BLINDSIDED

Almost no one saw it coming until moments before the crash. Why were Sovietologists blindsided? Didn't they know that the USSR's criminalization of business, entrepreneurship, and private ownership was sure to impair its global competitiveness? Were they dozing on the job? The answer isn't hard to find. Sovietologists weren't asleep at the watch. They were beguiled by their numbers and axioms and the theories that supported them, and they failed to pay adequate attention to other early warning signs. For those too young to remember, the consensus in the West – a consensus that reflected a protracted theoretical debate on the feasibility of Soviet socialism – was that the economic performance of the USSR was mediocre given its economic backwardness but good enough to allow it to survive permanently in a state of peaceful coexistence. Official statistics published by Goskomstat (the State Statistical Committee), adjusted to reflect the western concept of gross domestic product (GDP), showed the USSR's national income and per capita consumption growth outpacing America's during the period 1955–89, with defense spending as a share of GDP persistently falling after 1969. The USSR's margins of superiority weren't great, and the growth rate noticeably decelerated after 1968, as it had in Europe and Japan, but if no one in 1991 expected the West to implode, why fret about the USSR?

One possible reason for worry was that Soviet economic statistics were unreliable. However, western calculations broadly confirmed Goskomstat's findings.