"Era of Stagnation" — Command Economy Fails to Deliver

By the early 1980s, Soviet economic growth had slowed to a crawl, consumer goods shortages were chronic, agricultural output routinely fell short of plan targets forcing large grain imports from the West, and the phrase "era of stagnation" (later coined by reformers under Gorbachev) had already become an accurate description of daily life. Corruption and absenteeism were endemic; the joke that circulated among workers — "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" — captured a system that had stopped functioning on its own stated terms.