The Soviet political system since 1917 had developed few fixed regulations. When Lenin died there was no assumption that a single successor should be selected. The same was true at Stalin’s death. No effort had yet been made to establish rules about the succession even though it was by then taken for granted that whoever was appointed to lead the Secretariat would rule the country. In mid-1964, as Khrushchëv’s colleagues wondered what to do about him, this uncertainty persisted and they also had the problem that the Party First Secretary was not dead but alive and capable of retaliating.
Khrushchëv returned from trips to Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia in summer. Sensing nothing afoot, he took a break at Pitsunda by the Black Sea in October. He was still fit for a man of seventy. His Presidium colleagues had recently congratulated him at his birthday celebrations and wished him well in political office, and the First Secretary took them at their word. Mikoyan popped over to chat with him and hinted to him not to be complacent. But Khrushchëv ignored the allusion; instead he waited with bated breath for news that the latest team of Soviet cosmonauts had returned safely to earth. As was his wont, he arranged to greet them in person. Everything seemed well to him despite an alarm raised by a chauffeur who had overheard details of a plot to oust the First Secretary.1 He who had outplayed Beria refused to believe that he might one day meet his match.
The Presidium had in fact put together a peaceful plot involving older colleagues like Brezhnev and Suslov as well as the younger ones such as Shelepin and Semichastny. KGB chief Semichastny’s betrayal was crucial since it was properly his duty to inform Khrushchëv of any such conspiracy. The plotters had also used former Central Committee Secretary Nikolai Ignatov, who had been sacked by Khrushchëv, to take discreet soundings among Central Committee members. Nothing was left to chance.
The only thing left to decide was about the timing. After several false starts, Suslov made a phone call to Khrushchëv on 12 October 1964 and requested that he fly to Moscow for an unscheduled Presidium discussion of agriculture. At last Khrushchëv guessed what was in store; for he said to Mikoyan: ‘If it’s me who is the question, I won’t make a fight of it.’ Next day, when his plane landed at Vnukovo 2 Airport, Semichastny’s men isolated him and rushed him to a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin. Initially Mikoyan worked for a compromise whereby Khrushchëv would lose the First Secretaryship but remain Chairman of the Council of Ministers. But the rest of the Presidium wanted Khrushchëv completely retired. Eventually the old man buckled under the strain and tearfully requested: ‘Comrades, forgive me if I’m guilty of anything. We worked together. True, we didn’t accomplish everything.’ Unconditional surrender followed: ‘Obviously it will now be as you wish. What can I say? I’ve got what I deserved.’2
On 14 October, an emergency Central Committee plenum was held. It was attended by 153 out of 169 members. Brezhnev was in the chair since the Presidium had already agreed that he should become Party First Secretary. After briefly referring to Khrushchëv’s ‘cult of the individual’ and ‘voluntaristic actions’, he vacated the podium so that Suslov might make a report. The Central Committee needed to hear from someone who had no close association with Khrushchëv.3
Suslov asserted that what Lenin had said about Stalin’s crudity and capriciousness was also applicable to Khrushchëv. The principles of collective leadership had been infringed, and Khrushchëv had intrigued to set colleague against colleague. Policy had been changed without consultation. Khrushchëv had arbitrarily introduced outsiders to Central Committee meetings. He had promoted members of his family and taken them on expensive foreign trips. His interventions in industry were bad, in agriculture even worse. His reorganizations had damaged the party, and he had behaved high-handedly towards the countries of the Warsaw Pact. He had replaced the Stalin cult with a Khrushchëv cult. ‘So there you have it,’ declaimed Suslov. ‘Not leadership but a complete merry-go-round!’ Suslov’s tone was softened only towards the end when he read out a letter from Khrushchëv recognizing the validity of the criticisms.4
Emotions in the audience were highly charged and several Central Committee members shouted out that Khrushchëv should undergo punishment of some sort. But Brezhnev was already assured of victory, and ignored such demands. Khrushchëv, depressed and contrite, was shunted into comfortable retirement. He was hardly mentioned in the press again in his lifetime. In the contemporary Western term, he became a ‘non-person’ overnight.
