A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

21 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation

The Soviet Union emerged from the war victorious but with tremendous population losses and economic damage. The number of dead was at least twenty million, twenty-seven million by some estimates, including three million prisoners of war, some seven million soldiers killed in battle, two million Soviet Jews, and at least fifteen million Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian civilians. All areas occupied by the Germans were devastated, including the USSR’s richest agricultural land and the whole Ukrainian industrial complex, which had supplied the country with almost half of its products on the eve of the war. Housing stock and city services were smashed, and even in unoccupied areas the strain of the war showed everywhere. To make things worse, a bad harvest in 1946 led to famine conditions in much of the country. Soviet reparations from Germany and Eastern European countries helped somewhat, but the scale of loss and destruction was so great that even such measures provided only small recompense for the losses.

At the same time, the victory brought with it a new order in the Kremlin. Soon after the war, Stalin ordered the People’s Commissariats to be called Ministries, for he announced (in private) that such names had been appropriate to a revolutionary state, but that the Soviet Union had now consolidated itself enough to operate with more permanent institutions. For the first time Stalin and his inner circle began to delegate power to a series of state committees, usually headed by the principal ministers who managed the main areas of the economy. In principle, Stalin was no longer going to monitor all the details of government and economic activity, and some new faces joined the pre-war leadership. Beria and Zhdanov (until his death in 1948) continued on in Stalin’s inner circle, while Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov remained from the pre-war years but were less powerful, especially Voroshilov, disgraced by his military failures. New faces in the top leadership were Malenkov (vice-chairman of the Council of Minsters under Stalin’s chairmanship), Nikolai Bulganin (minister of defense and a longtime economic manager), and Khrushchev, until 1949 head of the Ukrainian party organization and then of the Moscow city party. To a large extent the system did work in a more regular fashion for the last eight years of Stalin’s life, but at the same time he did not refrain from scolding and bullying his closest collaborators and from directing a series of political “cases” with murderous results. The cult of Stalin reached its apogee in the post-war years. Besides the ubiquitous portraits and statues an official adulatory biography appeared on his seventieth birthday. The press produced endless accolades to the “great leader of peoples,” the great Marxist, and the genius military commander Stalin. As much as he may have realized that the USSR needed a more normal mode of government, Stalin could not let go of the reins of power, and continued to behave like a revolutionary commissar of the civil war era, jumping into the middle of the fray with a firing squad ready.

The main task before the Soviet leadership was first of all reconstruction of the war damage, and then the continuation of “socialist construction,” including the progressive technical modernization of industry.

In some ways reconstruction was the easy part, for it meant the rebuilding of previously existing plants and infrastructure, and it was largely completed by 1950. The expansion and modernization of industry was more complicated. It is the case that the growth rates of the post-war era were some of the highest (actual) growth rates in Soviet history. In those years many of the pre-war investments began to pay off, with huge growth in the Urals-Western Siberian metallurgical and mining areas. To a large extent the crucial Soviet industries came up to world standards, and an enormous nuclear industry came into being, at this time largely for military purposes but with planning for power generation and other civilian uses in the future. What did not happen was proportionate investment in consumer goods or agriculture, the latter still hampered by the leadership’s fascination with agronomic fantasies such as the “grass-field” system of crop rotation. Reconstruction brought housing only to the pre-war level, with most people living (at best) in communal apartments. A rare improvement of the post-war years was in medicine, for the number of doctors grew again by seventy-five percent, and the 1946 famine did not lead to massive epidemics, as had occurred in 1932–33.

Stalin’s insistence on centralized discipline and his assumption that all disagreement masked political subversion created a series of incidents among the leadership that terrified even Stalin’s allies. The first sign was Marshal Zhukov’s demotion in 1946 to commander of a local military district. This and later incidents fell in a period of intense ideological campaigning that affected more than just cultural life. The party issued reproofs to composers, poets, and biologists, but it also launched campaigns to celebrate Russian culture and its importance (as well as selected aspects of the non-Russian cultures) as part of a closing-off of Western influence wherever possible. After the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Soviet authorities suddenly launched a campaign against “cosmopolitanism” that was in fact directed against the many Jews prominent in Soviet culture as well as the state and party apparatus. The campaign soon died down, but not without casualties. The wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and its leading members – Yiddish poets, Jewish scientists, and party officials – were arrested and shot. On Stalin’s orders the security forces killed the famous actor and director of the Moscow Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels, in a faked auto accident in Minsk. It is in these years that travel and correspondence abroad became essentially impossible for almost all Soviet citizens. The irony of these campaigns and repressive measures was that the war had for the first time given the Soviet Union legitimacy in the eyes of millions of its people, but rather than relying on that new found legitimacy, the party simply tightened the screws.

