Change in the Soviet Political System: Limits and Likelihoods

Abstract

The Soviet Union confronts grave needs for reform because it achieved impressive progress upon old foundations, struggles with a systemic economic slowdown, faces fundamental social and spiritual infrastructured problems, wrestles with a costly overextended empire, and must adapt to the age of knowledge that challenges its centralized control. Soviet leaders recognize the need to restructure the economic and political system, but they consider innovation an ideologically unacceptable hazard to its values, and its control. Change would threaten the primacy of the military share of economic resources, the high priority foreign policy receives to provide legitimacy, and control of Eastern Europe. Only corrections and minor repairs in the economy are likely in a system that lacks a reform mechanism.