Where this article was first published has not been established, so it is not reproduced here. marxsite reprinted it in full; this archive does not.
Ernest Tate traces the collapse of the Soviet economy and the restoration of capitalism in Russia. He begins from the achievement he does not want conceded — that planning carried a largely rural, semi-feudal country to industrial power within a few decades — while insisting that it was done under a bureaucracy that dominated society and a dictatorship that jailed and killed its opponents. He then follows the decline: growth faltering under Brezhnev into shortage and stagnation, the crisis deepening under Gorbachev, and finally a bureaucracy that abandoned planning altogether and accommodated itself to imperialism, presiding over the largest privatisation in history as energy and minerals passed into private hands by outright theft.
Précis by Red Mole.
Read it at the archived copy of the marxsite page.