Potentially even more serious was the Leningrad affair of 1949. Arising from an arcane dispute over a trade fair held in Leningrad, it soon turned into the dismissal of several thousand party members in the city and the secret trial of nine local party leaders, charged with treasonable offenses. Six were executed and three sent to camps, their real crimes apparently being the creation (in Stalin’s mind) of a sort of local fiefdom that did not consult the central leadership. Another victim was Nikolai Voznesenskii, who had headed Soviet planning since 1938. Peripherally involved in the Leningrad affair, his actual crime seems to have been concealing information from Stalin about the 1949 plan, something the aging dictator would not leave unpunished. Voznesenskii also perished. In 1952 Stalin called a Congress of the Party, the first since 1939, where Georgii Malenkov presented the main report on Soviet achievements, including a wildly inaccurate account of the supposed progress of agriculture. This sort of public spectacle gave an appearance of unity in the party leadership, but in reality Stalin’s behavior was beginning to worry his comrades. In 1951 the Ministry of State Security forces arrested more than a dozen Georgian party officials, charging them with nationalism and spying for the West (the “Mingrelian affair”), resulting in the exile of over ten thousand people from Georgia. Late in 1952 a new “conspiracy” surfaced, in which a supposed plot of Kremlin doctors, most of whom were Jewish, planned to murder Stalin. The horizon was darkening.

In the background of these lurid and sinister events, the party leadership was beginning to realize that some changes were needed. Malenkov and other leaders knew perfectly well that agriculture was not prospering. The collective farms managed to produce enough to feed the people at a sufficient but low level. Every harvest was still a gamble, and meat and dairy products came overwhelmingly from the collective farmers’ private plots. Another area of crisis was the GULAG. By 1950 the special settlements had two and a half million people, most of them from various national minorities deported for unreliability: Germans, North Caucasian peoples, Crimean Tatars, as well as some remaining kulaks. The camp system had about the same number, in this case heavily Russian, including political prisoners from the 1930s, Nazi collaborators real and mythical, and a great majority of people convicted of non-political crimes and common murderers and thieves. For the GULAG administration the problem was that prison labor was no longer economically effective. Though prisoners made up some ten percent of the work force in logging and construction and were used in projects where ordinary labor seemed too expensive, the costs of the GULAG were too great. The expenditures on administration and hundreds of thousands of guards were just too high, and to make matters worse, the prison labor system rested on unskilled labor. Even in logging, mechanization was beginning to penetrate Soviet industry, and prison laborers lacked the skills and motivation to use the new equipment. By 1952 the GULAG officials and Beria himself were considering some sort of changes in the system.

Then Stalin died at his dacha on March 5, 1953. The response of Stalin’s inner circle was to declare collective leadership, with Khrushchev (now made first secretary of the party) and Malenkov (now made chair of the Council of Ministers) as the main figures. The immediate problem they faced was Beria. Since 1946 Beria had not headed the security police, the Ministry of State Security or the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but he did have Stalin’s ear. He was also head of the Special Committee within the defense network that ran the increasingly important nuclear industry, at that time still almost entirely working for military production. In the new division of power after Stalin’s death Beria obtained the united Ministry of Internal Affairs and State Security. Once again, as in 1938, he was in charge of all police functions. The first political crisis of the new regime came at the end of June, when Malenkov raised the issue of Beria at the Presidium of the party (the new name for the Politburo). The meeting on June 26 was actually a conspiracy, for Beria was not told that his fate was on the agenda. Right in the meeting Marshal Zhukov and a group of officers arrested him. A week later Malenkov and Khrushchev explained their actions to the Central Committee, claiming that Beria was trying to control the party through the security police and was aiming for absolute power. He was an intriguer who had poisoned Stalin’s mind against the other leaders and ultimately was an agent of Western imperialism. He was presenting himself as a reformer to create a political base in the party. After a closed trial, Beria was executed in a military bunker by the Moscow River.

The removal of Beria solved only one problem. Even before his arrest the new leadership knew that some changes had to take place. Agriculture was in poor shape, the camp system was in crisis, and ferment in eastern Germany was creating a problem in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev sponsored a series of agricultural reforms, higher purchase prices for kolhoz products and lower taxes on the peasants’ private plots. After Stalin’s death Khrushchev had acquired the position of first secretary of the Communist Party, but Malenkov was the prime minister and Molotov still a powerful minister of foreign affairs. Both sat on the Presidium of the party and all of its members, with Khrushchev leading the chorus, proclaimed that the party and country now had collective leadership. To carry out his plans, however, Khrushchev needed to eliminate potential rivals. First he managed to convince his colleagues to demote Malenkov from the position of prime minister to minister of electrification and replace him with Bulganin. He then moved to sideline Molotov, though the latter remained foreign minister. By the time of the 1955 Geneva Conference it was clear that Khrushchev was the most powerful, not Bulganin or Molotov.

