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Abstract

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, he was presiding over a large economy, rich in resources but also inefficient and isolated from the world economy. In the 1960s the USSR produced Sputnik and Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet economy would ‘bury’ the west. In the 1970s the Soviet Union had to import large amounts of grain. In the 1980s its growth rate slowed and dissatisfaction with its economic performance began to be openly expressed. The inadequacies of central planning described in the previous chapter applied, of course, to the Soviet Union, from which central planning was exported to Eastern Europe.

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© 1994 Robert Solomon

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Solomon, R. (1994). Chaos and Reform in the Soviet Union and Russia. In: The Transformation of the World Economy, 1980–93. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23675-6_8

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