Soviet workers: A giant just beginning to awake
1989Paul Siegel 1989-03Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 14 →
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Martin Walker, The Waking Giant: Gorbachev's Russia.
New York, Pantheon Books, 1988. 315 pp. $8.95.
Martin Walker was the resident correspondent in the Soviet Union of the British liberal newspaper The Guardian. His book was conceived and begun with its present title when Chernenko was still in power. The "Waking Giant" referred at that time not to the effect of the "The Waking Giant" was first published in 1986. The present edition seeks to bring the book up to date with a postscript written in November 1987. Of necessity, it lags behind events and contains a good deal that is now well known. However, some of the analysis and many of its Walker is able to see both the achievements made possible by the nationalization of the means of production and the increasingly choking effect of the bureaucracy's grip "The Soviet Union," he says, "has built the world's second largest economy, and over the post-war period has grown faster than its main rival, the USA. Its industrial output has grown more than twice as fast, its agricultural output about 80 percent faster, and its industrial productivity, which was running at 30 percent of the American rate in 1950, is now at almost 60 percent of that was the worst decade performance for the Soviet Union However, "over the past 15 years, the Soviet economy since the war years, and each extra 1 percent of growth has been running faster and faster to stay in the same place, required an increase of 1.4 percent in investment and 1.2 investing more and more to keep growing less quickly.
"During the 1970s, the Soviet national income grew by 62 percent-though surpassing the record of the USA or the EEC [European Economic Community] countries, this Walker explains how in the centralized command system Baltimore Cleveland Minnoapolls P.O. Box 16005 P.O. Box 6151 P.O. Box 14087 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1989 15 BOOK REVIEW measures taken by the Gorbachev government sense of the need for change he found among intelligentsia.
facts are still useful.
on the system. rate." but to the the Soviet percent in raw materials."
Kegime • or internal controi the development of high-tech industry. discussion of the Soviet working class. job for every worker, this was dangerous." modifying the plan.
only in modified form. must change its regime of internal control."
The greatest shortcoming of Walker's book recently transplanted peasants of Stalin's day. The working class