While these maneuvers in the Kremlin were bringing Khrushchev to the top, the leader was carrying on in secret a complete revision of the Stalin era policies of repression. The news of Stalin’s death and the first reforms provoked revolts in the GULAG in 1953 and 1954 that were put down by the military, but the process of release began, from the camps and labor colonies as well as from the special settlements. Almost a million were released by the beginning of 1955. Equally important were the various investigations that the authorities launched under the aegis of the USSR Supreme Court to examine the more egregious cases of execution and imprisonment back to the 1930s. Their findings were overwhelmingly that in the cases of these victims they found “an absence of the components of a crime” (otsutstvie sostava prestupleniia), leading to their release and the posthumous rehabilitation of the dead. Rehabilitation was not merely symbolic, for it meant that the families of those who perished were no longer enemies of the state, and if they had languished in the camps, they were released. All over the Soviet Union hundreds of thousands of people found themselves with a ticket home and papers allowing them to live normal lives, returning to families some had not seen for fifteen or more years, and whose families did not even know if they were alive. For the time being, the release and rehabilitation of the prisoners and the dead took place in silence. Nothing appeared in the newspapers.

At the end of 1955 Khrushchev convinced his colleagues, even those who had been Stalin’s closest associates like Molotov and Kaganovich, to establish a party commission to look into Stalin’s “violations of socialist legality,” particularly the extermination of most of the party elite in 1937–38. The head of the commission was P. N. Pospelov, a former editor of Pravda and to all appearances a fervent Stalinist. His commission’s report became the basis of Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956. Khrushchev’s speech, with additions from himself and editorial work by another party ideologist, M. M. Suslov, came at the end of the Congress. As everyone was packing to go home, the announcement came to the Soviet and foreign Communists that there would an additional session. There, Khrushchev read his speech for four hours (with a short break) to a stunned and silent audience. In it he blamed all the crimes of the 1930s and after on Stalin personally, with some room for Beria. He focused primarily on the destruction of the Central Committee in 1937–38, seventy percent of whose members had perished, and on Stalin’s conduct of the war. Neither of his accounts was fully honest, for in blaming Stalin for the terror he omitted the role of Molotov and other leaders, including himself, to say nothing of the thousands of enthusiastic denouncers of wreckers and spies from among the population. Khrushchev’s account of Stalin’s role in the war was simply wrong, giving rise to numerous legends that came to be refuted only after 1991. He said almost nothing about collectivization, which ultimately involved more people and more deaths than the terror. The point, however, was to shift the blame onto Stalin for all the crimes of the past and to underscore the importance of the collective leadership of the party, to avoid “the cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. To prevent a recurrence of such horrors, the need was for collective leadership and the preservation of “socialist legality.”

The leadership had debated how much to publicize the speech, and the result was a compromise. It was not published in the Soviet Union (it appeared only in 1989) but was circulated among party organizations where it was read in its entirety to party members, some seven million people, and the whole of the Komsomol, more than eighteen million. As it was also circulated to foreign Communists, the speech got to the West through Poland and was quickly printed in many translations. Khrushchev’s lurid depictions of torture and execution (taken directly from Pospelov’s report) were a tremendous shock to foreign leftists, especially in the West, but elsewhere reaction was mixed. In China Mao Tse-tung never really approved of it, and Stalin’s works remained canonical in the Chinese party. In the Soviet Union itself the report produced pro-Stalin riots by thousands of students in Tbilisi and Gori in Stalin’s native Georgia, and it caused outbursts of violent criticism of the regime among Moscow intellectuals. Mostly, however, the population was more concerned with meat prices and accepted the new policies, even if many harbored more positive views of the Soviet past than those now propagated by Khrushchev.

The main effects of the secret speech were in Eastern Europe, leading to riots in Poland and the Hungarian revolution in the fall of 1956. Khrushchev survived these threats with his power intact, and moved on with more reform projects. In the late 1950s the release of prisoners and special settlers grew to a flood. The deported nationalities from the North Caucasus returned home, their autonomous republics restored. (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and some other groups, however, did not return, though their personal legal statuses were restored.) By 1960 the GULAG had come to an end. More change was in the works. Soviet industry was doing much better than agriculture, but the pressure to build a fully modern society, now in competition with the United States, mandated greater progress in both manufacturing and agriculture. Khrushchev publicly called on Soviet agriculture to surpass US production in meat and milk products. For industry the solution he adopted early in 1957 was to decentralize the economy, creating “Councils of the National Economy” on the regional level instead of the central industrial ministries that had managed the economy since the 1930s.

