Unresolved Issues and Possible Alternative Futures

The task of this final chapter should be to assess the significance of the, Soviet-type economic system in relation to modern economic history and our ideas about economic systems. That these two perspectives are related is clear enough from the kind of questions we often ask about the Soviet system. For example, we wonder whether the Soviet model and Soviet strategy are best understood as an alternative to the kind of private-property, market-dominated system that exists in other advanced countries, or as a kind of transition system suited only to the needs of the early stages of economic development. If the latter, is it a uniquely effective and transferable approach to economic growth or only a tragic misstep in Russian history, never consciously designed for efficacy, more Russian than socialist? Can an economic system built to that design be adapted to deal with the novel challenges posed by advances in the level of output and technology, and a more open world? That is to say, is reform possible? Finally, can we get any hint from the reform experience, which has now extended over several years, about the kind of economic system it might become as it outgrows the matrix in which it originated? Will it converge to something like the western market model, or will it evolve differently?