SYMPTOMS RECOGNIZED, CURES REJECTED 59keyboards were just a few examples among many. There was very little
of this in the USSR, where the expenditure on armaments had resulted
in few indirect benefits in material comfort or cultural facility. The
‘military-industrial complex’ was a law unto itself. Diplomat Anatoli
Adamishin understood the true scale of the long-term economic
damage.^28 Truly massive over-production of missiles took place. Stock-
piles were increased for the contingency that a protracted sequence of
nuclear strikes would occur if and when the Third World War began.
There were officials in the Party Defence Department, Soviet patriots
all, who knew that this made no military or economic sense.^29 But
what the General Staff laid down, no politician was going to challenge.
Adamishin was shocked by what he learned on joining one of the
policy-planning groups under Andropov in 1983. The economic pros-
pects were grim and getting grimmer. By the 1990s, it was suggested,
industrial output would grow annually by less than one per cent. The
productive base had been neglected. The state budget had been wasted
on defence, agriculture, housing and foreign aid. The leeway for
dynamic initiatives within the current framework had vanished and it
was only inflation that disguised the fall in average household incomes.
Adamishin was horrified: ‘The future’s been eaten up!’^30
The technological gap between the USSR and the West gave rise
to frank discussion at a meeting of the Party Secretariat as early as
4 August 1979. Ivan Frolov, deputy department chief, reported that
the country was sixty per cent less effective than capitalist societies
in replacing manual labour. Nothing said on behalf of the ministries
or the State Planning Commission contradicted this gloomy picture.
Ministers struck back at Andrei Kirilenko when he rebuked them;
they told him that ministries could hardly do better with their
resources unless they were told how to go about it – and Kirilenko
manifestly had no idea: he was merely handing out the usual threats
and admonishments. The ministers made clear their resentment at
being treated like naughty schoolboys.^31 The USSR was in an impasse.
Its leaders knew that it faced economic competition that it stood
no early chance of matching. Its institutional mechanisms of party
rule and state industrial coordination were proving inadequate, and
nobody was coming up with any ideas that would lead to basic im -
provement. There was plenty of criticism and too little thought about
solutions. The Politburo was filled overwhelmingly with people who
were habituated to an organizational and ideological order that had
undergone scant change since the death of Stalin.