Before this plan could be implemented, a new crisis arose, this time in the central leadership of the party. Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich had been discontented with Khrushchev for some time. Molotov was unhappy with the partial reconciliation with Tito, the increasing talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, and with the increased priority given to agriculture and consumer goods. His allies shared these doubts, and also opposed the growing personal power of Khrushchev. Behind these particular concerns was the looming issue of de-Stalinization: how far would Khrushchev go? The lesson of Hungary was that the process could get out of hand, and even without that, as the main survivors of Stalin’s old guard they were themselves acutely vulnerable. In the early months of 1957 they lobbied the members of the Presidium, gaining seven votes – themselves, the aging Voroshilov, Bulganin, and two important economic managers – out of eleven for ousting Khrushchev from power. The plotters then told Khrushchev that they needed to meet to discuss a joint appearance in Leningrad for its anniversary, but when he arrived on June 18, he learned that they wanted to replace him as the leader of the party. Furious debate raged and Mikoyan, alone of the Stalin old guard in support of Khrushchev, left the room briefly and went to Leonid Brezhnev and Elena Furtseva (the only woman ever to play a role in Soviet leadership), both candidate members of the Presidium. He told them to contact the Minister of Defense and a candidate member of the Presidium, Marshal Zhukov, who was absent because the plotters had sent him off on maneuvers. Brezhnev raced to the telephone and summoned the Marshal, who arrived in the Kremlin while the debate still raged. Molotov had his seven votes, but all but one of the candidate members stuck by Khrushchev. Mikoyan and others had also contacted the Central Committee members resident in and near Moscow, and by the party statute the ultimate arbiter of such decisions was the Central Committee (CC). Molotov and the others at first refused to meet with the CC members, but soon realized that they had no choice, especially with Zhukov unwavering in opposition to their plans. He had been the man who had arrested Beria and had the loyalty of the armed forces. The full Central Committee convened on June 22, 1957, the sixteenth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion.

These events had taken place in secret, and only a very few were aware that something was up. For a week the CC, some two hundred strong, lambasted Molotov and his allies, accusing them of mistaken policies, splitting the party, trying to seize power, ignoring the Central Committee, and bringing up the behavior of Molotov and Kaganovich in the great terror. The party elite did not want a return to the fear and despotism of the Stalin era. One of the most outspoken was Brezhnev, a provincial party leader from the Ukraine who had only recently entered the ranks of the party’s central elite. Finally Khrushchev and his supporters denounced the three main plotters as an “anti-party group” and expelled them from the Presidium, replacing them with Brezhnev and Furtseva. In Stalin’s time the plotters could have expected only death: instead they received minor appointments, Molotov going as ambassador to Mongolia. He and his allies had grossly underestimated the new party elite that had come into power since the 1930s – people with a great deal of experience in wartime and economic management and who were appalled at the prospect of a return to the Stalin era. These younger people were Khrushchev’s base in the party, and they would remain in power until the 1980s.

Molotov had criticized Khrushchev for trying to create a new “cult of personality” and run everything himself, but the Central Committee had taken that charge as mere demagoguery. They were to be proved to a large extent wrong in the coming years. Only a few months later Khrushchev arranged the demotion of Marshal Zhukov, accusing him of ignoring party control of the armed forces and despotic behavior. These charges had some truth to them, but his removal from the Ministry of Defense and the Presidium meant that Khrushchev now had no rivals at the top. He was not a dictator like Stalin, but he alone was at the pinnacle of power in the USSR.

Khrushchev used his power to conduct a foreign policy that increasingly involved bluffing his way through crises, alternating cautious diplomacy with wild risks, the most famous being the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He also faced the increasing disintegration of the Soviet bloc, as Albania and Rumania gradually turned into independent Stalinist states, and most important, China moved inexorably away from the USSR toward the Cultural Revolution. Mao and his allies in the Communist movement saw Khrushchev as the embodiment of “revisionism,” of a turn away from the true revolutionary path. Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Kremlin most certainly did not share Mao’s views, though they did think that Khrushchev had frequently exacerbated the conflict by his clumsy personal style. All of these events undermined his standing with the party elite, but equally problematic were the economic policies he pursued.

