Russia A History

13. From Stalinism to Stagnation 1953–1985

GREGORY L. FREEZE

After 1953, as the structural faults became increasingly apparent, Stalin’s successors applied various panaceas to repair or conceal the fissures. But neither the spasmodic reformism of Khrushchev nor the systematic standpattism of Brezhnev had much effect. Despite superpower status abroad and repression at home, by the early 1980s the USSR—like its leadership—was tottering on the verge of collapse.

AFTER decades of personalized tyranny, news of Stalin’s illness had a traumatic impact on the population. Recalling the recent ‘doctors’ plot’ (with transparent anti-Semitic overtones), some contemporaries suspected that ‘the doctors are involved in this. If that is confirmed, then the people will be still more outraged against the Jews.’ Many found the idea of life without the all-knowing Vozhd′ (Leader) unthinkable. Hope of instantaneous justice was gone. As one letter to the Central Committee put it: once Stalin is dead, ‘there won’t be anyone to complain to. If something happens now, people say: “We’ll complain to Comrade Stalin”, but now there won’t be anyone.’

But there was ‘someone’, in fact several of them, all fighting to succeed the Leader. That successor, however, would inherit not only the panoply of power but also the other legacy of Stalinist rule: a host of critical problems. These problems unleashed a torrent of letters to newspapers, government organs, and especially the Central Committee.

The problems were daunting in their complexity and gravity. One was power itself: Stalin himself had so personalized power, leaving the lines of institutional authority so amorphous and confused, that many key organs (even the Central Committee) had atrophied and virtually disappeared. To re-establish regular governance, it was essential to rebuild the institutions of party and state administration. Related to this was another grisly legacy—the victims and survivors of the purge and terror. Apart from posthumous rehabilitation, the most urgent question concerned the two million politicals and common criminals currently in the GULAG and still larger numbers in exile and banishment. Stalin’s heirs also had to resolve critical economic questions—above all, whether to continue Stalin’s one-sided industrialization (which emphasized heavy industry) or to develop agriculture and light industry. The Stalinist model, as one acerbic letter to the Central Committee noted, had produced not communism but ‘deficitism’. N. S. Khrushchev admitted that ‘there is little milk or meat’ and asked: ‘What kind of communism is this if there are no sweets or butter?’ That ‘deficitism’ exacerbated social tensions, for it did not apply to everyone. Stalinist social policy had vigorously combatted ‘levelling’ (uranilovka) in favour of sharp wage differentials and a highly stratified social order, with scarce resources being diverted to political élites and the scientific-technical intelligentsia. A letter to the Central Committee complained bitterly that ‘of late our country has simply forgotten the simple person—the worker, the kolkhoznik. All that the press and radio talk about is the academicians, scholars, agronomists, engineers.’ Another critical domestic issue was minority tensions, especially in the newly annexed territories of the West. As authorities confirmed, ‘in many districts [of western Ukraine] an anti-Soviet nationalist underground still exists and is actively operating as armed bands that commit sabotage, plunder, and terrorize the population and party-Soviet activists’.

In foreign policy Stalin’s heirs faced another knot of difficult questions—from the Korean War and Maoist pretensions to the infernal ‘German Question’ and Tito’s challenge in Yugoslavia. Resolutions of these problems also had major domestic implications, above all for the military budget, which consumed an inordinate share of national income. Even the ‘official’ military budget of 1952 (a pale reflection of reality) revealed a 45 per cent increase since 1950. Clearly, a regime seeking to modernize its economy could ill afford to divert so many resources—capital, labour—to so unproductive a sector.

Historical scholarship on the post-Stalinist period is still in its infancy. Until recently most literature belonged to the genre of ‘Kremlinology’—a mélange of inferences and wild guesses based on party propaganda, diplomatic gossip, distorted statistics, and symbolic gestures. Recently, however, Russian authorities have declassified materials from the super-secret ‘Kremlin Archive’ (renamed ‘Presidential Archive’) and from the operational files of the Central Committee. This chapter draws heavily upon these materials. It aims to present a fresh portrait of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras—named after two men who symbolize two different approaches to salvaging Stalin’s legacy: reform and retrenchment. By the early 1980s, however, it was obvious that neither had worked.

Perils of Reform

The first decade after Stalin’s death was marked by change so profound that perceptive observers began to question the static ‘totalitarian’ model that still shaped Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union. That decade was an era of frenetic reformism not only in the political system but also in society, economy, culture, and nationality policy. It was also a time of excesses and errors, which Khrushchev’s critics attributed to his boorishness, his penchant for ‘harebrained schemes’, and his reckless search for panaceas. The ill-repute of the Khrushchev era was so intense that, in the days of perestroika, even reformers were loath to invoke his name or reconsider his strategies. In that sense, perhaps the worst legacy of Khrushchevism was not that reform failed, but that it deterred new attempts until it was too late.

