This is a book that keeps score.
Its dust jacket explains the commission: among the letters reaching Progress Publishers, "one recurring request" was for a book setting out "the present balance of power in the world", the direction of the economic competition between the two systems, and "what has the future in store for mankind". This volume was "intended to fill that need". It is a balance-sheet of the contest Khrushchev had staked the Soviet future on, and that the Party Programme of 1961 had pledged to win by overtaking the United States in production per head within two decades.
Who wrote it matters, and the book discloses it at the back rather than the front. It "was compiled by the following staff members of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R." - Aboltin as senior contributor, with Pevsner, Salkovsky, Barabanov, Gantman, Zagladina, Lavrishchev, Orlik, Razmerov, Tomashevsky, Shapiro and Burdzhalov. This is IMEMO, the Academy's flagship institute for studying the capitalist world and the great rival of the more dogmatic Party institutes: a collective of professional economists rather than a single apparatus functionary.
That is what gives the book its interest. The comparative statistics on output, trade, growth and living standards are the work of people whose job was to understand Western economies accurately, and much of the material is not available in English anywhere else.
Edited by Yuri Sdobnikov, translated by James Riordan.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