Khrushchëv none the less came to regard the manner of his going with some satisfaction. No guns, no executions. Not even many sackings apart from his own. Brezhnev would head the Central Committee Secretariat and Kosygin the Council of Ministers; Podgorny, as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was to become head of state. They and their associates approved of the general line taken by the party since 1953; but they wished to introduce greater stability to policies and institutions. New themes appeared in Pravda: collective leadership, scientific planning, consultation with expert opinion, organizational regularity and no light-headed schemes. At Khrushchëv’s going there was no popular commotion. On the contrary, there was a widespread feeling of relief; even the dour image cultivated by Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny seemed admirable after Khrushchëv’s unsettling ebullience. Most Soviet citizens, including the intellectuals, anticipated a period of steady development for Soviet economy and society.
Certain early decisions on policy were predictable. The Central Committee plenum in October 1964 forbade any single person from holding the two supreme posts in the party and government simultaneously. In November the bipartition of local party committees was rescinded. In the winter of 1964–5 overtures were made to Mao Zedong to close the breach between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In October 1965 the sovnarkhozes were abolished and the old central ministries were restored.
Yet there was no consensus about what substantial innovations should be made. Shelepin, who was made Presidium member after helping to organize Khrushchëv’s dismissal, made a bid for the supreme leadership in February 1965 by calling for a restoration of obedience and order. He disliked the concept of the ‘all-people’s state’; he wanted to resume an ideological offensive against Yugoslavia; and he showed a fondness for the good old days in his confidential support for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation.5 ‘Iron Shurik’, as he was nicknamed, got nowhere in the Presidium. He did not help himself by parading his contempt for his older colleagues and by proposing to cut back the perks enjoyed by party office-holders. Brezhnev was not yet strong enough to remove him from the Presidium; but in 1967 he directed him out of harm’s way by moving him from the Committee of Party-State Control to the USSR Central Council of Trade Unions.
The Presidium member who struggled the hardest for any positive sort of reform was Kosygin. Brezhnev had kept up an interest in agriculture since guiding the virgin lands campaign in Kazakhstan; but mainly he busied himself with internal party affairs. It was Kosygin who initiated a reconsideration of economic policy. Yevsei Liberman’s proposal of 1962 for an increase in the rights of factory managers was dusted down and presented by Kosygin to the Central Committee in September 1965.6
Kosygin did not open the door to complete managerial freedom: even Liberman had avoided that, and Kosygin as a practising politician was yet more cautious. Yet the implications of his reforms were large. If the heads of enterprises were to operate with reduced interference by Gosplan, then the authority of economic ministries and the party would decline. Kosygin’s long-standing advocacy of the consumer-goods sector of industrial investment increased his colleagues’ suspicion of him. Party officials were especially annoyed at his proposal to reduce the authority of economic-branch departments in the Central Committee Secretariat. The post-war organizational dispute between Malenkov and Zhdanov was re-emerging as Kosygin challenged the interests of the central party apparatus. If Kosygin had had his way, the premisses of economic policy would stealthily be shifted towards profit-making, managerial initiative and ministerial freedom from the party’s interference.
Brezhnev decided that his best stratagem was not to confront Kosygin but to position himself between Kosygin and Shelepin until he could bring his own appointees into the Presidium. With Brezhnev’s approval, the Central Committee gave formal permission to Kosygin to go ahead with the reforms; but all the while Brezhnev, both at the plenum and afterwards, impeded him with unhelpful modifications.
