The Right Books

Since the accession last year of Yuri Andropov to the General Secretaryship of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a number of writers have mentioned that one of the chief concerns of Brezhnev’s successor is the inefficiency of the Soviet economy and of the bureaucracy and labor force behind it. According to Marshall I. Goldman, author of USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System (Norton, $15), Andropov has good reason for alarm. Goldman, who is associate director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University and a former consultant to the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, admits that he used to regard Western predictions of the collapse of the Soviet economy with considerable skepticism; now he is not so sure. “Conditions in the Soviet Union,” he says, “have deteriorated significantly, and it will take some skill and wise leadership to find a safe course.” It is now Goldman’s turn to doubt, as he looks at the sclerotic leadership in the Kremlin.

With a degree of stubbornness that is almost admirable, the Soviet Union, Goldman writes, “seems to be moving further and further from the course taken by most of the other countries of the industrialized world.” After nearly sixty years the Soviet government continues to adhere to the “Stalinist model,” devoting the nation’s productive energies to heavy industry—much of it, of course, producing military arms— at the expense of consumer goods. Even among Communist countries the USSR’s tenacity is almost unique: Hungary has seen fit to allow certain relaxations of Marxist dogma, and the People’s Republic of China is doing the same thing. Goldman’s book, in fact, received its original stimulus when the author, on a trip to China, was asked by his hosts to deliver a series of lectures on the probable direction in which the economy of the USSR was likely to develop over the next decade: “It turned out . . . that what really interested the Chinese was not what was going to happen to the Soviet Union, but what would happen to China if it failed to alter its course and reform its economy.”

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Since the accession last year of Yuri Andropov to the General Secretaryship of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a number of writers have mentioned that one of the chief concerns of Brezhnev’s successor is the inefficiency of the Soviet economy and of the bureaucracy and labor force behind it. According to Marshall I. Goldman, author of USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System (Norton, $15), Andropov has good reason for alarm. Goldman, who is associate director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University and a former consultant to the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, admits that he used to regard Western predictions of the collapse of the Soviet economy with considerable skepticism; now he is not so sure. “Conditions in the Soviet Union,” he says, “have deteriorated significantly, and it will take some skill and wise leadership to find a safe course.” It is now Goldman’s turn to doubt, as he looks at the sclerotic leadership in the Kremlin.

With a degree of stubbornness that is almost admirable, the Soviet Union, Goldman writes, “seems to be moving further and further from the course taken by most of the other countries of the industrialized world.” After nearly sixty years the Soviet government continues to adhere to the “Stalinist model,” devoting the nation’s productive energies to heavy industry—much of it, of course, producing military arms— at the expense of consumer goods. Even among Communist countries the USSR’s tenacity is almost unique: Hungary has seen fit to allow certain relaxations of Marxist dogma, and the People’s Republic of China is doing the same thing. Goldman’s book, in fact, received its original stimulus when the author, on a trip to China, was asked by his hosts to deliver a series of lectures on the probable direction in which the economy of the USSR was likely to develop over the next decade: “It turned out . . . that what really interested the Chinese was not what was going to happen to the Soviet Union, but what would happen to China if it failed to alter its course and reform its economy.”