20

‘The Era of Stagnation’: The Soviet Union under Brezhnev

‘The Era of Stagnation’ was the name given in the last years of the Soviet Union to the period between 1964 and 1982 when Leonid Brezhnev was the leader of the Soviet Communist Party and the most powerful politician within the Soviet state. It was in many ways a fitting description, for this was a period of a declining rate of economic growth, no political reform worthy of the name, and a conservative Communist regime led by the cautious Brezhnev. The term, though, can also be misleading, for Soviet society changed during these years in ways that were not and could not be wholly controlled from above. Moreover, in spite of the censorship and ideological pressures for conformity, there were struggles between different political and intellectual tendencies going on below the surface of politics.

Some Russian writers make a distinction between the early Brezhnev and the later Brezhnev. There certainly were contrasting features. In his early years as leader, Brezhnev was anxious to show how different he was from Khrushchev and did not try to hog the limelight.¹ In the 1970s, however, a mini-cult of his personality was created, and this continued into his declining years. In that last period, Brezhnev’s physical and intellectual capacities had been severely reduced by illness and his speech was slurred. But the differences in policy between early Brezhnev and late Brezhnev were far from notable. The early Brezhnev approved the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the later Brezhnev approved the invasion of Afghanistan. The word ‘approved’ is used deliberately, for he was not, as we have seen, the person who was pushing hardest for the use of force in either case. Indeed, he was aware that he probably could not have survived as Soviet leader in 1968 had he not gone along with the idea of military intervention. As he told one of the reformist leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Bohumil imon (who had been allowed to remain in the party Presidium for the time being), in Moscow later that year: ‘if I had not voted for Soviet armed assistance to Czechoslovakia you would not be sitting here today, but quite possibly I wouldn’t either’.² We now know from the archival evidence that there were significant voices in the Soviet leadership calling for the immediate overthrow of the Prague Spring reformers and the installation of a ‘revolutionary government’ in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Brezhnev, as we saw in the previous chapter, was one of those who judged it necessary to reach a temporary compromise with the reformist Prague political leadership, which had been shown to enjoy overwhelming domestic support. Thus, Brezhnev’s remark rings true so far as Šimon’s reprieve was concerned. More significantly, Brezhnev was doubtless right in thinking that his own survival as Soviet leader would have been in serious question had he opposed military intervention in Czechoslovakia. Failure to prevent a central European Communist state from acquiring political autonomy, thus setting a dangerous example for the rest of east-central Europe, was not an option he dared contemplate.³

In foreign policy, while having no desire to yield an inch of territory which came under Soviet control, Brezhnev favoured some easing of tensions in East – West relations. These were to be, as far as possible, on Soviet terms. That meant using every means available to try to prevent Western ideas from gaining a foothold in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Brezhnev’s policy of détente enabled him to establish a measure of rapport with Willy Brandt when Brandt as West German chancellor introduced his Ostpolitik. Brandt’s initiatives led to the signing of the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties in 1970, which recognized the state borders that had existed de facto since the end of World War Two.⁴ His chancellorship was of decisive importance in reducing the fear of Germany which had persisted in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Memories of the war were still fresh, and they were constantly exploited by Brezhnev and by the Soviet mass media. The victory of the Soviet army and the sufferings of the civilian population during the Second World War were used as a particularly effective rallying cry, one which evoked a much more deeply felt response than references to Marx or Lenin. In that context, respect for Brandt’s anti-Nazi record and his foreign policy initiatives had a more than temporary significance. Without the change of perceptions of Germany the Ostpolitik helped bring about, later Soviet acquiescence in the unification of the country would have been unimaginable. Détente extended to Soviet relations with the United States as well as with West Germany. Brezhnev signed arms control and trade agreements with American presidents Nixon and Ford, and shortly before détente collapsed, a treaty on strategic arms limitations (SALT II) with President Carter in 1979. Earlier the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, following the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. This was believed by many at the time to be a triumph of Soviet diplomacy, but it turned out to have more disadvantages than advantages for those in the USSR (including Brezhnev) who wished to keep the ideological hatches battened down. (The Helsinki agreement is discussed in Chapter 23.)

Domestically, as noted in Chapter 14, virtually all of Khrushchev’s administrative reforms were reversed within the first two years after his removal from office. Still more important was the change of policy with regard to Josif Stalin. The Brezhnev-led Politburo soon decided that it was much too dangerous to allow a continuation of criticism of Stalin. Brezhnev was a practitioner of what seemed to him a kind of Soviet ‘golden mean’. He abjured ‘revisionism’, on the one hand, and ‘dogmatism’, on the other. He was neither Stalinist nor anti-Stalinist, but projected himself, rather, as the voice of authentic Leninism. The retreat from criticism of Stalin and Stalinism in the Brezhnev era was a step backwards, but Brezhnev’s caution prevented it from becoming a still greater leap into the past. Immediately after the fall of Khrushchev there was substantial support both from Brezhnev’s personal entourage and within the top party leadership for a disavowal of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Party Congresses (which were seen as part of Khrushchev’s folly) and for the rehabilitation of Stalin. A battle was waged behind the scenes over every party document and the text of every Brezhnev speech.⁵ Among the most influential Stalinists in Brezhnev’s entourage was Sergey Trapeznikov, who had enjoyed his patronage ever since he worked for him in Moldova, where Brezhnev had been first secretary at the beginning of the 1950s. (It was there that Brezhnev also picked up the ever-loyal Konstantin Chernenko – his successor but one as general secretary. Chernenko was a conservative Communist, but less ideological than Trapeznikov. He became essentially Brezhnev’s chief clerk.)

