Yury Yaremenko

Who was Yury Yaremenko?

Yury Yaremenko was a respected Soviet academician economist who served under the last premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Yaremenko was a pessimist about perestroika. He saw that it would weaken the state, by allowing ministries, especially the military, to escape central planning. Yaremenko believed, like Gorbachev, that the Soviet Union had to escape from the Cold War and convert defense spending into civilian production, but he believed this had to be done with tight central control and that the transition would take up to 75 years.

Yaremenko's writings were largely ignored by Gorbachev because they were not comprehensible to him and perestroika was allowed to proceed.