Perestroika, Phase III: Can the USSR Learn from the Only Successful Reform?

Abstract

In Phase I of Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as chief director of Soviet economic strategy, the General Secretary seemed content to continue an approach his predecessors had referred to as plan "perfecting"

(sovershenstvovanie). This approach which called merely for the development and implementation of modest improvements in the planning mechanism. It was the chosen alternative to economic reform, the approach which had been peremptorily rejected with the closing of the Kosygin reforms at the end of the 1960s.