Communist Reformers Look West

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Overview

It has been almost three decades since Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, in his famous “kitchen debate” with then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon, made his grand prediction for the Soviet economy. “We have existed not quite 42 years,” he said, “and in another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.”

Not only did the Soviet Union fall short of Khrushchev's expectations, it is now turning to the West for help in bettering its citizens' living standards. Since rising to power in March 1985, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the current Soviet leader, has launched his country's most daring economic reform program. The new economic policy—known as perestroika, or “restructuring”—calls for the deliberate weakening of central planning, the backbone of the Soviet economic system constructed by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s. In place of government planners, factory managers will assume greater responsibility for the success or failure of their enterprises.