The problem here was not Khrushchev’s goals. The party elite clearly agreed that the country needed a radical improvement in agriculture. In the late 1950s the urban population still lived largely on black bread, sausage when it was available, and whatever could be afforded from the peasant market. Consumer goods were far more available than earlier but hard to actually obtain. Hence Khrushchev’s desire to put more resources into agriculture, consumer goods, and even housing, was extremely popular not just with the people but with the party leaders. They realized that they could not maintain stability if living standards did not improve radically.

The biggest problem was agriculture. One of his first acts was to abolish the machine–tractor stations set up in the 1930s and transfer their machinery to the kolhozes, a move that meant much greater autonomy for the farms. More was to come. On his 1959 trip to the United States he caused a considerable stir by his visits to American farms in Iowa and his meetings with American farmers. From this experience he seems to have been confirmed in his belief in large-scale, higher-technology farming, for American agriculture was already turning from family farms toward agribusiness. He realized that the USSR was way behind in the production and use of chemical fertilizer. The Stalinist industrialization model had consciously favored metallurgy and coal over chemicals and oil, as they were more suited to the then level of economic development as well as more important for defense production. This decision meant that increases in agricultural production, which did occur after the mid-1930s, came from mechanization, hybridization of plants, and more systematic crop rotation, rather than from the use of fertilizer or pesticides. None of these methods did more than keep pace with rapidly increasing urbanization, and to make matters worse Stalin and his agricultural bosses had accepted various crank schemes in agronomy like the notorious “grass-field” system. This was the notion, accepted by the authorities from the late 1930s, that food grains should be rotated with grasses rather than clover or other plants that aid nitrogen fixation. The system became a major bugbear for Khrushchev, who demanded that Soviet agriculture follow the rotation patterns accepted in American and other agricultural systems, and in 1963 he got his way.

Unfortunately Khrushchev’s programs combined solid planning with dubious schemes like the virgin lands project. Khrushchev, who considered himself something of an agricultural expert because of his years in the Ukraine, was aware that there was a great deal of uncultivated land in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. To him the solution was obvious: the Soviet Union’s low yield in grain could be solved by sending thousands of settlers to these areas to put the steppe under the plow. The result was a 1930s-style mobilization, with the Komsomol in the lead, sending young people out to live in tents while they sowed grain and built houses. The overall size of the Soviet harvest did increase rapidly as a result, but the program also took resources from modernizing the collective farms and it turned out that much of the land was indeed fertile but too arid for continuous cultivation. Environmental degradation was the inevitable result, with falling output. The Kazakh leadership had warned Khrushchev that there was not much suitable new land, but he simply replaced these naysayers with his cronies from Kiev and Moscow.

Besides the virgin lands, his other agricultural obsession was corn. Khrushchev knew even before he went to America that corn was a major component of animal feed throughout the world, and he decided that the Soviet Union should produce corn. Most agronomists thought that it was not a suitable crop outside of some small areas in the far south of the country, but Khrushchev would not agree, even trying to force the authorities in the Baltic republics to grow corn in place of the more traditional crops. Much time and money was expended trying to find a hybrid that would grow well under various conditions, but the project just turned into another centrally sponsored campaign with no major results. Khrushchev, however, would not give up.

Khrushchev’s record in industry was mixed. The 1950s were a period of very high growth rates, even after the end of post-war reconstruction. Soviet achievements in technology, such as the building of a nuclear industry and rockets that could go into space were visible symbols of a modern state. Most of the nuclear development was still secret, but the Sputnik launch in 1957 was a worldwide event. Even more spectacular was Iurii Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, followed by a whole series of space flights. Until the American moon landing in 1969, the Soviets seemed to be way ahead in the space race. Along with these very real achievements there were persistent problems. The new decentralized management system was no better than the old one, and in many areas it simply added a new layer of bureaucracy. More promising was the decision, which Khrushchev enthusiastically supported if he did not originate, of turning massive resources toward the chemical industry and the production of oil and natural gas. The two were related, as much of the raw material for the chemical industry would be petroleum byproducts. The Soviet Union would have plastic. For Khrushchev, the chemical industry was also to be a panacea for agriculture, as he did realize that corn and the virgin lands were not enough.

Unfortunately none of these plans addressed immediate problems. The decisions made in 1959–1960 did lay the basis for subsequent massive developments that shifted the energy base from coal to oil and gas by the 1970s and created a huge chemical industry, but there was little to show for it in the short run. Perhaps his most successful program for the average person was the first attempts at mass housing, the five story (with no elevator) small apartment houses that mushroomed around Moscow and other large cities. These were no longer communal apartments and although they were small they had the usual modern conveniences.

