By 1965 the Soviet economic system, at great human cost, had negotiated the first stages of the industrialisation of a developing country; and in the international arena the Soviet Union had emerged after the Second World War as one of the world's two superpowers. Industrialisation had brought about a major social transformation. In 1965, 33 million people were employed in industry and construction, as compared with 5 million in 1928; and the total number of graduates was now nearly 5 million, over twenty times as many as the 233,000 in 1928.

But the Soviet system had not been designed merely as an instrument for industrialisation. It had also been intended, ever since 1917, to provide a blueprint or starting point for the establishment of a planned socialist economic order throughout the world. To maintain this programme, the Soviet system of the 1960s had to find means of coping with the problems of economic growth and technical change in a more advanced industrial society.

The history of the quarter of a century between 1965 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the story of its failure to solve these problems. In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union failed to reduce the technological gap between its industry and that of the major Western countries. From the mid-1970s onwards, the growth of agricultural production barely kept pace with the growth of population. As early as the mid-1970s, the rate of economic growth had fallen so far that, for the first time since the mid-1920s, GNP was increasing less rapidly than in the United States – and much more slowly than in several newly industrialised countries.