The Soviet political leaders did not feel insecure in power. There were occasional acts of subversion, such as the detonation of a bomb in the Moscow Metro by Armenian nationalists in 1977. But such terrorism was not only rare; it was also usually carried out by nationalists on the territory of their own republics. Russians, however hostile they were to the Politburo, had an abiding horror of political upheaval. Civil war, inter-ethnic struggles and terror were the stuff not of medieval folklore but of stories told by grandparents and even fathers and mothers.
The KGB’s repressive skills remained at the ready. In 1970 the biologist and dissenter Zhores Medvedev was locked up in a lunatic asylum. Only the timely intervention of his twin brother Roy and others, including Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, secured his release.1 Human-rights activist Viktor Krasin and the Georgian nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia were arrested, and they cracked under the KGB’s pressure on them to renounce their dissenting opinions. Another method was employed against the young poet Iosif Brodski. Since his works were banned from publication and he had no paid occupation, the KGB took him into custody and in 1964 he was tried on a charge of ‘parasitism’. In 1972, after being vilified in the press, he was deported. Solzhenitsyn, too, was subjected to involuntary emigration in 1974. Vladimir Bukovski suffered the same fate a year later in exchange for imprisoned Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan. In 1980 Sakharov was subjected to an order confining him to residence in Gorki, a city which it was illegal for foreigners to visit.
Yet the members of the various clandestine groups appreciated the uses of publicity. Within a year of the signature of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, informal ‘Helsinki groups’ in the USSR were drawing the world’s attention to the Soviet government’s infringements of its undertakings. Western politicians and diplomats picked up the cause of the dissenters at summit meetings; Western journalists interviewed leading critics of the Politburo – and, to the KGB’s annoyance, several writers let their works appear abroad. The Soviet government did not dare to stop either Solzhenitsyn in 1970 or Sakharov in 1975 from accepting their Nobel Prizes.
Three figures stood out among the dissenters in Russia: Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev. Each had achieved prominence after Stalin’s death and had tried to persuade Khrushchëv that basic reforms were essential. Initially they were not recalcitrant rebels; on the contrary, they were persons promoted by the political establishment: they did not seek confrontation. But all eventually concluded that compromise with the Politburo would not work. They were unique and outstanding individuals who could not be broken by the weight of material and psychological pressures that were brought to bear upon them. But they were also typical dissenters of the 1970s. In particular, they shared the characteristic of deriving a spiritual forcefulness from their acceptance of their precarious living and working conditions; they had the advantage of truly believing what they said or wrote, and were willing to endure the punishments inflicted by the state.
They gained also from the country’s traditions of respect for relatives, friends and colleagues. Before 1917, peasants, workers and intellectuals kept a wall of confidentiality between a group’s members and the ‘powers’, as they referred to anyone in official authority over them. Russians were not unique in this. All the peoples of the Russian Empire had coped with oppressive administrators in this way. The informal ties of the group were reinforced in the Soviet period as a defence against the state’s intrusiveness, and the dissenters latched on to the traditions.
What Sakharov, Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn had in common was that they detested Stalin’s legacy and knew that Brezhnev’s Politburo had not entirely abandoned it. But on other matters their ideas diverged. Sakharov had contended in the late 1960s that the world’s communist and capitalist systems were converging into a hybrid of both. But steadily he moved towards a sterner assessment of the USSR and, being committed to the rights of the individual, he saw democracy as the first means to this end.2 This attitude was uncongenial to Medvedev, a radical communist reformer who argued that there was nothing inherently wrong with the Leninism enunciated by Lenin himself.3 By contrast, Solzhenitsyn put his faith in specifically Christian values and Russian national customs. Solzhenitsyn’s nuanced anti-Leninism gave way to strident attacks not only on communism but also on virtually every variety of socialism and liberalism. He even rehabilitated the record of the last tsars.4 Thus he infuriated Sakharov and Medvedev in equal measure.
By 1973 these disputes were ruining their fellowship, and the situation was not improved by the differential treatment of dissenters by the authorities. Sakharov had once received privileges as a nuclear scientist. The fact that he and his wife had an austere life-style did not save them from Solzhenitsyn’s carping comments, at least until Sakharov and his wife were dispatched into exile to the city of Gorki. Of the three leading dissenters, it was Medvedev who received the lightest persecution. His detractors claimed that although the security police pilfered his manuscripts, he had defenders in the central party leadership who felt that the time might come when his brand of reformist communism would serve the state’s interests.
