Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

by Vladislav M. Zubok

William Taubman, who quotes Deng Xiaoping’s verdict on Gorbachev, concedes that Gorbachev put the cart (political reform) before the horse (radical economic reform). The Soviet leader’s conservative colleagues in the Politburo thought so as well. Still, Gorbachev’s biographer, as well as other scholars of perestroika, have dismissed Deng’s verdict. The success of authoritarian reforms in China, they argue, was a unique case and could not be repeated under Soviet conditions.55 China, although in many ways a communist clone of the USSR, had fundamentally different starting conditions for reforms. Gorbachev could not release the energy of the peasantry in the way Deng did: Soviet agriculture, no more than 20 percent of the total workforce, had long been a state-subsidized business. China could leave its old industries, 15 percent of the total economy, alone, while creating a new market industrial sector. The Soviet economy was industrialized to an absurd extent, and its mono-industrial cities had no chance of surviving under market conditions. China’s economy tapped into peasants’ savings and foreign investments. The Soviet budget was overloaded by a safety net of 100 billion rubles paid as pensions and social benefits to Soviet citizens, as well as subsidies to external clients and internal republics. Moscow was losing billions of rubles because of oil prices and ill-fated economic decentralization.