Shestidesyatniki Economics, the Idea of Convergence, and Perestroika

The article analyzes the reception of the idea of convergence in Soviet economics from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. It is predominantly concerned with convergence theory as a policy idea that inspired perestroika. Its central question is: Under the conditions of an authoritarian regime, how could an imported policy idea that bluntly contradicted official ideology reach a degree of dissemination and (among a specific stratum of the elite) popularity that would later turn it into a central pillar of reform policy? An important finding is that the idea of convergence united the Soviet “people of the sixties” and some Western “progressive” intellectuals who together formed a transregional epistemic community that only for a short period of time, at the end of the 1980s, gained political influence.