Having failed to secure the rehabilitation of Stalin at the Twenty-Third Congress, those who were angling for this tried again when they worked on the speech Brezhnev was to deliver in November 1966 in Stalin’s native Georgia. Trapeznikov and a number of Stalinist Georgians were among the authors of a text which, in the words of Georgi Arbatov, an adviser to the Soviet leadership, was ‘an utterly unabashed effort to glorify Stalin and proclaim him, once again, the Great Leader’.⁶ Brezhnev had some doubts about the text and consulted more widely. Arbatov, backed by his chief at that time, Yury Andropov, who was head of the department of the Central Committee responsible for relations with other Communist states, was among those who put the arguments against the draft speech when Brezhnev asked for comments. Rather than focus on political morality, Arbatov chose arguments based on expediency likely to have more sway with Brezhnev. He pointed out, first, that a rehabilitation would complicate relations with East European Communist states (not least the positions of two leaders who had been victims of Stalin – Kádár in Hungary and Gomuka in Poland); second, that another about-turn on the Stalin issue would make life difficult for Western Communist parties; and third, he picked out the most strongly worded anti-Stalin passages from the speeches of existing members of the Soviet top leadership team at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 when they were still trying to please Nikita Khrushchev. Finally, he pointed out that Brezhnev had taken part in all the party congresses since the nineteenth. Might this not raise questions about his role?

Whatever Brezhnev’s personal inclinations, these arguments sufficed, and Arbatov and others drafted a boring speech which the Soviet leader duly read out in Georgia. It had the sole merit of avoiding any glorification of Stalin.⁷ Not only opposition from anti-Stalinists within the CPSU, but objections also from foreign Communist leaders and protests from prominent Soviet intellectuals played a part in ensuring that the rehabilitation of Stalin did not occur.⁸ The issue was not just of historical interest. A victory for the Stalinists, while ostensibly about the role Stalin himself had played, would have meant a severe crackdown on any contemporary deviation from the strictest orthodoxy – still more than actually occurred in the Brezhnev era. As it was, the struggle between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists ended in a stalemate in which, however, even the euphemistic phrase, much used in Khrushchev’s time, ‘the period of the cult of personality’ (which referred to the years from 1934 to 1953) was banished from use.⁹ On the whole there was silence about Stalin, but it became significantly easier to publish a positive than a negative reference to him.

The Brezhnev years turned out to be, in many ways, the golden age of the Soviet bureaucrat. Under Stalin they progressed rapidly up the career ladder, but they lived with uncertainty. Especially in the late 1930s, senior officials did not know at the start of each day whether they would end it in their own bed or in prison. If Stalin had threatened their very lives, Khrushchev threatened their careers. His frequent administrative reorganizations meant that there was still little security of tenure for officials in the party and governmental apparatus. Brezhnev, in contrast, made a virtue out of ‘respect for cadres’ and maintaining bureaucratic stability. For Soviet officials, this was welcome after what had gone before and was in particularly satisfying contrast with what they could see happening in China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

In Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, politicians could grow old in the same job, whether as Politburo members, party secretaries, or ministers. The average age of the Politburo immediately after Khrushchev’s removal was sixty. By 1975 it had risen to sixty-five, and on the eve of Brezhnev’s death in 1982 it was seventy. There was no tradition in Soviet politics of honourable retirement, and the best way to ensure a good send-off in the Soviet mass media was to die in office. Provided officials were politically loyal and ideologically orthodox, life for them was more predictable than it had ever been before. For inefficiency they might be moved from one post to another, but usually to a job of comparable standing – on the same level of the nomenklatura as the post from which they had been transferred. For young officials the promotion blockage, which had not existed in Stalin’s or Khrushchev’s time, was frustrating, but there was nothing they could do about it. With seniority went power – notably, membership of the Central Committee of the CPSU, to which the first secretaries of the republican parties belonged, as did most of the regional first secretaries and a majority of the ministers.

The Top Leadership

Like Khrushchev before him, Brezhnev promoted people who had been his subordinates in the past, but he only very gradually secured a Politburo in which he had a majority of close allies. His most influential colleagues, especially in the 1960s, were Alexey Kosygin, who had made his career in the ministerial network and was Chairman of the Council of Ministers for sixteen of Brezhnev’s eighteen years as party leader, and Mikhail Suslov, a senior secretary (a member both of the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee) throughout almost the whole of the Brezhnev era. His influence ended only with his death in office in 1980 at the age of seventy-nine. Brezhnev was fortunate that Suslov, who had people beholden to him in many parts of the apparatus, was satisfied with the substance of the great power he wielded within the Central Committee secretariat and did not aspire to the party leadership.

Another whose position was independent of Brezhnev was Nikolay Podgorny, a client of Khrushchev who (like Brezhnev) turned against his former patron. The long-serving Anastas Mikoyan was briefly Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1964–65, but Brezhnev and his colleagues, not forgetting that Mikoyan had been the only member of the leadership team to mount a partial defence of Khrushchev at the time of the latter’s removal, invented a new rule (quickly forgotten, after it had been applied to Mikoyan) that no one should remain in the Politburo beyond the age of seventy. Podgorny took Mikoyan’s place as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, combining that with his Politburo membership. He held both offices until Brezhnev felt strong enough unceremoniously to remove him in 1977. By then Brezhnev decided he had waited long enough to add the dignity of becoming formal head of state to his party leadership. Yet another senior member of the Politburo throughout the Brezhnev era who did not owe his position to Brezhnev was Andrey Kirilenko. Like the general secretary, he was indebted to Khrushchev for his initial invitation to the top table. Kirilenko was a senior secretary from 1966 until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. By that time, aged seventy-six, his mental condition had deteriorated to the point where he could scarcely remember the names of the other members of the Politburo. He was unable without help to write a short letter of resignation when begged to do so by Andropov.¹⁰