He quietly went about enhancing his own authority, ringing up provincial party secretaries for their opinion at each stage. He often spent a couple of hours each day on such conversations. His modesty seemed impressive. On the Kremlin Wall he was indistinguishable from the other late middle-aged men in staid suits and staider hats. At the March 1965 Central Committee plenum he displayed his preferences in policy by getting a larger share of the budget for agriculture (which was another sign that Kosygin’s industrial proposals were not going to be allowed to work). Brezhnev regarded chemical fertilizers and advanced mechanical equipment as the main solution to the grain shortage. He had concluded that budgetary redistribution rather than Khrushchëvian rhetoric and reorganization was the most effective instrument of progress. His primary objective was to make the existing system work better and work harder.
Brezhnev’s stabilization of politics and administration after the upsets of Khrushchëv also led him to clamp down on cultural freedom. As Khrushchëv had become more illiberal, many intellectuals had taken to meeting in little groups and circulating typescripts of poems, novels and manifestos that were certain to be refused publication. This method of communication was known as samizdat (or self-publishing); and it was to acquire a broader technical range when tape-recorder cassettes became available. The latter method was known as magnitizdat.
The participants in such groupings grew in number as access to official publication narrowed. Roy Medvedev’s book on the Great Terror, which itemized previously-unknown details of Stalin’s activity, was banned from the press. The same fate befell Viktor Danilov’s opus on agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote two lengthy novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, describing the lower levels of the political and social hierarchy under Stalin. He, too, had his works rejected or even ‘arrested’ by the KGB. Andrei Sakharov wrote letters to the Presidium requesting freedom of opinion and self-expression, but to no avail. A lesson was given to them that the avenues of consultation with the country’s supreme political leadership that had been kept semi-open under Khrushchëv were being closed. The cultural spring turned to autumn without an intermediate summer.
And a chilly winter was imminent. In September 1965 the KGB arrested two writers, Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel, who had circulated some satirical tales in samizdat about the Soviet state. They were put on trial in the following February and charged under Article No. 70 of the Criminal Code with spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. Sinyavski and Daniel were unyielding, and sympathizers demonstrated on their behalf outside the Moscow court building. Yet they were found guilty and sentenced to forced labour in the Gulag.7
The principal embarrassment to the Presidium was that the trial had lasted so long. New articles were therefore added to the Code so as to expedite matters in the future. The result was that dissenters could quickly be branded as common criminals, parasites or even traitors. The dissenters referred to themselves as ‘other-thinkers’ (inakomyshlyashchie). This was a neat term which encapsulated the origin of their predicament: namely that they disagreed with the postulates of the ruling ideology. Certainly it was more accurate than the word favoured in the West, ‘dissidents’. The etymological root of dissidence implies a sitting apart; but Soviet ‘other-thinkers’ were by no means distant from the rest of society: indeed they shared the living conditions of ordinary citizens; even a leading scientist such as Sakharov had most of his comforts withdrawn as soon as he became a dissenter. What was different about the dissenters was their willingness to make an overt challenge to the regime.
Starting in 1968, the samizdat journal The Chronicle of Current Events appeared. It was produced on typewriters with sheaves of carbon paper tucked into them. In 1970 a Human Rights Committee was formed by Andrei Sakharov, Valeri Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov. In 1971 an Estonian National Front was created in Tallinn. In Moscow, the priests Gleb Yakunin and Dmitri Dudko gathered Christian followers who demanded freedom of faith. Jewish organizations were established for the purpose of gaining visas to emigrate to Israel.
By the mid-1970s there were reckoned to be about 10,000 political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union. They were held in grievous conditions, most of them being given less than the intake of calories and proteins sufficient to prevent malnutrition. Punishments for disobedience in the camps were severe and the guards were both venal and brutal. But labour camps were not the sole methods used by the KGB. Punitive psychiatry, which had been used under Khrushchëv, was extended after 1964. Medicine became an arm of coercive state control as doctors were instructed to expect an influx of cases of ‘paranoiac schizophrenia’ shortly before public festivals; and many persistent dissenters were confined for years in mental asylums. Meanwhile the KGB maintained a vast network of informers and agents provocateurs. No group operated for long without being infiltrated by them, and the security police also tried to demoralize camp inmates into repenting their past.