Yet the efforts of the dissenters at co-ordination were insubstantial. The Moscow-based groups had some contact with the Jewish refuseniks in the capital; but they had little connection with the clandestine national organizations in Ukraine, the Transcaucasus or the Baltic region. And when in 1977 Vladimir Klebanov founded a Free Trade Union Association, he and his fellow unionists conducted their activities almost entirely in isolation from the intellectual dissenters. Few ordinary citizens had copies of their samizdat works. Occasionally it looked as if the KGB, by focusing efforts upon them, unnecessarily increased their significance. This was true to some extent. But the USSR was an authoritarian ideocracy; any failure to extirpate heterodoxy would be taken as a sign of weakness. The snag was that Brezhnev was not Stalin, and understood that persuasion to support the regime would not be effective if persecution were to be increased.
Key ideas of the dissenters continue to leech into the minds of many thousands of citizens. Some heard the ideas on Radio Liberty, the BBC World Service or the Voice of America in the periods when foreign radio stations ceased to be jammed. Others in Estonia could pick up and understand Finnish television. Still others knew people who knew people who had read the original works in samizdat. Having refrained from killing the leaders of dissent, the Politburo had to live with the consequence that their ideas could not be kept wholly in quarantine.
The dissenters probably had less impact on opinion in society than critics of the regime who stayed on the right side of the KGB. In the literary journals a host of writers appeared. In Russia, Vladimir Soloukhin and Valentin Rasputin wrote about the ruination of agriculture and village life. Vasil Bykaw did the same in Belorussia. Despite recurrent disagreements with the party, all of them successfully demanded respect for the pre-revolutionary customs and beliefs. Such writers were known as the ‘ruralists’ (derevenshchiki).5 Some of them involved themselves in public debates on ecology. They were joined by the Kyrgyz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov, who described the ravaging of nature and traditional culture in central Asia. Nor was it only living writers whose arguments against the designs of communism had an influence. Classics of Russian literature, such as Fëdor Dostoevski’s novels, continued to provide material for a strong critique of Marxism-Leninism.6
In every branch of the arts it was the same. The film directors Andrei Tarkovski and Tengiz Abuladze; the science-fiction writers Arkadi and Boris Strugatski; the musical composer Alfred Schnittke; the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny; the theatre director and performer Vladimir Vysotski: none of them belonged to the groups of overt dissent, but their works offered an alternative way of assessing Soviet reality. And they had a depth of analysis and emotion greater than most of the artists whom Khrushchëv had promoted to eminence.
There was resentment among natural scientists, too, about their working conditions. Distinguished physicists queued up in the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad to read copies of the London scientific weekly Nature with the advertisements cut out (which meant that crucial bits of articles on the other side of the excised pages were removed).7 Even more strictly supervised were historians, economists and political scientists. Politburo member Suslov kept a sharp eye on them and punished delinquents with demotion: his favourite sanction was to transfer them to a pedagogical institute and stop their books from being published. He also interviewed the novelist Vasili Grossman about the manuscript of his Life and Fate, which exposed both the dictatorial essence of Leninism as well as the anti-Semitism of Stalin’s policies. Suslov predicted that the novel would not be printed for 300 years. (As things turned out, his prophecy was wildly wrong because Life and Fate was published in 1989.)
Although professional people were fed up with the humiliating customs of subordination, they usually complied with the summons to cast their votes in favour of single candidates from a single party in Soviet elections: any failure to do this would attract unpleasant attention from the KGB. For similar reasons it was difficult to refuse to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union if invited. By the late 1970s approximately forty-four per cent of ‘the party’ was constituted by white-collar employees.8
Thus the state was regarded with suspicion by practically everybody and lying and cheating remained a popularly approved mode of behaviour. The fish rotted from the head. Brezhnev was a cynic and his family was corrupt. But even if he had been a communist idealist, he would have had no remedy. The old problems remained. In order to fulfil the quotas assigned by the Five-Year Plan, factories still needed to bend regulations. Skilled workers still had to be paid more than was centrally intended. Unskilled sections of the labour-force still had to be indulged in relation to punctuality, conscientiousness and sobriety. The flitting of workers from one job to another was an ineradicable feature in industry; the absence of unemployment meant that the state had no serious counter-measure. Factories, mines and offices were staffed by salaried and waged personnel who put greater effort into the protection of their indolence than into the discharge of their duties. A work-shy attitude was characteristic of both administrators and workers.
The Politburo was given no credit for the material improvements secured in the 1970s, and the cheap provision of food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care and transport was taken for granted. Brezhnev’s successes were noted more for their limitations than their progress beyond the performance before 1964. He earned neither affection nor respect.