Kosygin, as already noted, had an importance initially which was at least comparable to Suslov’s. And like Suslov he did not aspire to be general secretary. He was content to head the governmental rather than the party machine, although less happy at the way Brezhnev’s gradual accretion of power reduced his own authority in the 1970s as compared with the mid-

1960s. Kosygin was so prominent in the earlier post-Khrushchev years that as late as 1970 Henry Kissinger mistakenly thought that he was ‘the dominant figure in foreign policy in the Politburo’ and that summit talks with the recently elected President Nixon would mean meeting with Kosygin.¹¹ In fact, Brezhnev was busy demonstrating once again that the leader of the Communist Party would emerge as number one in Soviet politics and that discussions at the highest level must involve him. Kosygin continued, however, to be in charge of detailed economic administration in his role as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

He introduced an economic reform of modest proportions in 1965. It aimed to increase material incentives and to reward factories and their managers for sales rather than simply for gross output. But in the absence of market prices, even the sales success indicator was of dubious value as a measure of economic efficiency. The Soviet economy, in fact, enjoyed stronger growth in the second half of the 1960s than it ever did thereafter, but the link between that and the ‘Kosygin reforms’ is tenuous. Kosygin, although an able administrator, was too much a product of the Soviet ministerial system, as it evolved under Stalin, to become a radical economic reformer. However, even his modest proposals for change became linked in arguments behind the scenes with the developments in Czechoslovakia. It seems likely that the harshness of Kosygin’s criticism of Czech and Slovak reformers owed something to his realization that they had made his own attempt to achieve greater rationality within the Soviet economic system harder to realize. The fact that economic reform in Czechoslovakia had in 1968 been accompanied by dangerous political reform helped to discredit the very word ‘reform’ in the Soviet Union. Those, especially within the Communist Party apparatus, who viewed any attempt to make the economy more self-regulating as a threat to their political and administrative powers were happy to assist in the task of elevating Brezhnev to a position of significantly higher authority than Kosygin. In practical terms, a more important economic development than the Kosygin reforms was the removal of some of the restrictions, which had been imposed by Khrushchev after 1958, on peasant plots. The size of this subsidiary agriculture was still curtailed, but it was treated more benevolently under Brezhnev (who, like Khrushchev before him, made agriculture one of his special responsibilities). Peasants were allowed to keep more livestock on their personal plots than hitherto.¹²

If Brezhnev kept a wary eye on Kosygin, he turned a more baleful gaze on one member of the top leadership team who was a real potential rival, Alexander Shelepin. There is every reason to suppose that Shelepin, who was not alone in regarding Brezhnev as a temporary leader, aspired to the top job. Known as ‘Iron Shurik’, he had accumulated some important allies on his way to membership of the Politburo. He had been head of the Komsomol (the Communist youth organization), then head of the KGB, and from 1961 a secretary of the Central Committee. When in 1966 he became a full member of the Politburo, he was one of the handful of senior secretaries – those with a foothold in both the Politburo and the secretariat – who, as a result, carried special authority. Brezhnev handled Shelepin with care. In May 1967 he removed Vladimir Semichastny, an important ally of Shelepin, from the chairmanship of the KGB, replacing him with Yury Andropov. In September of the same year he eased Shelepin out of the secretariat, making him head of the Soviet trade unions. This was a dead-end job, given that the main function of Soviet-style unions was to keep workers docile and obedient rather than have them become an autonomous force defending workers’ interests. Yet such was Brezhnev’s caution that there was a gap of almost eight years between his moving Shelepin out of the secretariat and dropping him from the Politburo. That was engineered in 1975 while Shelepin was on a visit to Britain. As we have seen, it was common practice in the post-Stalin Soviet Union for politicians to be dismissed when they were far from Moscow and thus unable to mobilize support from potential allies. (In Stalin’s time it didn’t matter where they were. They could just as easily be arrested in their apartments in central Moscow.)

Although Brezhnev demonstrated what Stalin and Khrushchev had shown before him, that the general secretaryship of the Central Committee was the most powerful office in the Soviet Union, the period of almost twenty years in which he occupied the Kremlin was one of oligarchical rather than autocratic rule. Even the absurd personality cult which developed in the second half of the 1970s (albeit far below the scale of Stalin’s) did not turn Brezhnev into a dictator. In Soviet society it was counterproductive, since it was seen as too much of a coincidence that Brezhnev was found to have been a major war hero, and thus the recipient of the highest award for military valour, the Order of Victory, in 1978 when he was at the height of his political dominance. Still more risible was the award to him one year later of the Lenin Prize for Literature for his ghosted memoirs. Pleasing as these and many other awards were for Brezhnev, who was not lacking in vanity, they were primarily a way of setting him on a higher pedestal than other members of the Politburo and thus bolstering the position of his closest associates within the political hierarchy.

Nevertheless, Brezhnev was a far less domineering leader than Khrushchev had been. Under Khrushchev, almost every major institutional interest had been adversely affected by his zeal for change and reorganization. Brezhnev, in contrast, was solicitous of the interests of the military (whom Khrushchev had tried to cut down to size), of the KGB (whose past was no longer to be associated with the crimes of Stalinism), and even of the ministerial network (who had the same chairman, Alexey Kosygin, from 1964 until his resignation two months before his death in 1980). Above all, he dealt benevolently with the party organization. Loyalty was rewarded with political longevity, and those who had worked successfully with Brezhnev in the past received generous promotion.

