I recently visited the Soviet Union. I was there for only one week, as a tourist: time to get only a very limited and superficial impression of life there. Nevertheless, it was a sobering and thought-provoking experience. For even such a brief visit forces one to confront the problems raised by the evidently unideal character of the Soviet Union and other ̀ actually existing' socialist societies...

It has been observed in the past that, at the time of Mikhail Gorbachëv‟s ascension to power following the death of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko in 1985, few people believed that the Soviet Union was heading for collapse; merely reform (Bartlett, R. (2005:278)). Thus the question begs; what changed over the next five years to bring one of the world‟s two superpowers to the point of utte...

the dissolution of the soviet :union: faced the disintegrated east superpower with a tattered economic structure that had to be restored with the assistance of the west in an atmosphere free from ideological barriers. except for russia that still claimed to be the superpower, other countries of the collapsed soviet :union: attempted, in various degrees, to attract the west investment and techno...

Reassessing the Standard of Living in the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using Archival and Anthropometric Data Both Western and Soviet estimates of GNP growth in the USSR indicate that GNP per capita grew in every decade – sometimes rapidly – from 1928 to 1985. While this measure suggests that the standard of living improved in the USSR throughout this period, it is unclear whether this economic gr...

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