Abstract
An American political scientist reinterprets the politics of economic reform in the USSR from 1953 to 1991. The paper offers an integrated explanation for three features of reform policies: their reappearance during periods of political succession; their persistent partiality; and their radicalization over time. The explanation focuses on the interaction over time among political competition, ideology, and collective learning. Reasoning leads to conclusions that a consensus on the superiority of a market economy finally emerged within the Soviet leadership in 1990, but that the learning process has not resulted in a consensus on strategies and costs of transition, journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 040, 052.

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