Diversity behind the Monolithic Façade

While there were some differences of outlook in the top leadership team – for example, between Andropov (who became a full member of the Politburo in 1973) and Suslov, to whom I’ll return later in the chapter – they were all committed to the maintenance of the pillars of the Communist system both in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. Even overt dissent in the broader society seldom called into question such major features as the monopoly of power of the Communist Party. More often, the argument was that the Soviet Union should abide by its own constitution and allow the freedom of speech it seemed to provide. (As noted in a previous chapter, even the constitution contained important qualifications on the various democratic rights it ostensibly bestowed.) What became known as the dissident movement – though its size was scarcely large enough to be regarded as a movement – emerged in the Soviet Union in the earliest post-Khrushchev years. That was partly in response to the elimination of criticism of Stalinism and the arrest of two writers, Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel, in 1965, followed by their trial and imprisonment in 1966, for publication of ‘anti-Soviet’ works abroad.

Two major novels submitted for publication by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the mid-1960s, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, were refused publication, even though the editor of Novy mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, was eager to see them in print. The KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn’s literary archive, which included much more overtly anti-Communist works, and he was by this time regarded with deep suspicion.¹³ It was in the Brezhnev era that Solzhenitsyn and the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov emerged as the two leading dissidents in the Soviet Union. The fact that the one was a major writer and the other a great scientist meant that more attention was paid, both within the Russian intelligentsia and in the outside world, to them than to other dissidents, some of whom were no less brave. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were very different in outlook, although not in respect of their moral courage. Solzhenitsyn had become an Orthodox Christian and Russian nationalist – though at the moderate end of the nationalist spectrum – whereas Sakharov had evolved from having in his youth absorbed ‘Communist ideology without questioning it’¹⁴ into a liberal in the West European sense of that term.¹⁵

The 1960s saw the development of the phenomenon of samizdat – literally, self-publishing – whereby writings were typed, with numerous and ever-fainter carbon copies, and distributed by hand. Even when photocopying machines began to be introduced in Soviet institutes and other work places, they were kept under strict lock and key. Dissidents, therefore, had to make copies of documents – and even long novels, such as those of Solzhenitsyn – in a very labour-intensive way. A related phenomenon was tamizdat – meaning publication ‘there’ (i.e. the West)–whereby works which emanated from but could not be published in the Soviet Union were printed in Russian. Some of them found their way back into the USSR. To be caught reading such a book, still worse to be distributing it, was a seriously punishable offence, and so the impact of tamizdat was not great. The typescripts of samizdat, especially when they consisted of politically unorthodox but high-quality creative literature (which the Russian intelligentsia craved), were, however, seen by a significant proportion of intellectuals. They were mainly people outside the political elite, but there were reform-minded officials who read samizdat literature from time to time.

A stream of Soviet dissent which had some covert support even within the Soviet establishment was that associated with the historian Roy Medvedev. His first, and major, work was a lengthy and seriously researched manuscript on Stalin and Stalinism called (in English) Let History Judge. ¹⁶ Medvedev represented a strand of opinion which was anti-Stalinist but took an idealized view of Lenin. Before the archives were open, he was able, as a result of his meetings with and collection of materials from old Bolsheviks, to throw detailed light on the crimes of Stalin. He also wrote about contemporary Soviet politics and was given information by people friendly to his point of view within the party apparatus.¹⁷ Medvedev’s relationship to the system was vastly less hostile than that of Solzhenitsyn or even compared with the position to which Sakharov evolved, but he had overstepped the bounds of the permissible. As early as 1968, Andropov, by this time chairman of the KGB, was calling the attention of heads of Central Committee departments to the book on Stalinism which Medvedev was writing. Three of these department chiefs, including Trapeznikov, jointly signed a document saying that the Moscow city party organization should raise the question of Medvedev’s continued party membership. Although Medvedev was treated more leniently than some dissidents, the KGB and Andropov personally came to regard him as dangerous. Medvedev had made no secret of his work on this book. In the Soviet archives there is a copy of a letter he wrote to Mikhail Suslov, enclosing the chapter headings of his work on Stalinism when it was still in progress, requesting a half-hour meeting with him. In fact, his reward for completion of the book was expulsion from the Communist Party in 1969.¹⁸

The dissidents who became known in the West were mainly those who were concerned with issues of human rights and civil liberties. While they caused concern to the party leadership and the KGB, by the later Brezhnev years their numbers had been reduced from small to infinitesimal. The overtly dissenting groups and movements ‘made little or no headway among the mass of ordinary people in the Russian heartland’, as the leading specialist on their activity noted. In the last three years of the Brezhnev era and the period of less than three years when Andropov and Chernenko were, successively, the Soviet leaders (i.e. from early 1979 until 1985), there was an especially severe and effective crackdown on the dissidents.¹⁹

The most dangerous segment of the dissident movement from the point of view of the Soviet authorities was that associated with nationalism, especially when national and religious identity coincided. The three Baltic states, which had been forcibly incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1940, remained the most disaffected of the union republics which made up the USSR. Most Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians did not openly protest at their lack of political and cultural autonomy, for the price of doing so was too high. Nevertheless, it was clear that if they were given the freedom to argue for a high level of autonomy within a real federation, or outright independence, they would do so. As it was, in their literary journals, and in the foreign works they translated, they were able to get away (especially in Estonia) with material of a kind deemed politically impossible when presented to Moscow publishers. Moreover, samizdat was more widespread in Lithuania, in relation to population size, than in any other Soviet republic.²⁰

