Experiences of Soviet Conversion

A few years ago, when considering the conversion issue in my dialogue with John Kenneth Galbraith,1 I took the view that there should be no serious difficulty in the then extant Soviet Union in converting military production to civilian use. This view was based on two assumptions which did not prove to hold in the context of the revolutionary changes that occurred in the country thereafter and could not have been fully foreseen. My assumptions were, first, that even under far-reaching market reforms, elements of central planning would be retained and, second, that the resistance to conversion from the military-industrial complex would not be very strong. In reality, however, for political reasons (disintegration of the centralist state), the system of central planning and distribution broke down very rapidly, even before any decent market infrastructure had started working. And, because central authorities under Gorbachev turned out to be extremely weak, the military-industrial complex could sabotage conversion as much as it desired. In the conditions that now prevail, conversion, though possible, is meeting new obstacles.