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Life Under Perestroika
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16299 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
3,059 Words |
| Author
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Nicolai N. Petro
Nicolai N. Petro is lecturer in political science at the
University of Pennsylvania. He recently served as policy
adviser in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs at the
Department of State, and as political attaché at the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow. |
To assess the effect of perestroika on people's lives in the Soviet Union, one could ask the same question Ronald Reagan asked the American people in 1980, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" There is, unfortunately, no means of conducting such a survey, but by nearly every Soviet and Western account the answer would be a resounding no.
More importantly, there is increasing evidence that the average Soviet citizen does not feel that he is ever likely to be better off if the country sticks to the limited reform agenda proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev. What seems to be developing out of this discontent is a type of perestroika that is not entirely controlled by the Kremlin and that could have some surprising results.
When Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, he inherited what he termed a "pre-crisis" situation in the Soviet Union. The previous 15 years had seen a noticeable decline in the rate of growth of the national income. The average annual increase in economic production, as Soviet economists were urgently pointing out, was so low that it did not provide for any growth in living standards or for the capital investment urgently needed to replace aging equipment. Four successive harvest failures between 1979 and 1982 led to the introduction of rationing cards in 20 major cities for the first time since the end of World War II.
The social effects of a failing economic system could no longer be ignored. The most obvious was the pervasiveness of alcohol abuse. In 1978 alone, for example, over 100 times more deaths were attributed to alcohol poisoning in the USSR than in the United States during the same period. Even areas to which the Soviet government had pointed with pride, such as health care, were deteriorating rapidly. The crude death rate, which had fallen to 6.9 per thousand in 1964, had risen steadily since then, and had reached 10.3 per thousand by 1980. Infant mortality was three times what it was in the United States. Male life expectancy had actually fallen from 66 to 62 years, contributing to the rise of single-parent families. The high incidence of abortion (the average Soviet woman undergoes 3 to 4 abortions in a lifetime, compared with 0.75 in the United States) combined with abysmal housing conditions (in Moscow, one out of five families continues to share a single-family flat with two or more other families) has contributed to a dangerously low birthrate among Slavs.
Faced with the daunting task of preventing further domestic decline, Gorbachev unveiled a program of perestroika,
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