Jews were a special case in Soviet nationality policy. Citizens of Jewish origin were counted as a nationality in the Soviet Union, but they were dispersed throughout the country. In the course of the 1970s, Soviet Jews emigrated in large numbers. To succeed in doing so involved a struggle with the authorities, and some were refused permission to leave. Emigration was, nevertheless, on a scale which had not occurred since the 1920s, and this was one of the areas in which Soviet policy under Brezhnev did change significantly. Although in the late Brezhnev years the number of Jewish emigrants declined, even in 1980 as many as 21,471 left for Israel or, via Israel, for the United States. By the end of that year, the number who had left the USSR over the past decade was close to a quarter of a million (with approximately 1.8 million of the Soviet Jewish population remaining).²¹ Tens of thousands of Soviet Germans were also allowed to emigrate to Germany in the 1970s. Permitting people from these two communities to emigrate was deemed by the Soviet leadership to be a lesser evil than keeping against their will so many disaffected citizens, the more especially since they had strong support from abroad. This took the form of high-profile campaigning and lobbying in the United States, in particular, for the Jewish would-be emigrants, and quiet diplomacy from West Germany on behalf of the German Soviet citizens.

The emigration, even though grudgingly granted by the Soviet authorities, was a change of policy in a more liberal direction. It did not, however, contribute to the longer-term liberalization of the Soviet Union. That is because the Soviet Jews, a particularly well-educated group, included a large number of people who were strongly in favour of reform of the system, among them, naturally, many of the emigrants. Even after the large-scale emigration, Jews remained the most overrepresented ‘nationality’ within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, although the very fact that so many wished to leave the country did not make life easier for the even larger numbers of Soviet citizens of Jewish origin who wished to stay where they were. Ever since Stalin’s anti-semitic purge at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Jews (with rare exceptions such as Kaganovich until 1957) had been kept out of the highest ranks of the party and the KGB, but there continued to be a significant number of academic specialists of Jewish origin in senior positions in major Soviet think-tanks.

The national dissent potentially the most corrosive of the Soviet system was Russian nationalism, given that Russians made up a little over half of the total population of the USSR and the Russian republic constituted three quarters of its territory. The union could survive large-scale Jewish emigration and a union could continue even without the Baltic states (though that was scarcely an imaginable occurrence during the Brezhnev years). If, however, Russians were to give up paying even lip-service to Marxism-Leninism, the foundations of the Soviet state would be fatally undermined. In fact, the Brezhnev era saw the rapid growth of Russian nationalism, though it was a movement which had many different strands. There were Russian nationalists who saw the Soviet Union as a greater Russia and fully identified with the Soviet state, glorying in its superpower status. There were others who saw the USSR as much too internationalist, and pointed to the fact that the other fourteen union republics had their own capital and their own republican institutions, such as academies of sciences, whereas Russia simply had the Soviet capital, Moscow, and Russians had largely to make do with being the preponderant nationality within a number of all-union institutions. For some, such as Solzhenitsyn, national feeling was closely connected to respect for the Orthodox Church and abhorrence at the way Christianity had been persecuted during the Communist era. Among the authors who might in varying degrees be described as nationalists, there was a school of ‘village prose’ writers who tended to idealize the Russian peasant and to deplore the way the Communists had destroyed traditional patterns of rural life. A complementary strand of writing – which one did not need to be a nationalist to support – involved a concern with ecological issues. This was a permitted form of dissent and included campaigning for the protection, for example, of Lake Baikal (the world’s largest freshwater lake), although raising ecological concerns went against the Communist regime’s relentless emphasis on economic growth and material progress.²²

Russian nationalists who remained within the Communist Party were opposed to internationalism and to Western influences, and often were strongly anti-semitic, seeing Jews as archetypal internationalists with strong foreign links. In terms of broad movements of opinion within the CPSU, there was a fundamental division between those, on the one side, who constituted ‘the Russian party’ and those, on the other, who wanted greater integration with the rest of the world, many of whom could be accurately described as Westernizers. Although both Mikhail Suslov and Yury Andropov were orthodox enough Communists, Suslov was seen as the protector of the Russian nationalists and Andropov, strange though it may seem, was held to be the patron of the internationalists. Andropov himself never even visited a non-Communist Western country, but he was generally well disposed towards the international institutes, such as the Institute of the United States and Canada (founded early in the Brezhnev era) and IMEMO (the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, which had existed for much longer), in neither of which was there any shortage of Westernizers. Andropov was also a hate figure for many Russian nationalists.*

Andropov was a complex character, and one side of his personality – the fact that he had intellectual interests and liked to be surrounded by intelligent people – is illustrated by the subsequent careers of party intellectuals who worked closely with him in the Central Committee before he became chairman of the KGB. Several of them turned into important reformers during perestroika, the most senior of their number being Shakhnazarov. Andropov also supported Kádár in the 1970s, after the Hungarian leader had embarked on economic reform which went beyond anything to be found elsewhere in the Soviet bloc at that time. Yet he had taken one of the hardest lines on Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in general there were strict limits to his reformism. He was, however, certainly no nationalist. Suslov, in contrast, was the senior member of the party leadership who did most to ensure that Russian nationalist deviation was the form of dissent treated most gently throughout the 1970s. Many books and articles which were more Russian nationalist than Leninist were passed by the censor. Towards the end of the Brezhnev era three journals (and they were far from alone) on whose editorial boards Russian nationalists predominated – Molodaya gvardiya (Young Guard), Moskva (Moscow) and Nash sovremmenik (Our Contemporary)–had a combined circulation of more than one and a half million copies.²³ This utterly dwarfed the circulation of samizdat, whose products also, however, included some of Russian nationalist orientation.

