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The Coming Crisis in the Soviet Union
| Article
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10755 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1986 |
11,918 Words |
| Author
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R.V. Burks
R.V. Burks is emeritus professor of history at Wayne State
University. He is the author of The Dynamics of Communism in
Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press), and was policy
director of Radio Free Europe in Munich for four years. |
The chance of system breakdown in the Soviet Union within the next five to ten years are probably better than even. By system breakdown, I mean a Soviet version of the crisis which took place in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Yugoslavia in 1971 and in Poland in 1980. The existing Soviet regime might in the end recover some form of control, but its mastery of the population would at the least have been severely put to the test.
I. The Failure of Central Planning
The secular slowdown in the rate of growth of the Soviet Gross National Product (GNP), which reached new and unforeseen lows beginning in about 1978, is likely, in my view, to provide the underlying cause of the event which I am attempting to envision. The rate of increase in the Soviet GNP has fallen from an annual average of seven percent in the 1950s, to five percent in the sixties, and to three percent in the seventies. Since 1978 it has hovered around two percent and the Central Intelligence Agency has forecast that it will remain at that level throughout the present decade. Private scholars, however, have argued that per capita there has been no increase in Net Material Product in recent years, and have even asked whether the Soviet economy has not stopped growing altogether. Indeed the question may well be asked whether the decline will not continue until the rate of growth is clearly negative and headed on down.
The primary cause of the decline in the rate of growth appears to be the nature of the Centrally Planned Economy (CPE), whose crucial weakness--at least in its Soviet version--has been its inherently low rate of technological innovation. Throughout its history the Soviet Union has had to import virtually every new technology from its point of origin, the industrial West and, despite vast expenditures, has, after an early spurt, gradually fallen further and further behind.
The low Soviet innovation rate results in a growth primarily dependent upon increased inputs of the factors of production, of labor and of capital, and only secondarily upon increases in the productivity of those factors. In this respect the CPE is the exact opposite of the market company.
Soviet dependence upon inputs has become more important as the pace of technological change in the West has continued to accelerate. The Soviet economy has so far been unable to absorb the technology of the latest (or third) industrial revolution through which the West has begun to put
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