Economic Growth and Slowdown

Abstract

Phases of economic development are rarely synchronised with the personal regimes of political leaders. At the beginning, the Soviet economy under Brezhnev was little different from the economy under his predecessor Khrushchev. At the end, the economy under Brezhnev shaded into the economy under Andropov, then Chernenko. If there was a significant break in the pattern of development it came half-way through the Brezhnev years in the early or middle 1970s. We can say with some confidence that the economy that Brezhnev bequeathed to his successors was less dynamic than that which he and his prime minister Kosygin had taken over in 1964. In this chapter I will review the pattern of economic slowdown, its possible causes, and the measures taken to try to overcome it. I will conclude that the Soviet economy at the end of the Brezhnev years faced serious problems but was not yet a hopeless case.