CULTURAL DEVIATION

In many ways pressure from below changed official policy, while not yet affecting the fundamental characteristics of a Communist system. Even though the ‘leading role’ of the party was maintained in the political system of the Brezhnev era, the party was more often than not following, rather than leading, within the realm of popular culture. Youth culture had become increasingly international. Cultural overseers fought prolonged battles against jeans and rock music, and lost both. Party propagandists might rage against ‘decadent’ Western influences, but to very little effect. Having failed to stop young citizens of the Soviet Union from buying jeans from Western tourists, the Soviet state began to manufacture its own. It was soon discovered, though, that only Western labels had the required cachet. Because the genuine article was not easy to come by and the price was high, a flourishing underground market emerged in fake Western jeans.²⁴ The dominance in popular music of Western groups, from the Beatles onwards, was scarcely less great throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe than Western sartorial influence. This was not particularly linked with political nonconformity, other than in its defiance of the conservative cultural norms of officialdom.

More politically potent than Western rock music in the Soviet Union was an essentially indigenous form of musical protest which was part of neither official culture nor the dissident movement, but occupied a halfway house. Its three most famous representatives, known as the ‘guitar poets’, were Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Bulat Okudzhava, who sang nonconformist songs of their own composition.²⁵ Only a few of the recordings of the songs of Vysotsky, an outstanding actor at the Taganka Theatre as well as a poet, were approved for distribution in his lifetime. Along with the other guitar poets, his prolific output was circulated through magnitizdat, the tape-recorded equivalent of samizdat literature. When Vysotsky died in his early forties in 1980, the huge attendance at his funeral was a rare (for the Brezhnev era) public demonstration of the extent of critical thinking within the society. Galich, the least tolerated by the Soviet cultural authorities (who took, however, a dim view of all three of them), was also an actor, but one whose writing came to take precedence over acting. He was expelled from the Union of Writers in 1971 and from the Soviet Union itself in 1974. Okudzhava, whose Georgian mother and Armenian father were both arrested in 1937, was gentler in his satire than the other two, and his work was diffused with nostalgia for older values (and buildings). He was the only member of the trio still alive during perestroika, during which he was a strong supporter of liberalization and democratization. The work of all three poet-singers became widely and officially available from quite early in the Gorbachev era. Galich, who died in 1977, was fully rehabilitated in 1988. The audience for the taped songs of the guitar poets was not only, or perhaps even mainly, students, but a generation of the intelligentsia who had come of age in the Khrushchev era and whose anti-Stalinism was allowed no official outlet in the two decades that followed his removal from office.

INTRA-SYSTEMIC DISSENT

A number of people who became overt dissidents, and were punished for it by the party-state authorities, began by trying to bend, rather than break, the rules of the system. That was clearly true of Medvedev, but even Solzhenitsyn made minor cuts in some of his earliest published works in order to have them appear in Novy mir. Solzhenitsyn also became a member of the Writers’ Union, from which, however, he was expelled in 1969. The following year, to the embarrassment of the Soviet authorities, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was only after it became clear that Solzhenitsyn’s work would no longer be published in Russia that he revealed to the world the full extent of his anti-Communism. He had completed in secret his devastating account of the fate of political prisoners, The Gulag Archipelago, in 1968, but did not authorize its publication abroad at that time. When it was first published in the West in 1973, the Politburo decided that Solzhenitsyn was too dangerous to remain in the country and too renowned to be imprisoned again (as he had been in Stalin’s time). He was arrested in February 1974, deported from the USSR, and deprived of his citizenship.

Still more clearly, Andrei Sakharov tried to influence developments in the Soviet Union as an insider. As a distinguished physicist, and one who had made an important contribution to research on nuclear weapons, he did not hesitate to offer advice and to advocate changes of policy to Soviet leaders, urging Khrushchev, for example, to stop the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. A samizdat essay he wrote in 1968, on ‘Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’, was intended to influence governments, including his own, as well as public opinion. There was no chance, however, of it being published in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and when it appeared in print in the West, Sakharov was banned from work involving state secrets and deprived of many privileges. He became an increasingly radical critic of Soviet policy throughout the 1970s, and at the beginning of 1980 he was sent into internal exile – banished to the city of Gorky (which has now been restored to its old name of Nizhny Novgorod). It was not until January 1987 that Sakharov was able to return to live and work in Moscow, following a telephone call from Gorbachev in December 1986 inviting him to do so. (In 1989 Sakharov was elected a member of the reformed Soviet legislature. He died suddenly in December of that year.)

During the Brezhnev era, however, thousands of people did succeed in surviving as reformers working within the boundaries of the system, pushing them wider when they could. If they went too far, they could find themselves turned from ‘intra-systemic’ to ‘extra-systemic’ reformers – in other words, overt dissidents. Yet over the long run, those gradualists who worked to change the system from within played the more important role in transforming the policy and character of the Soviet state. Their victories during the Brezhnev years were modest ones, but the fact that they had remained within the parameters of the system was crucially important when a reform-minded general secretary came to power in 1985. The system was such that a general secretary had to appoint to important positions people who already had some seniority within the party. If he wished to find people with fresh ideas, some of them (who could bring in others) needed to have experience already of the corridors of power of the Central Committee building. Three such people who played important roles during the perestroika period were Alexander Yakovlev, Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov. All three of them had fought in the Second World War but defied the generalization which loosely associated Soviet war veterans with Stalinism. Resolute anti-Stalinists, they had all held senior positions in the Central Committee apparatus. In the Brezhnev era, Yakovlev had been an acting head of the Department of Propaganda, Chernyaev was a deputy head of the International Department, and Shakhnazarov a deputy head of the Socialist Countries Department.