Soviet citizens concentrated on getting what enjoyment they could out of their private lives. Families operated as collective foragers in an urban wilderness. Turning up at a restaurant was seldom enough unless a booking had been made or a bribe been offered. And so Granny was dispatched to queue for hours in the ill-stocked food shop; young Yevgeni missed a morning at the pedagogical institute to dig the potatoes at the family dacha; and Dad (or ‘Papa’) took a set of spanners he had acquired from the factory and swapped them for an acquaintance’s armchair. The people who carried the greatest burden were the women. Years of propaganda had not bettered their lot even though many had entered occupations once reserved for men. Wives were simply expected to do their new job while also fulfilling the traditional domestic duties. It was not a sexual liberation but a heavier form of patriarchy.
Consequently Soviet citizens, while remaining resolutely slack at work, had to be indefatigable in obtaining alleviation of their living conditions. They had no other option even if they aimed only to semi-prosper. They had to become very enterprising. Each looked after himself or herself and relatives and close friends. On the inside, this collectivistic society fostered extreme individualism.
When all was said and done, however, ordinary Russians could only make the best of a bad situation. They were powerless to effect a general change. Rates of alcoholism, mental illness, divorce and suicide went on rising inexorably. The deterioration of the physical environment continued; diseases were on the increase and hospital services worsened. The living space accorded to the normal urban family remained cramped: just 13.4 square metres per person in 1980.9 Thousands of Moscow inhabitants had no resident permits, and many of them inhabited shacks, doorways and parked trams. The diet of most citizens, furthermore, ceased to improve in the late 1970s. Rationing of staple food products returned to Sverdlovsk (which was then under the rule of local party secretary Boris Yeltsin) and several other large cities.10
Not surprisingly the society of the USSR turned a flinty eye upon the propagandists sent out by party organizations. Attitudes had changed a lot since Stalin had claimed that ‘life is getting gayer’. An anecdote illustrates the point neatly. A young woman was seized by the burly militiamen next to Lenin’s Mausoleum for distributing a pamphlet of protest. The pamphlet was discovered to be full of blank pages. Asked to explain herself, the woman replied: ‘Why bother writing? Everybody knows!’
Marxism-Leninism had never become the world-view of most citizens. The authorities knew this from the reportage on popular opinion delivered by the KGB. In the 1960s they were sufficiently worried that they allowed random-sample social surveys to be undertaken and published despite the ban on sociology as a subject in institutions of higher education. The results were troubling to the Ideological Department of the Party Central Committee Secretariat. In Moscow, according to the results of a questionnaire, only one in eleven propagandists believed that their audiences had absorbed the Marxist-Leninist content of lectures as their personal convictions. Nor did it help that many propagandists carried out their duties with obvious reluctance. For example, forty per cent of those polled in Belorussia gave talks or lectures only as a party obligation.11 This was a problem stretching back to the 1920s. Fifty years on, it had not been solved.
Politburo member Suslov had played a prominent part in the mummification of the notions of Marx, Engels and Lenin; but even Suslov did not stand in the way of Marxism-Leninism’s retreat from earlier standpoints. The natural sciences were freed to a somewhat greater extent from ideological interference. Researchers continued to suffer impediments and indignities since contacts with foreign colleagues remained difficult. Yet at least they were no longer compelled to accept a single official party-approved version of biology, chemistry and physics.
In the social sciences, which in Russia includes philosophy and literature as well as history, party control was tighter. Lenin’s interpretations of the literary classics were compulsory ingredients of scholarship; and, although historical accounts of the Assyrian Empire could be published with merely cursory mention of Marxism, the same was not true about the history of Russia – and especially the decades of Soviet rule. No subject was more jealously guarded from heterodoxy than the theory and practice of the communist party. From one end of the telescope it appeared that extraordinary concessions were being made to non-Marxist opinion. But from the other end things looked different: sceptics were less impressed by the licence gained by Assyriologists than by the unchallengeability of the official party historians who affirmed that, from 1917 to the present day, the party leadership had largely avoided error. Anything new written about Assurbanipal mattered a thousand times less than the fixed catechism about Lenin.
This was indeed a contradictory situation. On the one hand, Marxism-Leninism’s self-restrictions signalled a diminishing official confidence. On the other, Suslov and his subordinate ideologists were eradicating any surviving liveliness in interpretations of Lenin, the October Revolution, Soviet history and current official policies. The authorities had given up ground to its critics, but made a bitter defence of the remaining ideological terrain.
