With figures at hand, he showed that the Soviet economy was heading toward an abyss. In 1988 he wrote an article called “The Foundation Pit,” borrowing the title from the novel by Andrei Platonov, in which socialist workers dig out a giant foundation pit to build a house for the entire proletariat: the deeper they dig, the more futile their work becomes, sucking out their energy and their lives.28 The novel had been written in 1930 but was not published until 1987.
