Economic planning in the Cold War: The Soviet economy in the period 1953-1989

Abstract

The organization of the Soviet economic planning model, which began after the 1921s Russian Civil War, with Lenin’s New Economic Policy and Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, was responsible for changing the Soviet bloc from a feudal region in the early days of the twentieth century to an international hegemonic power after the II World War. Considering these historical aspects, this paper aims to analyse Soviet economic planning in the post-Stalinist period, going through the governments of Nikita Kruschev, Leonid Brejnev and Mikhail Gorbachev. From this analysis, we intend to understand the differences between economic planning into those different governments, and how their economic policy decisions contribute to the break-up of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s.