ar's arms escalations, but also to quell any potential opposition. Second, the Soviets could not keep up with the widening technological gap with the West, due to the fact that they never did adopt modern production strategies. These strategies, known as Toyotism, provides for a profit oriented economy where things are only produced when they are needed and there was to be no stock reserves. It is a production system dictated by demand. It went against the basic tenets of the Soviet political economy, which involved mass stockpiling of such things as arms to protect against potential enemies. It failed, not surprisingly, because you can't completely change the main tenets of the old system and yet try to keep the skeleton of it still in place. Traditional Russians today who look back on the 'good old days' blame Gorbachev and Perestroika for his part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. They think him as sort of a villain who reversed seventy or so years of hard work and started the dismantling of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian state. But looking back, it was doomed to fail anyway....
