Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy

Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette

"Strong in its insights and readability."
-Wall Street Journal

"Marxism failed on Soviet soil, but not in American universities. Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette seek new ways for both."
- -Yuri B. Kochevrin, Academy of Sciences of the USSR

"Robust, wide-ranging...but above all, myth-dispelling, as is still a requirement in the West."
-Robert Conquest, author
The Great Terror

In a country where TVs explode and bread isn't always available for the asking, Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette trekked through village shops and pored over articles and advertisements in Pravada for the inside dope on shopping in the Soviet Union.

The glasnost generation inherited a nation paralyzed by economic inefficiency, shortages, and corruption, write Roberts and LaFollette. Marx and Lenin "were intent on establishing a radically different form of economic organization that would be more productive than and morally superior to a market economy." They failed.

The Soviet Union may sometimes produce more than market economies do--but it produces goods nobody wants to buy. Soviet manufacturers and producers aim to meet quotas for weight and volume, regardless of what Soviet consumers want or need. Companies compete to satisfy central committees, not the customer.

The Soviet economy "operates mainly through theft [of material goods that are then put up] for sale in the black market." So much for moral superiority. Soviet housewives and factory managers are realizing that abolition, not reform, is the only antidote for the ailing Soviet system.

Paul Craig Roberts holds the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is chairman of the Institute for Political Economy, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is a columnist for Business Week and author of The Supply-side Revolution; Alienation and the Soviet Economy; and Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis. Karen LaFollette, a research associate at the Institute for Political Economy, is writing a book on the failure of development planning in Latin America.

Inside facts about the Soviet economy-revealed in Meltdown:

• As late as 1989 some American intellectuals refused to believe the revelations of Stalin's murderous tyranny being published in the Soviet press.
• Schools without plumbing or lights and factories without electricity are declared ready for use.
• Billions of gallons of toxic waste are released into the Caspian Sea as sturgeon, source of Russian caviar, die by the millions.
• For every 100 telephones in the Soviet Union there are 400 repair requests.
• A Soviet nurse, unable to find a bed for a new patient in the overcrowded ward, places him on two tables in the dining room.
• Company officials dismiss a customer's complaints about his television's not having sound as "unscientific" because he should have known it is impossible to make a TV that works perfectly.

1990/152 pp./$19.95 cloth ISBN: 0-932790-79-8/$9.95 paper ISBN: 0-932790-80-1

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