Yet Brezhnev and his colleagues refrained from all-out violent suppression. They had not forgotten how the Great Terror had affected party leaders such as they had now become. Furthermore, they did not want to incur greater hostility from the intelligentsia than was absolutely necessary; they continually stressed that they would treat the opinions of professional experts seriously. Consequently dissent was not eliminated, but was held at a low level of intensity.
Brezhnev himself had a kindly reputation among political colleagues and in his family; and he can hardly have been consistently anti-Semitic since his wife Viktoria was Jewish.8 But first and foremost he was an apparatchik, a functionary of the party apparatus, and an ambitious, energetic one at that. When appointed as First Secretary, he was fifty-eight years old. He had been born to a Russian working-class family in Ukraine in 1906 and had no involvement in the October Revolution or Civil War. He became a communist party member towards the end of the First Five-Year Plan and qualified as an engineer in 1935. He had just the background to enter politics in Dneprodzherzhinsk as the Great Terror raged. By 1939 he was working in the party apparatus in Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine. In the Second World War he served as a commissar on both the Southern and Ukrainian fronts. Attaining the rank of Major-General, he made impression enough on Khrushchëv to be taken under his patronage and marked out for rapid promotion.
No one who had held this succession of posts could have been over-endowed with moral sensitivity. Collusion in repression was a job specification. So, too, was an ability to trim to the changing winds of official policy; and most functionaries of the pre-war generation were more like Brezhnev than Khrushchëv: they had learned to avoid being seen to have independent opinions. Brezhnev’s guiding aim was to avoid getting himself into trouble with higher authority.
He therefore stamped ruthlessly upon the ‘bourgeois nationalism’ of Romanian speakers when appointed as the Moldavian Communist Party First Secretary in 1950. He was put on the Presidium by Stalin in 1952 as a member of the younger generation of Soviet leaders. Losing this status on Stalin’s death, he rejoined the Presidium after the Twentieth Party Congress. By then he had played a major part in the virgin lands campaign, and photographs of him by Khrushchëv’s side became frequent in Pravda. Meanwhile he built up his own power-base by recruiting personnel from among his associates from his time as Dnepropetrovsk Province Party Secretary. He had a handsome look with his generous grin and his shock of black hair – and he was proud of his appearance. Only his pragmatic need to subsume his personality under the demands of ‘collective leadership’ stopped him from shining in the glare of the world’s media.
And yet it would have been a brightness of style, not of substance; and the style, too, would have been dulled by Brezhnev’s defects as a public speaker. He had no oral panache. He was also very limited intellectually, and acknowledged this in private: ‘I can’t grasp all this. On the whole, to be frank, this isn’t my field. My strong point is organization and psychology.’9 This comment hit the mark. For indeed Brezhnev was masterly at planning an agenda so as to maximize consensus. Always he strove to circumvent direct conflict with colleagues. Even when he decided to get rid of someone, he carried out the task with charm.
Such qualities were embarrassingly narrow for the leader of one of the world’s superpowers. And Brezhnev’s vanity was extraordinary. For instance, he shunted the Moscow City Party Secretary N. G. Yegorychev into an obscure ambassadorship for refusing to sing his praises.10 Moreover, he was indifferent to problems of corruption. ‘Nobody,’ he casually opined, ‘lives just on his wages.’11 He permitted his family to set a grotesque example. His daughter Galina was a promiscuous alcoholic who took up with a circus director running a gold-bullion fraud gang. Brezhnev himself outdid Khrushchëv in the nepotism for which he had criticized him. Nor did he forget to be generous to himself. His passion was to add to his fleet of foreign limousines donated to him by the leaders of states abroad. He drove them on the roads between his dacha and the Kremlin with flagrant disregard for public safety.
