum of the Central Committee, for example, which launched a broad package of economic reform measures, Gorbachev presented his audience with a picture of emergency that was without parallel since the Civil War and since the Great Patriotic War against Germany. In order to understand the needs for perestroika, Gorbachev argued, one must realize that economic developments during the past decades had placed the country in a ‘pre-crisis’ situation (predkrizisnoe sostoyatie). ¹ Less than a year later, at the February 1988 plenum of the Central Committee, he returned to explain the underlying causes of this development:

During a period of 70 years, our people and our Party have been inspired by the ideas of socialism and socialist construction. But due to external as well as internal reasons, we have not been able to fully realize Lenin’s principles of constructing a new society. Serious obstacles have been the cult of personality, the establishment in the 1930s of the command-administrative system of management and control, bureaucratic, dogmatic and voluntaristic distortions, arbitrariness, and at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s — brake mechanisms and a lack of initiative which served to produce stagnation. ²