The USSR before the Fall: How Poor and Why

This essay appraises the scholarly findings on the level of consumption and output in the USSR, compared with that in the West. Such aggregative calculations are onerous for any country, and not very surprisingly have encountered particular difficulty where such a strange society as Soviet communism has been in question. Predictably, the results have been controversial, but properly viewed they still provide illuminating perspective on the extraordinary events that have lately transpired in the USSR.