Although their own views evolved and were not the same in the early 1970s as they became in the late 1980s, even in that earlier period they were relative liberals – or in at least one case, a closet social democrat – within the party apparatus.²⁶ Chernyaev and Shakhnazarov were still deputy heads of their respective departments in 1985, but Yakovlev had been sent into dignified exile as Soviet ambassador to Canada in 1973. His main offence had been to publish a newspaper article in late 1972 that attacked all forms of nationalism and chauvinism, including Russian nationalism. This provoked anger in conservative Communist and Russian nationalist circles. Yakovlev remained in Canada until 1983, when Mikhail Gorbachev, by that time an influential senior secretary of the Central Committee during Yury Andropov’s brief period as Soviet leader, visited Canada and found a political soulmate. At Gorbachev’s request, Andropov agreed to Yakovlev being brought back to Moscow as director of the major foreign affairs think-tank, IMEMO. From there, Gorbachev, on becoming leader, brought Yakovlev back into the Central Committee.

The minority of reformists by inclination who held on to posts within the Central Committee apparatus during the Brezhnev era were to play a particularly important part in Soviet political life when Gorbachev came to power. The International Department (ID) of the Central Committee was widely regarded in the West as a citadel of Communist orthodoxy, and it was, indeed, the department which had inherited the role of the Comintern, keeping a supervisory eye on non-ruling Communist parties throughout the world. Yet it was from this department that Gorbachev was to draw many of the ‘new thinkers’ of the perestroika era into his foreign policy team. Part of the reason was that it recruited into its ranks as full-time consultants highly educated people with a knowledge of one or more foreign languages and expertise on the outside world. They were influenced by their travel and by their reading in ways unintended by the party leadership, who nevertheless relied on them for a better understanding of that outside world with which they had to deal.

A second department of the Central Committee with international responsibilities, the Socialist Countries Department, likewise contained people with linguistic and other expertise. Its main focus was on the countries of Eastern Europe, and albeit to a lesser extent than the ID, it too was a source of fresh thinking. In these departments, as elsewhere in the Central Committee apparatus, those who were profoundly dissatisfied with the way things were going in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era had to keep such ideas largely under wraps in their official capacities, although they would speak freely among close friends. Anatoly Chernyaev, an exceptionally influential ‘new thinker’ of the Gorbachev era, aptly draws on Orwell for the title of one of the Brezhnev-era chapters in his memoirs, calling it ‘In the regime of doublethink (the International Department of the Central Committee)’.²⁷

Reformers, and people who were profoundly dissatisfied with the Soviet status quo, were to be found in much greater numbers in the research institutes than in departments of the Central Committee. They were especially numerous in those which involved travel and study visits abroad. Apart from the Institute of the USA and Canada, whose director, Georgi Arbatov, had at one time been head of Andropov’s group of consultants in the Central Committee Socialist Countries Department, and IMEMO, whose director for almost the whole of the Brezhnev era was the pro-détente Nikolay Inozemtsev,²⁸ special note should be made of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, headed by Oleg Bogomolov.²⁹ A higher proportion of radical reformers, it is arguable, emerged from Bogomolov’s institute during perestroika than from any other. Even in Brezhnev’s time, there was no bolder institute in giving advice which was not what the party leadership wanted to hear. On 20 January 1980, that institute sent a memorandum to the Central Committee of the CPSU in which they wrote of the ‘hopelessness and harmfulness’ of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.³⁰

Institutions which were set up for one purpose could gradually come to serve another, the second purpose being almost the opposite of the original intention of the founders. Thus, for example, Arbatov’s USA institute was established to provide the party leadership with better knowledge of the United States and to help the Soviet Union effectively counter American propaganda. Many of its researchers, however, became not only sophisticated analysts of American politics but also rather pro-American – not in an unpatriotic way, but finding much to admire and which could be copied, with advantage, nearer home. Specialists in Bogomolov’s Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, part of whose task was to ensure that East European countries received Soviet guidance and kept to a straight-and-narrow Marxist-Leninist path, became enthusiastic about some developments in east-central Europe which were less than congenial for the Soviet party leadership. That applied not only to Hungarian economic reform but, for a few members of the institute, even to the rise of Solidarity in Poland.

An especially interesting example of this emerging dual character of institutions in Communist states – what a Chinese scholar analyzing Chinese developments called ‘institutional amphibiousness’³¹–was to be found in the Department of Scientific Communism of the institute responsible for collecting information in the social sciences, INION. This department was staffed by people who were expected to read, in foreign languages, the most sensitive materials published abroad, including critical writings about the Soviet Union. INION had a series of quite liberal directors, of whom the first was the Sinologist Lev Delyusin, who had earlier been a member of Andropov’s team of consultants in the Socialist Countries department of the Central Committee (as had been two other important institute directors – not only Arbatov, but also Bogomolov). Intellectuals who were highly critical of Soviet reality found INION’s Department of Scientific Communism a very attractive place to work and happily congregated there. They were able to read in the office interesting materials which they would have been very hard pressed to find in samizdat.

One person who was employed in this supposed Marxist-Leninist redoubt was Ludmilla Alexeyeva, a leading Soviet dissident who in her spare time typed and distributed underground literature.³² In the period when she worked under the roof of Scientific Communism, she was – as all who worked there had to be – a member of the Communist Party. Other people of critical views who worked in that office, as well as in other social science or international institutes, remained ‘within-system reformers’ or ‘intrastructural dissenters’. The idea, quite widespread in the West during the Brezhnev years, that Soviet citizens could be divided into dissidents, on the one hand, and conformists, on the other, with members of the Communist Party constituting the ultra-orthodox members of society, was highly misleading. The membership of the CPSU included Stalinists, idealistic Communists (who put their faith in the late Lenin or the purged Bukharin), nationalists, social democrats and liberals, among others. The system was such, however, that only a change at the top could allow these ‘hundred flowers’ to bloom.