Yet it was initially a distinct point of attraction for his central party colleagues that Brezhnev was so undistinguished. Each Presidium member expected to be able to guide the First Secretary in policy-making. They had underestimated him. Shelepin and Kosygin were steadily being worn down. Podgorny, who wanted Brezhnev kept in check, had no personal following in the Presidium; and Suslov apparently had no ambition to become the supreme leader, preferring to exercise influence behind the scenes.12 Brezhnev’s fellow leaders perceived that he was becoming more than primus inter pares among them only when it was too late to reverse the process.
Brezhnev had helped to make his own luck. But he was also assisted by the trends of current economic data. Khrushchëv had lost his political offices partly as a result of the poor grain harvest of 1963. He was sacked just before the encouraging news of the harvest of 1964 had become fully available. The improvement continued in the immediately following years. Between 1960 and 1970 Soviet agricultural output increased at an annual average of three per cent.13 Industry, too, enhanced its performance. At the end of the Eighth Five-Year Plan period of 1966–70 the output of factories and mines was 138 per cent greater than in 1960.14 At the same time the regime was effective in maintaining strict political control. There were several disparate strikes, but nothing remotely akin to the Novocherkassk uprising of 1962. The authorities had a tight grip on society, and Brezhnev’s prestige grew among members of the Soviet political élite.
The Twenty-Third Party Congress, which began on 29 March 1966, changed the name of the Presidium back to the Politburo and allocated eleven members to it. The post held by Brezhnev was redesignated as the General Secretaryship (as it had been known in the 1920s). This hint at continuity with the Stalin era was meant to emphasize that the disruptions of Khrushchëv’s rule were at an end. Since Brezhnev wanted to avoid the Politburo turning on him as he and his colleagues had turned upon Khrushchëv, very few sackings occurred in the central party leadership. For a while only the most dangerous opponents were removed. In particular, Shelepin’s ally Semichastny was replaced by Yuri Andropov as KGB chairman in May 1967; and Shelepin himself was moved out of the Committee of Party-State Control in June and out of the Party Secretariat in September.
The Politburo was still feeling its way towards settled policies. This was especially obvious in its handling of those countries in Eastern Europe where economic reforms were being implemented. Hungarian party leader János Kádár had introduced measures similar to those advocated by Kosygin in the USSR. He got away with this because he had moved stealthily while Khrushchëv was in power and because he had Kosygin’s protection after Khrushchëv’s retirement. By 1968 a New Economic Mechanism which included limited permission for the creation of retail markets had been introduced. In Poland a different approach was taken. Władisław Gomułka had failed to fulfil his promises of industrial and agricultural growth and was removed in favour of Eduard Gierek in 1970. The new Polish government raised huge Western loans to facilitate the rapid expansion of heavy industry. Financial support and technological transfer, Gierek argued, would unblock the country’s economic bottlenecks.
The Soviet communist leaders gave approval to both the Hungarian and the Polish experiments not least because the USSR could ill afford to maintain its massive subsidy of the East European countries in the form of cheap oil and gas exports. In any case the basic structures of the centrally-planned economy remained in place in both countries.
Less contentment was shown by the Soviet Politburo with the policies adopted by the communist leadership in Czechoslavakia. At first there had been little cause for concern. Czechoslovak party leader Antonin Novotný had become as unpopular as Gomułka in Poland, and Brezhnev on his visit to Prague in December 1967 refused to intervene in the factional dispute. Novotný resigned in January 1968 and was succeeded by Alexander Dubček. The consequence was the ‘Prague Spring’. Dubček and his colleagues allowed the emergence of independent pressure groups; they allowed the mass media to criticize the Czechoslovak official authorities, not excluding himself. The trade unions resumed the role of defence of workers’ interests, and market reforms of the Hungarian type were treated as a minimum short-term aim. Dubček, hoping to create a ‘socialism with a human face’, still thought of himself as a Leninist. But by introducing so many checks on the communist party dictatorship, he was unknowingly rejecting the main tenets of Lenin’s thought and practice.