Khrushchev kept tinkering with agriculture and proclaiming grand goals. In 1961 he held another party congress in which he announced that the Soviet Union was going to “build communism,” Marx’s second stage beyond socialism in which the state would wither away among a universal abundance of all possible goods and services. For a population that was still struggling with deficit goods, long lines at stores, and high prices at the peasant market, this program tasted of megalomania. In the next year the authorities even faced a riot in the southern town of Novocherkassk – a riot entirely with economic causes that was harshly repressed.

Coming on top of the Cuban missile crisis, the economic problems were increasingly disturbing. To top it off, Khrushchev did seem to be constructing a “cult of personality.” Movies appeared chronicling his trips abroad in loving detail with titles like Our Nikita Sergeevich. With his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei controlling Izvestiia, one of the two main newspapers, his doings were spread all over the country. He appeared at various meetings with writers and artists, lecturing them about politics and art, the most famous being his performance at an exhibit of mildly modernist art in 1962, where he told the artists that their work looked like a donkey’s tail had painted it. The party leadership did not necessarily disagree, but disliked his practice of dealing with these issues off the cuff and without consultation. It was too much like Stalin’s incursions into economics and linguistics. Khrushchev also antagonized large numbers of people by a new campaign against religion. After Stalin’s recognition of the Orthodox Church and most other religions at the end of the war, the churches gradually began to acquire a modest position in Soviet society. Khrushchev decided to change that, and embarked on another massive wave of persecution. Fortunately it lacked the murderous results of the 1930s, but it did result in the closing of many churches, arrests, and the virtual proscription of religion from Soviet life. The party elite was certainly not in favor of religion, but like Stalin, they no longer thought it was a major issue and preferred simply to control it. Khrushchev’s campaign was unnecessary and was the result of his personal quirks imposed on the country.

Ironically the straw that broke the camel’s back for Brezhnev and the other party leaders came from the intersection of agriculture and science, for a long time one of the chief sore points of the Soviet system. Khrushchev, for all his anti-Stalinism, remained a convinced supporter of Trofim Lysenko and his officially sponsored 1949 condemnation of modern genetics. Lysenko had his own fiefdom in the network of agricultural research institutes, but the Academy of Sciences kept most of his cronies out. Early in 1964 Khrushchev tried to get a number of these cronies elected to the Academy of Sciences, but the physicists, led by Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm, mobilized so much opposition that the prospects were voted down. Khrushchev was furious, though his own scientist daughter tried to persuade him that Lysenko’s work was simply wrong. At a full meeting of the Central Committee in July, after a long rambling speech about agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly announced that part of the problem was with the scientists, with Sakharov’s and the Academy’s meddling in politics, as he saw it, to reject the Lysenkoites. Then he announced that they should just abolish the Academy as a relic of the nineteenth century.

Brezhnev and his colleagues decided that the time had come. The Academy issue was only one of many, but it was just too much. As they were struggling to modernize Soviet society, here was their leader trying to wreck the principal source of innovation, their only hope of catching up to the West. In October 1964, the Central Committee met again, presenting a whole list of charges against Khruschev, including the Academy affair. He did recognize his “rudeness” about Sakharov and the Academy and his obsession with corn, but he continued to defend this behavior in the Cuban missile crisis (“the risk was inevitable”) and in the various Berlin crises. The Committee voted him out, placing Brezhnev in the position of head of the party and Aleksei Kosygin, an economic manager, in the position of Prime Minister.

The new regime largely continued Khrushchev’s policies without his erratic style. The regional Economic Councils were quickly abolished, and the more exotic agricultural campaigns ceased. There was no return to Stalinist methods of rule. Stalin remained unmentionable in most contexts, though some of the World War II generals did describe aspects of his wartime leadership in memoirs, mostly rather negatively. In history textbooks and public statements the achievements of the Stalin era were attributed to “the party and people,” and accounts of his crimes remained as they stood in 1964. Further revelations ceased. The new policy produced some disquiet in the intelligentsia, but for most of the population Stalin was no longer an issue. If anything, popular estimation of the former “great leader of peoples” was more positive than the official line. In two important respects the Brezhnev era actually brought further liberalization. The campaign against religion came to an end, establishing a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union’s various religions that lasted until the 1980s: religion was discouraged, but not prohibited, and the artistic heritage of Orthodoxy in icon-painting and architecture became the object of extensive study for the first time. In science the new regime totally abandoned Lysenko and restored genetics to Soviet biology. The last remnant of Stalinist science disappeared.

