[eru]

The economic liberalisation was a response to the decline. They didn't stray away from more 'proper' communism because everything was hunky dory, you know.

Statistics about the Soviet economy are notoriously hard to make sense of. First, they ran a rather weird economic system (compared to the west), and second, you can't necessarily trust the statistics, there weren't really any independent organisations at all like we have in democracies. No independent media to check, no independent statistical institutes etc.

Even in the west environmentalism was only just getting en vogue in the second half of the 20th century. But the Soviet Union takes the cake in terms of how much environmental damage they were willing to take for a bit of extra economic output.