Successes and Failures

From the point of view of Communist rulers, the Brezhnev era was in many ways successful. This was the period when the USSR achieved a rough parity with the United States – by the early 1970s – as a military power, although the basis of its ‘superpower’ status depended very heavily on the disproportionately large resources it devoted to military expenditure. Although no economic superpower, the Soviet Union contained some of the world’s richest mineral deposits. It was, however, a sign of the weakness of the economy that Soviet exports depended so heavily on the sale of natural resources, especially oil and gas. Yet what was termed the ‘oil crisis’ in Western Europe – the sharp rise in price of 1973–turned out to be an energy bonanza for the Soviet Union. The Brezhnev leadership’s ability to keep various elites content owed much to the sale at advantageous prices of its natural resources. Keeping them satisfied was, however, harder at the end of the Brezhnev era than earlier. The rate of economic growth was in long-term decline and in Brezhnev’s last years had virtually ground to a halt.

To reduce the chances of outbursts of popular, as distinct from elite, discontent, Soviet party leaders were far from relying on the threat of coercion alone. Basic foodstuffs were subsidized and many commodities were in short supply. The shortage economy meant a lot of time was wasted searching for scarce products, but price increases caused resentment. Queuing was regarded as fairer than price hikes, which hit the low-paid hardest. The Brezhnev leadership displayed great caution in dealing with the problem, even as the cost of subsidizing bread and meat prices soared. By the later Brezhnev years, subsidies to farm products were, by international standards, on an exceptionally large scale. A quarter of all Soviet investment went into its highly inefficient agricultural sector.³³ In the long run, subsidies were at an unsustainable level and a radical reduction in their level would have been easier under the highly authoritarian (or, according to how the term is defined, totalitarian)* regime of the 1970s than in the liberalized system of the second half of the 1980s when marketizing policies could be openly advocated but whose adoption and implementation was too long delayed.³⁴

The Brezhnev era was a time when tens of millions of Soviet citizens could live a peaceful and more predictable life than hitherto. It was also a period of comparatively stable prices. Most people did not live in fear of the KGB. Whereas in Stalin’s time it was easy to be caught up in the maelstrom of state terror through anonymous denunciation or sheer bad luck, in the Brezhnev era KGB interrogation normally came about only when people had significantly breached the rules of the Soviet game. Even then, for offences such as passing along samizdat (an activity which the vast majority of the population did not engage in), the KGB normally let miscreants off with a warning in the first instance. In many opinion surveys in post-Soviet Russia, more respondents named the Brezhnev era than any other when asked what was the best time to live in Russia during the twentieth century.³⁵ By the 1970s, there were more highly educated people in the Soviet Union than ever before. In the middle of that decade there were four and a half million students in higher education institutions. Educational advance was one of the successes of the Soviet system. It was also, however, a double-edged sword so far as the longer-term viability of the system was concerned.

Highly educated people were more likely to listen to foreign broadcasts and tended not to take at face value the upbeat accounts of Soviet life to be found in the domestic mass media. They became increasingly unhappy about the restrictions placed on their reading matter and about the curbs on travelling abroad, especially when they compared their situation with equivalent professionals in Western countries. For many decades Soviet people had tended to make comparisons with the past and take satisfaction from an enhanced standard of living over time. Once they made comparisons across space rather than time, a great deal depended on their reference group – that is to say, with whom they compared themselves. In the Baltic republics, citizens made the comparison with their near neighbours in Scandinavia and had every cause for dissatisfaction. In countries such as Sweden, Norway and Finland, far higher levels of economic well-being were combined with political freedom. For people in Soviet Central Asia, the comparison was very different. They could contrast their relative tranquillity very favourably with China during the Cultural Revolution, and their economic and educational levels were much superior to those in neighbouring Afghanistan. Russians, especially those in the professions who were already enjoying an educated middle-class lifestyle – reading widely, going to the theatre and cinema – were ever more conscious of the freedoms enjoyed by West Europeans and North Americans that were denied to them. Increasingly, it was with these advanced Western countries that they made comparisons.

There were ample grounds for dissatisfaction with the Soviet status quo. The Brezhnev era was one of growing social problems and disturbing long-term trends. In the first category came the growth of alcoholism and drunkenness and its consequences for health. Alcohol abuse was one of the major reasons why the life expectancy of men in the Soviet Union declined from sixty-six in 1964 to sixty-two in the early 1980s. It was unusual to have such a decline over a period of less than two decades in an industrialized developed country.* There was also a long-term demographic problem. Whereas the population was growing quite quickly in Soviet Central Asia, in the European part of the USSR it was stagnating or even declining. Some Soviet analysts worried about thinly populated Siberia, where so many of Russia’s mineral resources were located, and the billion Chinese over the border.

The Soviet Union’s foreign relations during the Brezhnev era are largely dealt with in other chapters. They hardly represented a success story. The Soviet Union in 1982 had bad relations with the United States, with China, and with Western Europe. The leaders had good relations with their East European counterparts, but the warm sentiments of the latter were not shared by the populations of those countries. In particular, the crushing of the Prague Spring had not been forgotten in Czechoslovakia, and the recent imposition of martial law in Poland, although undertaken by Poland’s own Communist leadership, had done nothing to ease the animosity of Poles towards the Soviet Union. Soviet troops were also bogged down in a war in Afghanistan in which the most they could achieve was a costly stalemate. Whatever nostalgia may have been felt in post-Soviet Russia, especially in the first decade after the end of Communism, for the Brezhnev years, that era was a time of great hypocrisy. If public criticism and overt social conflict were rare during this period, that was largely because of the strictness of the censorship, the sophisticated system of rewards for conformist political behaviour, and the hierarchy of sanctions for deviation from that norm.