The main problems of the process of modernization of regional production, on the example of the enterprises of heavy engineering of Mykolaiv oblast (region) of the USSR in the period of 1985 – 1990, have been investigated in the article. There is an objective need to study the basic socio-economic processes of the time, not only in the national dimension (within the USSR), but particularly in the regional dimension. It has been noted that actually at the level of the oblast (region) – district, town – village, there was historically justified search for those factors that, on the one hand, led to the disintegration of the country, and, on the other, showed the possibilities of overcoming social crisis phenomena. The success of modernization processes depended on the understanding of the economic situation in the country, the effectiveness of economic reforms. Attempts to carry out economic modernization were methodologically insufficiently substantiated and haphazard. Politics and economics, for the most part, contradicted each other and this situation weakened the modernization process.