ABSTRACT
Alongside all the discussion about what is to be done, there is under way in the USSR a more abstract debate about what is to be thought. Soviet leaders now openly acknowledge a truth the population has long known from personal experience—namely, that the Soviet system is a failure. As two leading Soviet spokesmen have put it: "The all-embracing 'total' state is not only difficult and expensive to manage but ineffective and even counterproductive." 1 Soviet social scientists are, accordingly, attempting "to redefine socialism" in order to decide where the USSR is going and how it should get there.
