Why Gorbachev Is Worried

‘The Soviet Union is facing a very serious crisis,” Marshall Goldman says at the outset of his recent book, USSR in Crisis. “This immense rich country is in serious trouble,” Washington Post national editor and former Moscow correspondent Robert G. Kaiser wrote in that paper one year ago. “That the Communist economies are inefficient and unproductive is known to every reader of the daily press,” Richard Pipes wrote in Survival Is Not Enough, his recent book about the Soviet Union.

It is difficult for us to remember today how high the hopes once were for the Soviet Union and its economy. Communism would “bury” us. History was on its side. “Who is encircling whom now?” Nikita Khrushchev asked a Figaro correspondent at a Kremlin reception in 1958. “When I really feel gloomy I think that five years from now [the Soviets] will be obviously superior to us in every area,” said Jerome Wiesner of MIT in 1957. “But when I am optimistic I feel it will take ten years for them to achieve this position.”

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Tom Bethell

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‘The Soviet Union is facing a very serious crisis,” Marshall Goldman says at the outset of his recent book, USSR in Crisis. “This immense rich country is in serious trouble,” Washington Post national editor and former Moscow correspondent Robert G. Kaiser wrote in that paper one year ago. “That the Communist economies are inefficient and unproductive is known to every reader of the daily press,” Richard Pipes wrote in Survival Is Not Enough, his recent book about the Soviet Union.

It is difficult for us to remember today how high the hopes once were for the Soviet Union and its economy. Communism would “bury” us. History was on its side. “Who is encircling whom now?” Nikita Khrushchev asked a Figaro correspondent at a Kremlin reception in 1958. “When I really feel gloomy I think that five years from now [the Soviets] will be obviously superior to us in every area,” said Jerome Wiesner of MIT in 1957. “But when I am optimistic I feel it will take ten years for them to achieve this position.”