His cardinal error lay in assuming that he could pull the Soviet Politburo along with him. In Moscow, the Czech reforms were seen as threatening the existence of one-party rule, the centrally-planned economy and the survival of Eastern Europe as an exclusively communist zone. Brezhnev sent his emissaries to Prague over the summer to pull him back into line. But Dubček ignored all the hints that his intransigence would incur a military penalty.
On the night of 20–21 August 1968 the tanks of the Warsaw Pact rolled into Czechoslovakia. The decision had been taken in the Soviet Politburo. Kosygin had wavered earlier in the summer, remembering the complications around the world that had followed the suppression of the Hungarian revolt.15 Brezhnev, too, had not always been enthusiastic. But the vote in the Politburo was unanimously in favour of invasion. Brezhnev was later to affirm that ‘if I hadn’t voted in the Politburo for military intervention, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here now’. In the meantime Hungarian leader Kádár had tried to dispel Dubček’s naïvety: ‘Don’t you understand what kind of people you are dealing with?’ Dubček rebuffed the warning; and when the tanks arrived in Prague, he was taken prisoner and flown to Russia, where he was injected with drugs and threatened with execution unless he complied with the USSR’s orders. Dubček succumbed, but with obvious heavy reluctance, and in spring 1969 the Soviet Politburo put the compliant Gustav Husak in power.
After a brief period as Czechoslovak ambassador to Turkey, Dubček was demoted to the job of local forest administrator. A bloodless purge of the participants in the Prague Spring was put in hand. No country of the Warsaw Pact was permitted to follow policies involving the slightest derogation from the premisses of the one-party state, Marxism-Leninism and Warsaw Pact membership. The Brezhnev Doctrine was imposed, whereby upon any threat to ‘socialism’ in any country of the Pact, the other member countries of the Pact had the right and duty to intervene militarily.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia had baleful consequences for the political and economic debates in the USSR. Ideological retrenchment was inevitable. This was appreciated by dissenters outside the party such as Pavel Litvinov, who led a small group of protesters on Red Square on 23 August. The participants were seized by police, put on trial in October and sentenced to three years in prison camps.16 Litvinov’s treatment could easily have been worse; but within the Politburo there was reluctance to resort to greater repression than was deemed completely necessary. The measures were anyway severe enough for the intelligentsia to lose any remaining illusions about Brezhnev. Khrushchëv, who spent his days at his dacha telling tales to visitors who came out to picnic in the woods, was becoming a figure of nostalgia among artists and scholars. A siege mentality gripped the regime: if a Gorbachëv had existed in the Kremlin in 1968, he would have been arrested.
The USA assured the USSR that the invasion of Czechoslovakia would not cause a world war and that Western political revulsion would not get in the way of negotiations between the superpowers. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1969 and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were begun in the same year. By 1970 the USSR had caught up with its rival in the number of its intercontinental ballistic missiles. But both Moscow and Washington were keen that competition in military preparedness should occur in a predictable, non-violent fashion.
Yet the Czechoslovak invasion damaged the USSR irreparably inside the global communist movement. Hopes for a reconciliation with China had been slim since 1966, when Mao Zedong had castigated Moscow as a ‘centre of modern revisionism’ that had betrayed the principles of Marx, Engels and Lenin. After 1968 the number of critics grew. Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia condemned the Brezhnev Doctrine; and when seventy-five communist parties met in Moscow in June 1969, the polemics were incessant. Only sixty-one parties agreed to sign the main document at the conference. World communism had definitively become polycentric. Indeed border skirmishes broke out along the Siberian border with the People’s Republic of China. All-out war was a possibility until Moscow and Beijing each concluded that a diplomatic settlement was in its interest. The Politburo was finding relations with China as intractable as at any time under Khrushchëv.
