U.S.-Soviet quality of life: a comparison - transcript

US Department of State Bulletin, Sept, 1985 by Richard Schifter

In making these comparisons, I do not mean to suggest that the Soviet Union has made no economic progress since the October rEvolution. But the limited success the Soviet economy has enjoyed in the past was dependent on constant additions to the labor force and on the availability of plentiful and inexpensive resources. Now that the Soviet Union has used up its surplus labor pool and its resources are more costly, its growth rates have plummeted. The Soviet Union, in fact, is no longer closing the gap between itself and the developed West. The per capita consumption comparisons I cited earlier have remained constant over the last decade. Given low Soviet labor productivity, the gap can reasonably be expected to widen in the future.

Shortcomings of the

Soviet Economic System

Consumer Shortages and Corruption. The Soviet economy today is characterized by pervasive shortages of consumer goods and the widespread corruption these shortages generate. These features, moreover, are not temporary problems which will solve themselves through continued progress over time. Rather, they are problems endemic to the Soviet system of centralized economic planning. This system, based on the notion that a small group of planners can efficiently allocate resources for an entire economy, has created instead an economy of bottlenecks, shortages, and waste.

In the Soviet Union, unlike anywhere in the developed West, the most basic consumer goods are in continuous short supply and rationing remains a common fact of Soviet life. The situation has been so bad in some localities in recent years that food riots have reportedly occurred. In 1981, Izvestia reported the introduction of rationing in 12 major Soviet cities, including Irkutsk, Kazan, Tbilisi, Vologda, and Naberezhnye Chelny (now called Brezhnev). We have learned that meat and butter have both been formally rationed in the closed city of Sverdlovsk and its surrounding villages for several years. Presumably, the same is true of many other areas closed to foreign visitors.

The long lines of people lining up for scarce items on Soviet city streets have become famous throughout the world. The production and distribution system is so capricious that it is impossible to tell what will be available from one day to the next. This is why Soviet housewives frequently join lines without inquiring what is for sale. They simply assume they had better get whatever it is while it's available. This is also one important cause of Soviet productivity problems, since working people are typically obliged to take unauthorized absences from their jobs to chase after scarce necessities. These endless shortages force the average Soviet family to spend 2 hours shopping every day just to obtain the basic necessities of life.

The endless waiting is bad enough, but the Soviet consumer often finds that the product waiting for him at the front of the line is hardly worth the wait. The quality, variety, and design of the consumer goods available in the Soviet Union are, in fact, notoriously poor by both Western and East European standards, and retail trade and personal service facilities are scarce, primitive, and inefficient.