Russia Confronts a Choice

The question of our belonging to the Third World was not even raised five or seven years ago. Indeed, in the mid-1980s (I use B.M. Bolotin's calculations), annual per capita GDP in the former Soviet Union was $7,450, i.e., somewhere between the average for Western Europe ($12,700) and Latin America ($3,200). To be sure, the picture will be different if we take the consumption level. Our level of consumption and individual GDP were only 27 percent of the U.S. level, which was lower than Uruguay (41 percent), Mexico (30), Argentina (29), and only slightly higher than Brazil (25 percent). This difference between the general and the per capita "consumption" levels of GDP is understandable: a disproportionately large part of the Soviet economy worked not for man but for state, primarily military, purposes. Consequently, we looked worse than even many developing countries with respect to a number of commonly accepted indicators of the quality of life (infant mortality, life expectancy, housing, etc.).