Konversiya

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Konversiya (Cyrillic: Конверсия), Russian for "conversion" and used here in the sense of economic conversion was an economic policy initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union^[1] and which continued into the early years of post-Soviet Russia.^[2]

His aim was to divert resources and economic capacity from military production to civilian production.^[1] These measures, carried out from 1987 onwards, were only moderately successful.^[1]

Gorbachev first attempted to implement konversiya in the context of the 1987 INF Treaty^[1] and continued it in the defence budget cuts of the following year.^[1] In theory, once free of the demands of military procurement, manufacturers could spend capacity on consumer goods and other products to enhance civil society.^[1] Such a shift in production would also decrease the Soviet Union's reliance on importing such goods from Western nations.^[1] All of this assumed that manufacturers would find the switch easy and that only minimal retraining and retooling would be required to make this change.^[1] In a 1989 speech to the United Nations, Gorbachev suggested that plans for such conversion should be implemented world-wide, in parallel with arms reduction.^[3]