The Soviet crash
The Soviet bureaucracy was not long in discovering this the hard way. Its levels of accumulation were reaching the limits of what could be sustained. It depended more on foreign trade than previously, using oil revenues to buy wheat abroad to feed the population in the 1970s and early 1980s (adding to worldwide inflationary pressures). A fall in the world price of oil in the course of the mid-1980s then threw its domestic economic calculations into some disarray. And the decision of the Reagan administration to reassert US hegemony by raising arms spending put pressure on the USSR to do likewise. The external factors added to the internal problems caused by trying to sustain accumulation in the face of declining growth rates.
Gorbachev's promotion to head of the ruling Communist Party was a sign that influential people had recognised the urgency of the situation-his rise owed much to Yuri Andropov, who had witnessed what crisis could lead to as ambassador to Hungary in 1 956 and as general secretary of CPSU during the Polish events of 1980-81. Gorbachev has been blamed since as a "counter-revolutionary" by some people on the left nostalgic for the Soviet style set-up. But his intention was to try to save that set-up through topdown reforms before economic, social and political crisis on Polish lines could arise. His misfortune was that the crisis had reached a point where it could not be overcome by reform.
Reports from ministerial meetings in the winter of 1988-9 provide a picture of increasing economic chaos, with the regime not seeing any way to deal with it. There were bitter clashes over "the balance (or rather the imbalance) between different sectors of the economy", the "number of enterprises" which were "significantly refusing to supply planned output" or were "significantly reducing deliveries" and the way "the volume of new investment continued to grow".62 "The supply of goods to the consumer market" had "suddenly begun to deteriorate sharply and noticeably before our eyes in the second half of 1987 and especially in 1988".63 There was an:
The End of the Golden Age
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