The first decade or so of the Brezhnev era was a period of enormous economic growth. Plans laid under Khrushchev came to fruition, as vast new fields of natural gas went into production. In only twenty years gas production increased tenfold, with about half coming from Siberia and a quarter from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Whole new cities sprang up, like Navoi in Uzbekistan, named in typical Soviet fashion for a medieval Central Asian poet. New oil fields opened up, mainly in Western Siberia, and production nearly doubled by the 1980s. The Soviet Union launched a huge program in nuclear power, starting with the Beloiarsk station in the Urals. Beloiarsk followed a largely experimental reactor built near Moscow in the 1950s. It employed a slow-neutron reactor, a design not later used in the Soviet Union, and it produced its first electricity in 1964. Eventually the Soviet Union built nearly fifty nuclear power plants with pressurized water or graphite moderated designs, the latter being the version that failed at Chernobyl. By the 1980s nuclear reactors produced around a quarter of the country’s electricity.

The huge growth in the energy sector signaled a shift from coal to petroleum-based energy sources and nuclear power. It also changed the distribution of energy among the republics, for coal had been mined mainly in the Ukraine until World War II, then increasingly in the Russian republic and Kazakhstan, although the Ukraine still produced almost half of Soviet coal. Oil, by contrast was ninety percent the product of the Russian republic and gas was nearly eighty percent. To some extent nuclear power reset the balance, for the policy was to build nuclear power stations where other resources were absent or in decline. Thus the Chernobyl graphite moderated reactor began to produce electricity in 1977, and the Ukraine came to depend on nuclear power for half its electricity, in contrast to only twenty percent for the USSR as a whole. The southern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe received the largest nuclear power facility in Europe, whose reactors came on line starting in 1985, fortunately with the safer pressurized light water reactors. The other effect of the massive increase in the energy base was that the Soviet Union began to export oil and gas to Eastern Europe and the world in general. Trade with the West as well as Asia began to increase rapidly in the 1950s, but oil and gas exports were in a whole different league. In Eastern Europe, the new exports sped up the transition inaugurated under Khrushchev from one in which Soviet satellites subsidized the USSR with low resource prices to the reverse. In the 1960s Soviet gas and oil went to “fraternal” socialist countries at considerably below market price. The export of oil to the West compensated for these subsidies by bringing in large amounts of hard currency that allowed the Soviets to make much needed purchases of technology and grain abroad.

As elsewhere, the nuclear industry was also tied into military production, which allowed the Soviet Union to reach rough parity with the United States in the late 1960s, for the first time. The foundation of this parity was the development of nuclear submarines and of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which now could actually strike the United States from the USSR in the event of war. Long-range bombers were no longer necessary. The result was an increasingly expensive arms race that absorbed huge amounts of capital and trained personnel, which the USSR could not afford as easily as its American rival. The arms race was only part of the social and ecological cost of the final decades of Soviet industrialization. Rivers and forests were polluted with nuclear waste, leading to serious health problems in the affected areas. The oil and gas fields disturbed the fragile sub-arctic ecology, and hydropower meant the flooding of large areas, removing the inhabitants and causing all sorts of changes in the environment, many of them totally unanticipated. This was not merely the story of arrogant party officials pushing scientists and engineers to construct shoddy plants in pristine nature: the scientists were convinced that their designs were perfectly safe and the ecological effects were minor. Indeed it was the physicists who most consistently pushed for more nuclear power plants, convincing party officials who worried about the massive costs.

The early Brezhnev years also saw a radical transformation of Soviet agriculture, at least of its technology. The same collective farms that had operated for decades without enough fertilizer and pesticides were using three to five times as much as American farms by the late 1970s. In 1966 the authorities abolished the labor-day system, and collective farmers received their share of the proceeds in money. Agricultural production expanded rapidly, freeing up millions of peasants for industrial work. The migration to the cities in the last thirty years of Soviet power was so great that large areas, especially in central and northern Russia, began to empty out, leaving thousands of abandoned villages dotting the landscape. For the first time in Russian history, the city population outnumbered the country residents, rising to more than two thirds of the total in the USSR by 1990.