Not that everything in foreign affairs was problematical. Kosygin, Brezhnev and Podgorny followed Khrushchëv’s precedent by visiting several foreign countries. In 1966 the USSR had brought India and Pakistan together under Kosygin’s chairmanship in Tashkent to settle their recurrent conflicts. The Soviet-Indian relationship was especially warm.17 Furthermore, Cuba remained defiantly pro-Soviet despite an American diplomatic and economic embargo, and in 1970 the Marxist coalition leader Salvador Allende came to power in Chile. In Asia, North Vietnam, fighting with Soviet military equipment, was wearing down the American-supported regime in South Vietnam. In Europe, the USSR had its successes even after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. As soon as Willy Brandt was elected German Chancellor in Bonn in 1969, he made overtures to the Kremlin. A treaty was signed between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany in the following year giving formal recognition to the separate German Democratic Republic.
Elsewhere in the non-communist world the attempts to increase Soviet power and prestige were not quite so productive. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah was chased from power in 1966. His departure left the USSR without friends in Africa except for Egypt. Then Egypt, too, fell away. In 1967 Soviet influence in the Middle East was undermined when Israeli forces defeated an Arab military coalition in the Six-Day War. President Nasser of Egypt died in 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who saw no advantage in keeping close ties with the USSR. The Soviet-Egyptian alliance rapidly collapsed. Countries of the Third World were finding that the USSR might be able to supply them adequately with military equipment but could not sustain them economically. It was increasingly understood around the globe that occasional acts of munificence such as the financing of the Aswan Dam did not generate long-term industrial and agricultural development.
Yet the campaign to increase Moscow’s influence abroad was sustained. At home, furthermore, central political prerogatives were asserted. The Politburo abandoned the decentralizing experiments of Khrushchëv. In 1966 its members scrapped the sovnarkhozes. Inside the party, the Bureau of the RSFSR in the Central Committee – established by Khrushchëv – was abolished. Thus the largest republic by far in the USSR lost its co-ordinating party body. The other republics still had their own parties, central committees and first secretaries. The humbling of the RSFSR signified that no national political unit, not even the Russian, was immune to the Politburo’s supra-national demands.
Accordingly, the other republics were placed under tight discipline. Eighteen well-known Ukrainian nationalist and intellectual dissenters were brought to court in Kiev in August 1965 – a full month before the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavski in Moscow. They refused to disown their beliefs and received harsh prison sentences. Also in 1965 there was a large demonstration in Erevan, protesting about past and present injustices against the Armenian people. It was suppressed by armed force. The subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia horrified nationalist opinion, especially in the Baltic Soviet republics and Ukraine. A student was arrested in the Estonian city of Tartu for daubing a cinema wall with the declaration: ‘Czechs, we are your brothers.’ But disturbances also occurred independently of the Prague events. Riots broke out in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, in 1969. Several officials of Russian nationality were murdered before sufficient troops arrived to restore control.
In the Politburo there were lively discussions. It would seem that Alexander Shelepin and Dmitri Polyanski took the strongest line in advocating the eradication of national dissent among non-Russians. It was rumoured that Polyanski’s ideas were virtually those of a Russian nationalist. On the other side there was Petro Shelest, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, who believed that any further scouring of Ukrainian culture would open wounds that would turn the Ukrainian speakers of his republic into irretrievable opponents of a ‘Soviet Ukraine’. Shelest himself had a deep sympathy for the traditions of the Cossacks.
