Yury Yaremenko

Yury Yaremenko (?? - 1996) was a respected Soviet academician economist who served under Gorbachev.

Yaremenko was a pessimist about "perestroika". He saw that it would weaken the state, by allowing ministries, especially the military, to escape central planning. Yaremenko believed, like Gorbachev, that the Soviet Union had to escape from the Cold War and convert defense spending into civilian production, but he believed this had to be done with tight central control and that the transition would take up to 75 years.

Yaremenko's writings were largely ignored by Gorbachev because they were not comprehensible to him and "perestroika" was allowed to proceed.