The 11th Five Year Plan
Yuri Andropov in August of 1980 was a man riding high; as the beginning of his third year in power quickly approached, he had consolidated his power over the machinery of the state, become associated publicly and within the CPSU as the face and instigator of a vast anti-corruption purge meant to "revitalize the Socialist system," and now had overseen a very successful Moscow Olympics in which Soviet athletes had won the total medal count, even though the United States (narrowly) earned the most golds.
Andropov decided to follow up the good feelings generated by the Olympics by outlining the third and final "arrow" in his reform plans, building out from his anti-corruption campaign and promotion of reformist officials to add now economic reforms inspired by the more consumer goods oriented, market developmentalist approach of the Hungarian economy which had given the Magyars the highest standard of living in the Eastern Bloc. During his presentation to the Presidium of the 11th Five Year Plan, Andropov described the targets in consumer goods production that the USSR would aim to hit, the revitalization of its grain industry to reduce reliance on foreign imports (particularly from the United States), and a program to use its gas and other natural resource production surpluses to finance new technologies, particularly in the field of "rationalized computer sciences," with it broadly understood to young risers like Legachev and Gorbachev that the concept was pointed at economic management to take things out of the hands of corrupt officials.
Historians have in many ways overstated how much of a departure the 11th Plan really was; the 9th and 10th Plans, devised under Brezhnev, had already begun to encourage consumer goods production. Much of the ideas Andropov incorporated into his regeneration program had been developed by Kosygin, nobody's idea of a young, starry-eyed reformer.
[1] And for all the talk of the "Olympic spirit" underpinning "Goulash in the Kremlin" and a potential new time of openness and moderation from Moscow, Andropov remained the KGB spymaster he'd always been, seen most definitively in his hard-line against the Polish trade union movement that sprung to life concurrently with his introduction of the 11th Plan in August of 1980, a line that made it an open question on the other side of the Iron Curtain whether or not Andropov was in 1980 or '81 give Warsaw the Budapest '56 or Prague '68 treatment. Still, it was an important first step towards a more flexible, decentralized, and transparent Soviet economy to separate from the stagnation that had defined it for years, and the disciples of the early 1980s Andropov Reforms would by the middle of the decade dominate all levers of the Soviet government once Andropov himself was gone...
[2]
[1] So basically, the Andropov Reforms are a mix of Goulash Communism and the 1979 reform program advocated by Kosygin before his death, and the latter not being a total failure. Not quite Dengism, but a far cry from the chaos of
perestroika
[2] Andropov will live longer than IOTL without that random cold bench kidney failure incident, but not
that much longer. The health of the Soviet gerontocracy was not great across the board, after all
