<P> Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions . Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US, China, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion . The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam". However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system . </P> <P> A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system...It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has...caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself . We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay". </P> <P> By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s . These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state . </P> <P> An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring . Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses and paved the way for foreign investment . These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more productive areas in the civilian sector . </P>

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