Is the Soviet Union over?

John Lloyd

  • Moving the mountain: Inside the Perestroika Revolutions by Abel Aganbegyan, translated by Helen Szamuely
    Bantam, 248 pp, £14.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 593 01818 4
  • Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform: The Soviet Reform Process by Anders Aslund
    Pinter, 219 pp, £35.00, May 1989, ISBN 0 86187 008 5

A new plan for economic reform will shortly be decided on by the Soviet Government. It will be the fourth in less than a year: we cannot of course know whether it will last any longer than the previous three, which were withdrawn because of public criticism and divisions among the leadership. It is a common view among Soviet reformers that this is the last chance for perestroika – though there are many who believe that the last chance has gone, who no longer have any faith in perestroika, or in Mikhail Gorbachev, or indeed in the continuing existence of the Soviet Union.

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