Even Lenin’s books were handled with caution. The fifty-five volumes of the fifth edition of his collected works had been brought to completion in 1965. But in the late 1970s an unpublicized official ban was placed on the sale of the edition in second-hand bookshops.12 Many of Lenin’s statements were at variance with many of the party’s contemporary doctrines. Consequently the authorities preferred to use excerpts from his writings, carefully chosen to fit in with Brezhnev’s policies. It was a funny old Leninist world where Lenin had become a suspect author. Yet only a few Russians bothered about this paradox since Lenin’s writings were abundantly available at least in some fashion or another. This was not true of thousands of authors who still attracted unconditional disapproval; and the regime had not abandoned its key dogmas on politics, economy and society.
The systematic curtailment of information affected even the pettiest aspects of daily life. KGB operatives were attached to harmless groups of tourists visiting the West, and the card-indexed files of the security organs bulged with reports by its unpaid informers as well as by its own officials. Not even telephone directories were on sale, but were held behind the counter of ‘information kiosks’ – and the employees in these kiosks were not permitted to tell the ordinary enquirer the phone number of foreign embassies. What is more, the Politburo dedicated large financial resources to the development of the technology of control. The KGB’s bugging devices were especially sophisticated. At the same time Soviet citizens were prevented from acquiring equipment that might enable them to pass information among themselves without official permission. Walky-talky radios, photocopiers and word-processing computers were not purchasable in the shops.
These barriers to communication, however, were only partially effective. Citizens had their own direct experience of Soviet history and politics, and were in an excellent position to pass private judgement on the words of party propagandists. Hardly a family existed without relatives who had been killed in Stalin’s time. And everyone could remember the boasts made by successive rulers. After decades in power it was hard for the Politburo to claim that the country’s problems were not the party’s fault to a decisive extent.
And so this most politicizing of states had induced a pervasive political apathy. The messages and the methods of official ideology were deeply unappealing. On Soviet TV, the female continuity announcer’s rigid, bouffant hairdo and humourless mien set the tone; and there was a steam-rolling pomposity about series such as ‘For You, Parents’ and ‘For You, Veterans’. Most TV programmes were heavily didactic. But the public reacted unenthusiastically to them. Sport, crime thrillers, variety shows, science-fiction films and melodramas were much more popular: even Politburo members were scunnered by any media output that was intellectually demanding. Brezhnev liked ‘low-brow’ entertainment as much as did ordinary citizens. Ice-hockey games between the Soviet Union and Canada were much more to his liking than the theory of ‘developed socialism’.
Much leisure in any case was spent outside the home. The Soviet Union, like other communist states, linked its international prestige closely to the performance of its sports teams. The network of facilities was the envy of foreign countries. Soviet youngsters had access to well-funded premises, training and equipment; they knew that, if they had talent, they would be rewarded by privileges which would not fade when they retired: the typical ex-athlete would move into the profession of trainer. The football goalkeeper Lev Yashin and the weightlifter Aleksei Vlasov remained major personalities in Soviet public life.
The state also provided several institutions for daily recreation and annual holidays. Trade unions provided beach vacations in Crimea and Georgia to members who showed a high level of activism and obedience (and children could be sent separately by their parents to summer camps). Workers achieving the monthly production quotas had their names placed on their factory’s Roll of Honour. The state continued to award badges for all manner of public services, and bemedalled war veterans were allowed to go to the head of queues in shops. Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences – who had their own special badge – were each provided with a chauffeur-driven car. The hierarchy of honour and privilege paralleled the hierarchy of job occupations. A large enough minority of citizens benefited sufficiently from these perks to give considerable solidity to the Soviet order.
Yet the long-term dissolvent tendencies in society were unmistakable. The villages went on losing their skilled males to the towns since the improvement in the conditions of kolkhozniki failed to stem the exodus from the countryside. Tractor drivers could nearly always better themselves in the urban work-force. The kolkhozniki, who were typically female and either late middle aged or elderly, had neither the morale nor the energy to organize harvests adequate to feed an industrial country. In the towns and cities a different set of problems prevailed. Workers entering employment in the 1930s and 1940s could reasonably expect promotion to white-collar jobs if they worked and studied hard and obeyed the political authorities. In the 1950s the number of posts in management was ceasing to expand; in the 1970s the holders of these posts hung on to them: mere incompetence was scarcely ever deemed due cause for an individual to be sacked. Social rigidification was setting in: once a worker, always a worker.13
Simultaneously the structure of families in many regions of the USSR was causing trepidation. Across Russia, as well as the other Slavic republics and the Baltic region, married couples increasingly limited themselves to having one child. The inadequate living-space and the financial pressure upon wives to stay in the labour-force were the causes. The main birth-control technique was itself a problem: abortion. It was far from unusual for a woman to endure a dozen aborted pregnancies before reaching the menopause. This was terrible enough; but the long-term prospect was equally dispiriting since the proportion of the population supporting their pensioner relatives in Russia and other such regions was going into decline.
