"The reform policies of the Gorbachev government were, in effect, its own attempt to create what had been termed, with reference to Dubcek and Czechoslovakia in 1968, ‘Socialism with a human face’. The sham propaganda of Communist progress, however, helped ensure that these policies inadvertently destroyed Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, as well as the Soviet state. It proved impossible, in yet another stage of the attempt at uplifting the Soviet standard of living, and thus promoting the efficacy of Soviet ideology, to introduce a market responsiveness in a planned economy. Consumerism was a Western bourgeois concept to the Soviet government but, nevertheless, there was a wish to win popular support through economic means. Efforts from 1985 to achieve economic and political reform, however, faced the structural economic and fiscal weakness of the Soviet system, not least the preference for control as opposed to any price system that reflected cost and availability. Moreover, the post-Communist dismantling of the old command economy was to expose the uncompetitive nature of much Soviet-era industry, both of individual enterprises and of the economy as a whole. By 1985, it took the Soviet Union three times as much electricity to produce one ton of steel as in the case of the West Germans, and at least twice as much time (i.e. labour) as in the West German and American cases. Soviet economic inefficiency and costs led to the moment of truth that Gorbachev faced in the mid-1980s."