These massive increases in production, the creation of a nuclear industry and a more or less modern chemical industry, also brought a wave of consumer goods for the first time in Soviet history. Food stores began to display some variety, both of Soviet products and canned goods imported from Bulgaria and elsewhere. Dairy products appeared in modest variety. To make up the needs in grain and fodder, the Soviet Union imported grain from Canada and the United States regularly. The result was a massive improvement, but not universal prosperity. Supplies were irregular, and one or another food item was in deficit every year. Carrots disappeared in one area for several months, and returned while beets disappeared from the stores. Workplace distribution continued, if on a lesser scale, to supply hard-to-find items like chickens. Consumer electronics became nearly universal in cities and television even appeared in the villages. At the same time actually buying a television set was a major operation. Telephones came mostly from Poland in exchange for cheap Soviet gas and were notoriously unreliable. The housing crisis eased as thick rings of pre-fabricated high-rise housing surrounded Soviet cities. Finally, most urban residents left the communal apartments for new apartments with their own kitchens and bathrooms. Unfortunately, the other necessary facilities, such as schools and stores, often failed to appear in the new neighborhoods for decades. Production boomed, but distribution remained in a state of permanent disorder. With all the problems, however, the first decade or so of the Brezhnev years was in many ways the high point of the Soviet Union. Not only had it achieved superpower status but the population also finally acquired the basic elements of a modern standard of living. There were two problems with that standard of living. One was the post-war boom in Europe and America that created a whole new world standard of living, and news about that seeped across the border. The USSR was chasing a moving target. The other problem was that the rise in Soviet living standards stalled after the middle of the 1970s. More housing appeared, but virtually all consumer goods gradually entered a permanent state of deficit, which meant that they were available but increasingly difficult to actually find. The struggle of daily life was the background to the malaise that settled over Soviet society.

This malaise was not explicitly political, outside of small dissident groups in the intelligentsia. The first dissidents had appeared in the 1960s, when it was finally clear that openly opposing the Soviet system would lead to harassment and even prison in some cases, but not death or long incarceration. The KGB under Yurii Andropov changed its mode of operation. It no longer looked for organized opposition groups tied to émigrés in the West and instead tried to police society with a combination of persuasion and selective force. For most people who fell afoul of the system, the KGB brought them in for a “conversation” and reminded them of the possible consequences of persistent action, and then left it at that. A very small minority of intellectuals continued to protest and went to prison or to psychiatric hospitals. The dissidents mostly came from highly privileged positions in Soviet society. Intellectuals continued to have apartments, privileged access to goods, and a select few maintained opportunities for foreign travel. Writers lived in dachas in the Peredelkino and other writers’ colonies, while ordinary citizens struggled with long lines and mass-construction housing. Scientists, especially those in strategic areas like physics, lived in similar places, and also had contact with power on the basis of their utility to the military and the civilian nuclear industry. Not surprisingly some began to chafe at this privileged but ultimately powerless role. In 1968 Andrei Sakharov moved from criticism of nuclear weapons testing and Lysenko’s biology to criticizing the whole system and formulating notions of convergence that would produce a society more like the West than the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn moved from fictional and non-fiction accounts of the Stalinist GULAG to a Russian nationalist position that criticized equally Western and Soviet society in favor of an authoritarian religious state based only on the Slavic peoples of the USSR. The phenomenon closest to widespread dissent was the emigration of almost a million Soviet Jews, some forty percent of the Jewish population, between 1970 and 1990. The first wave consisted of more or less committed Zionists who moved to Israel, but the by the 1980s that stream had dried to a trickle, and most Jewish emigrants had moved to the United States and Germany in search of better economic conditions.

The dissidents attracted enormous attention in the West during the Cold War, and their ideas and writings were well known in the Soviet intelligentsia. Some other intellectuals supported them but the dissidents had no popular following. Nevertheless the authorities saw them as a threat to their utopian conception of a unified society, exiling Solzhenitsyn to the West in 1974 and Sakharov eventually to Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod), east of Moscow. Needless to say their works were published only underground or in the West, and they were never mentioned in public. More serious was the general sense that the country was somehow on the wrong track, a feeling that crystallized with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. The most common reaction to the invasion was neither patriotism nor indignation, but the sense that the leadership had made a serious mistake. For most people the Soviet Union remained a legitimate state, but one that was most definitely in the hands of incompetent and short-sighted leaders.

In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died. The generation that he represented, the young party leaders promoted in the late 1930s, was now a group of elderly men who simply could not understand why things had not come out as they had expected or even how bad the situation remained for the mass of the people. The world had also changed outside the USSR and they failed to grasp the challenge created by mass prosperity not only in the United States but also in post-war Europe and Japan. On Brezhnev’s death the Central Committee put in his place Yurii Andropov, the head of the KGB since 1967. Nearly seventy and in poor health, Andropov never had time to formulate a new policy, but he did bring to Moscow Alexander Iakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other future reformers. On Andropov’s death in 1984, the CC appointed the seventy-two year old Konstantin Chernenko to succeed him. Chernenko had been Brezhnev’s director of personnel for decades and the appointment allegedly came against Andropov’s wishes. If Andropov really did prefer Gorbachev, his wishes were fulfilled in 1985 when Chernenko died in turn, and Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was to preside over its demise.