In January 1981 Kosygin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikolai Tikhonov, acknowledged that ‘demographic policy’ was one of the weakest areas of his government’s activity. In reality he was referring to the ‘national question’; for Tikhonov’s unstated worry was that not enough Russians were being born. Many people, including non-communists, sympathized with him. If current trends continued, the Russian nation would soon constitute a minority in the Soviet Union. The evidence was provided by a census, which revealed that ethnic Russians had dropped from fifty-five per cent of the USSR’s population in 1959 to fifty-two per cent in 1979.14 For the attitude to family size in the Transcaucasus and central Asia had not followed the pattern of Russia. Tajiks and Uzbeks, who had gained better medical services from the hands of the Soviet state, produced more children than ever who survived to adulthood. The idea circulated among Russians that they would soon be outnumbered and politically downgraded by ‘orientals’.
Such language was racist; it was also rather laughable since several of the supposedly oriental cities, such as the Georgian capital Tbilisi, are located on a line of longitude to the west of cities in central Russia! Nevertheless the feeling behind the words was deep. Russians had for decades been treated as the primary nation of the USSR. Not only did they feel superior to the other peoples but also they considered that their contribution to the development and preservation of the USSR had been the greatest.
The Russian nation’s resentments could no longer be totally ignored, and the Politburo became increasingly frantic to assuage them. Anti-Semitism, which had been approved by Stalin not long before he died, was given semi-official respectability again. Already in 1963 the central party leadership had permitted the Ukrainian writer T. Kichko to publish Judaism without Veneer, an anti-Jewish tract which provoked still more citizens of Jewish origin to apply for exit visas. Brezhnev had let hundreds of thousands leave the country, but solely in order to placate the American administration: on the whole he preferred to reassure Russians that he was on their side. Among the central party leaders in Moscow only Alexander Yakovlev, who served in the Central Committee apparatus, strenuously opposed the condoning of Russian nationalism and demanded a more resolutely internationalist official policy. His position was made so uncomfortable for him that an agreement was made that he should become Soviet ambassador to Canada.15
None the less there was a still higher standard of living in Georgia and Estonia than across the RSFSR. This naturally caused many Russians to believe that current policies were injurious to the Russian national interest. The policy of elevating personnel of the major local nationality to high office was maintained. Ukrainians administered Ukraine, Uzbeks Uzbekistan and Latvians Latvia. Certainly very severe controls remained: the Politburo continued to position ethnic Russians – or sometimes especially trusted Ukrainians or Belo-russians – as deputy leaders in virtually every republican party, government and the KGB. Yet local ‘national’ functionaries were also prominent; and the policy of ‘stability of cadres’, which had been started in 1964, was prolonged through the 1970s.
The result, as time went on, was that the majority nationalities in each republic were able to augment their dominance over other local national and ethnic groups. Stern campaigns against administrative and financial malpractice were maintained by Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and Geidar Aliev in Azerbaijan; but neither Shevardnadze nor Aliev did much to protect the position of minorities: in Georgia the Abkhazians and the Adzharians suffered considerable discrimination; in Azerbaijan, the Armenian-inhabited enclave of Nagorny Karabakh was starved of funds. Nor were such tensions absent from the RSFSR. A glaring example was the attempt by Bashkirian communist leaders to ‘Bashkirize’ the education and culture of the Tatar population in their vicinity.16
Ostensibly these disintegrative trends in other republics were prevented from manifesting themselves in the same fashion in the RSFSR’s Russian provinces. The RSFSR shared a capital with the USSR and was altogether too vast to be permitted to follow a line of action disapproved by the central political authorities. The RSFSR had a formally separate government, but real power was denied it; and the ban on the establishment of a separate communist party remained in force. But there had long been ambivalences in the policies of the Politburo. In particular, Russian intellectuals were accorded greater latitude for cultural self-assertion than were their non-Russian counterparts. Russia’s pride of place among the nations of the USSR continued to be officially affirmed. And whereas Russians had important posts in the local political administrations of the other Soviet republics, ethnic Russians had a monopoly in the administrative apparatus of the RSFSR’s provinces.
