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Launching the Third Reform Cycle |
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When in the 1970s the Soviet
economy showed the first symptoms of a slowdown, the system began to
lose the very rationale it was based on. The communist ideology
presented economic growth as the necessary condition for the
creation of the material base of the future Communist society. In
other words, high growth rates were critical for justifying the
system. The declining economic performance began to corrode people’s
belief in the ability of the system to create the basis for a
society of material plenty and therefore undermined the system’s
legitimacy. |
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All this
put pressures on Nikita Khrushchev’s and consecutive Soviet
governments to shift away from the Stalinist economic model. After
Stalin’s death and until the USSR’s collapse, the Soviet leadership
for over thirty years was engaged in an almost continuous process of
reforming the Stalinist system of socialist central planning.
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The
objective of the reform programs of all Soviet leaders from
Khrushchev (1953-64) to Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91) was to make the
economy more efficient and receptive to technological innovation and
more responsive to consumer wants, while retaining its socialist
character.
The most
far-reaching of these effort was undertaken by Gorbachev, who
effectively initiated the third great cycle of modernization from
above in order to help Russia catch up with its Western competitors
in the new era of the scientific and technical revolution.
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