Brezhnev steered a middle course between them. In November 1967 he called for the ‘convergence’ of the Soviet Union’s peoples, but stressed that this would involve highly-sensitive decisions and that hastiness had to be avoided. Even so, neither Brezhnev nor even Shelest was diffident about quelling overt opposition whether it came in mass demonstrations or in poems, songs and booklets. This meant that the basic problems of a multinational state were suppressed rather than resolved. Russian nationalists resented the fact that their culture was not allowed to develop outside the distortive framework imposed by the Politburo. Among the non-Russians, nationalists resented what they perceived as the Politburo’s Russian chauvinism; their grievances were ably summarized in Ivan Dziuba’s lengthy memorandum to the Ukrainian party and government, Internationalism or Russification?18
Ostensibly most republic-level communist party leaders endorsed the suppression of nationalism in the various Soviet republics. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was installed as Party First Secretary in Georgia in 1972, rhapsodized that ‘the true sun rose not in the East but in the North, in Russia – the sun of Leninist ideas’. Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party, eulogized the Russian people as ‘the elder brother and true friend’ of the Uzbeks.19
When at home in Uzbekistan, Rashidov was not so self-abasing; on the contrary, he was promoting his fellow clan members into high office and ensuring that they could benefit from the perks of office without Moscow’s interference. The same had been happening in Georgia under Shevardnadze’s predecessor V. P. Mzhavanadze – and Shevardnadze’s subsequent struggle against corruption had only limited success. Even Dinmukhammed Kunaev, First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party and boon companion of Brezhnev, covertly gave protection to emergent national aspirations. Rashidov, Mzhavanadze and Kunaev zealously locked up overt nationalist dissenters in their respective republics; but they increasingly themselves selected and organized the local élites on a national principle. Such phenomena were also on the rise in the RSFSR, whose internal autonomous republics were allowed much freedom to promote the interests of the local national majority.
The Politburo’s own commitment to ‘stability of cadres’ contributed to the difficulties of holding together the USSR as a multinational state. Brezhnev assured officials in the party and major governmental institutions that their jobs were secure so long as they did not infringe current official policies. He wanted to avoid the enmity incurred by Khrushchëv’s endless sackings of personnel; he also contended that officials needed stable working conditions if the Politburo’s objectives were to be realized in the localities. Consequently Mzhavanadze’s replacement by Shevardnadze was a rare direct attempt to indicate to the official leaderships of the non-Russian republics that there were limits to the Kremlin’s indulgence.
A general lightness of touch was applied in the Russian provinces of the RSFSR. Leningrad Party Secretary V. S. Tolstikov was sacked in 1970. Tolstikov had drawn attention to himself as a communist arch-conservative, but the reason for his dismissal was not politics but his sexual escapades on a yacht in the Gulf of Finland.20 Brezhnev anyway punished him gently by sending him as Soviet ambassador to Beijing. Elsewhere in the RSFSR there was bureaucratic tranquillity. Typical province-level party secretaries were either left in post or else promoted to higher party and governmental offices. Cliental systems of personnel were fortified, and local officials built their ‘nests’ of interests so tightly that Central Committee emissaries could seldom unravel the local scams. Brezhnev sometimes talked about the need to ‘renew’ the cadres of party and government; but self-interest discouraged him from putting an end to the immobilism he detected. He did not want to risk alienating lower-level officialdom.
By the end of the 1960s Politburo members were united in their broad approach. They did not abandon Khrushchëv’s basic policies; but they erased his eccentricities and pencilled in what they thought to be sound alternatives. Stalin had been too brutal, Khrushchëv too erratic. They did not want to revert to the bloody fixities of the post-war years; they were glad that the unsettling reorganizations after 1953 had been terminated.
It was their assumption that such an approach would effect a successful stabilization of the Soviet order. They acted out of optimism, and still believed in the superiority of communism over its competitors. They could point to the military security and economic advance achieved since 1964. They were confident about having checked the rise of dissent and having brought the intelligentsia and the working class under control. They were not entirely hostile to experimentation in their measures at home and in Eastern Europe. But the scope for novelty was brusquely narrowed after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. And already the Soviet leaders were becoming entangled in complications which they had not anticipated. They confronted deepening problems in politics, economics, society, culture, nationalism and international relations. Little did they know that the price of their attempt at stabilizing the Soviet order was about to be paid.