The policy of stability of cadres, moreover, encouraged officials in the localities to ignore uncongenial central demands. The province-level party committee (obkom) secretary retained crucial local power and the fact that functionaries from the non-central party apparatus occupied a third of the places at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in 1976 was an index of their influence.17
Thus the local ‘nests’ were also reinforced. For a manager running a factory of national significance could always threaten to appeal to his minister; and a KGB chief in a border area or a commander of a military district might easily cause trouble if the obkom secretary interfered excessively in security affairs. But few local ‘nests’ of officials were very disputatious; for a common local interest existed in keeping the ‘centre’ from prying into the locality. Ordinary Soviet citizens who wrote to the Politburo and the Secretariat exposing an abuse of power in their town or village were sometimes rewarded with a Pravda campaign on their behalf; but such campaigns were ineffectual in transforming general practice – and sometimes such citizens found themselves victimized by the local officials whom they had exposed. At any rate the central authorities remained loyal to the policy of only sacking functionaries in cases of extreme disobedience to the Kremlin’s demands.
The old paradox endured. On the one hand, there was a frantic profusion of official demands for observance of legality, and under Brezhnev – according to one estimate – the number of ‘normative acts’ of legislation in force across the USSR had risen to 600,000;18 on the other hand, infringements of legality were pervasive. The key common goal of political leaders in the Kremlin was to minimize shifts of policy and avoid damaging internal controversy. Transfers of personnel, if they were on a large scale, would destabilize the relations among central and local public groups in the various institutions. The Soviet compound was entering a stage of degradation.
Nevertheless this is not how it seemed to most wielders of power at either the central or local levels. Even among those of them who were minded to introduce reforms there was little acceptance that basic reform was overdue; instead they tended to believe that it would be enough to modify existing policies, to sack the most incompetent of Brezhnev’s cronies and introduce younger blood. Above all, they felt that Brezhnev himself had served in office too long. The condition of his health was in fact even worse than most of the rumours about it. The handful of officials who came into regular, direct contact with him could see for themselves that he was a dreadfully ill old man. The scribblings in his personal diary showed a lingering interest in television programmes and sport; and his punctuation and spelling would have disgraced a schoolchild.19
Brezhnev had stayed in office after bowing to pressure from some of his Politburo associates; and this had postponed the jostling among them over the question of the political succession. Essentially Gromyko, Ustinov, Suslov and Andropov were governing the country through a consensus among themselves. Brezhnev’s closest aide and confidant, Politburo member Chernenko, had also acquired an influence. Crucial Politburo decisions were being taken by them in his absence.
But Brezhnev’s health worsened drastically in the winter of 1981–2 and the Politburo pondered who eventually was to take his place as General Secretary. The choice would have been influenced by Suslov, who was a senior Central Committee Secretary. But Suslov died aged seventy-nine in January 1982. KGB chairman Andropov was given Suslov’s place in the Central Committee Secretariat in May, and quickly it became obvious that he would make a strong bid to succeed Brezhnev. Stories about corrupt practices in Brezhnev’s family and entourage started to circulate.20 The stories came from Andropov’s associates in the KGB. Evidently Andropov was trying to create a mood in the Politburo that would ruin the chances of one of Brezhnev’s boon companions emerging as a serious rival to his own candidature.
By his actions Andropov showed that he no longer feared incurring Brezhnev’s hostility. Through spring, summer, autumn 1982 the General Secretary rarely appeared in public. The official pretence was maintained that he was not seriously ill; but his doctors, together with his nurse (who for years had been his mistress), despaired that he would ever recover. Brezhnev was sinking fast. On 10 November 1982, he suffered a final relapse and died.
The Politburo instructed that he should be buried outside the Kremlin Wall on Red Square. Statesmen from all over the world attended. His wife and family were accompanied to the funeral by the central party leadership – and daughter Galina outraged spectators by refraining from wearing sombre garb. Brezhnev had been dressed in his Marshal’s uniform with all his medals. But the careless way the coffin was dropped into his grave was taken as a sign that not all Politburo leaders wished to be seen to regret that at last he had left the political stage. In truth it was hard to feel very sorry for Brezhnev. When he had succeeded Khrushchëv, he was still a vigorous politician who expected to make the party and government work more effectively. He had not been inactive; he had not been entirely inflexible. But his General Secretaryship had turned into a ceremonial reign that had brought communism into its deepest contempt since 1917.