THE LOST SUMMER 199Beijing; or possibly he did not feel strong enough to face down Akhro-
meev on the question.
He declared to the Politburo that the USSR could not achieve its
internal transformation without making progress in the disarmament
talks. He admitted that he had no economic strategy: ‘For the moment
we have more questions than answers.’ But he started from the premise
that the Soviet Union lacked a highly developed economy. At best it
had a ‘weakly developed’ one.^10 When talking to Central Committee
secretaries and department chiefs, he underlined the productivity gap
with the West. He had received a report that a Japanese sewing enter-
prise did with 600 workers what it took a Soviet work force of 900,000
to produce. The Politburo had to show the decisiveness of Lenin and
Peter the Great: ineffective administrators needed to be fired. He said
that Stalin had had the right idea in promoting young people to high
office: ‘The human potential is good. And we’ll sweep away the rub-
bish.’^11 On the policy of official openness, Gorbachëv said: ‘The people
support this, and with the help of these ideas we will crush the resist-
ance. And let there be no compromise on questions of glasnost on the
grounds that we’re stripping off in front of the world’s eyes. Look, we’re
the ones who are doing the talking. We’re actually neutralizing anti-
Sovietism. This is where our strength is, not our weakness.’^12
The Politburo heard repeatedly from him that the economy’s plight
was bad and getting worse. Ryzhkov laid the depressing data before it
in the course of the summer. A fifth of the USSR’s annual cereal con-
sumption now depended on imported grain, at a cost of 26 billion
rubles.^13 Gorbachëv momentarily considered terminating the pur-
chases of grain from America.^14 The world oil price collapsed by
seventy per cent between autumn 1985 and July 1986. A financial
emergency was in the making. The Soviet state foreign debt climbed
from $7 billion to $11 billion. Revenues were also diminished by the
fall-off in sales of vodka since the introduction of the anti-alcohol
campaign.^15 Ryzhkov said there would have to be a cut-back in invest-
ment in technological modernization. Gorbachëv gloomily concluded:
‘The result is that we’ve been hitched to the work of slaves – getting
raw materials and supplying them to other countries. Even Bulgaria
makes us offers of its machinery in exchange for raw materials.’^16
The general discussion was no whit different from what the Politburo
had heard before 1985. The novelty lay in the focus on vivid details.
Ryzhkov and Gorbachëv felt no need to mince their words.
Everything depended on the American reaction to his foreign