The Struggle for Succession

On the evening of 5 March, two hours before Stalin’s death, his heirs met in the Kremlin to assign spheres of power. The most prominent appointments included Georgii Malenkov (Stalin’s heir apparent) as chairman of the Council of Ministers, Lavrentii Beria as head of the Ministry of Interior (reorganized to include the Ministry of State Security), and Viacheslav Molotov as Foreign Minister. After a bizarre incident involving Pravda (which published a self-serving photomontage of Malenkov, ostensibly without his knowledge), on 14 March Malenkov resigned as ranking secretary in the Central Committee and assumed leadership of the state apparatus. Power in the Central Committee now devolved on Khrushchev, who eventually (September 1953) assumed the title of ‘First Secretary’.

Initially at least, Khrushchev seemed an unlikely pretender for power: he did not even speak at Stalin’s funeral, an honour reserved for the big three—Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. None the less, Khrushchev was the consummate party functionary, bore the imprimatur of a top-ranking Stalin aide, and had close ties throughout the party apparatus. He also had extraordinary sangfroid and the capacity to speak effectively; his role at the Central Committee plenums, in particular, shows a self-confident ‘apparatchik’s apparatchik’. But he also knew how to relate to the common folk; an incorrigible populist, he loved to visit factories and kolkhozy to see conditions for himself. Khrushchev had a genuine concern for popular welfare. As Ukrainian party secretary, in 1947 he had even had the temerity to resist Stalin’s unreasonable demands for grain deliveries that ignored crop failure and famine—an act of defiance that earned a furious Stalinist epithet of ‘populist’ and temporary replacement by L. M. Kaganovich. By the end of the year, however, Khrushchev was reinstated as Ukrainian First Secretary and subsequently, in December 1949, summoned to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee and First Secretary of the Moscow party committee.

Beria, with the vast forces of the Interior Ministry and secret police at his command, was the most formidable contender. Recent archival disclosures have shown that, whether from conviction or cunning, Beria suddenly struck the pose of ‘liberal’ reformer. Within days of Stalin’s death, he not only spoke of the need to protect civil rights but even arranged an amnesty on 27 March that released many prisoners (too many common criminals, in Khrushchev’s view), including some people associated with the élite (for example, Molotov’s wife, Mikoyan’s son, and Khrushchev’s own daughter-in-law). Beria also shifted the GULAG from his own domain and later proposed that it be liquidated ‘in view of its economic inefficiency and lack of prospects’. He also exposed some major fabrications in late Stalinism, most notably the ‘doctors’ plot’ (4 April) and also proposed to release 58,000 former ‘counter-revolutionaries’ from permanent exile. The security chief even challenged the policy of Russian predominance in non-Russian republics; heeding Beria’s recommendation, on 12 June 1953 the party leadership agreed to condemn various ‘distortions’, to replace officials who did not speak the local language, and to require the use of the local language in republican communications. Beria also took an interest in foreign affairs, proposing to allow a unified (but neutral) Germany and to seek a rapprochement with Yugoslavia.

United by fear if not principle, Beria’s adversaries called a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June 1953 and, in his presence, voted unanimously for his immediate dismissal and arrest. Shortly afterwards they convened a plenum of the Central Committee to discuss the ‘criminal anti-party and anti-state activities of Beria’. An opening address by Malenkov gave a vivid description of how Beria ‘put the Ministry of Interior above the party and government’, with the result that the ministry ‘acquired too great an influence and was no longer under the control of the party’. Malenkov also castigated Beria’s newfound liberalism (in particular, his mass amnesty of criminals and proposals for a radical change in policy towards Germany and Yugoslavia) and denounced his maladroit attempts to gather information on ‘shortcomings in the work of party organs’ and even to maintain surveillance on members of the Presidium. The second main address was delivered by Khrushchev, who reiterated the attack on Beria’s belated liberalism and bluntly accused the police of fabricating ‘many falsified cases’. Six months later Beria and five of his close associates were tried, pronounced guilty, and shot.

The principal threat eliminated, the chief contenders were the two main speakers at the July plenum—Malenkov and Khrushchev. At one level, the two simply manœuvred to broaden their respective political bases—Malenkov in the state apparatus, Khrushchev in the party. But they also raised important issues, especially questions of economic development and agricultural policy. Malenkov proposed a ‘liberal’ policy giving greater emphasis to light industry, chiefly by diverting resources from agriculture; in his view, the regime had ‘solved’ the production problem and could rely on an intensification of production (i.e. mechanization, electrification, and increased use of mineral fertilizers). In response Khrushchev challenged the emphasis on consumer goods and, especially, Malenkov’s cheerful assumption that the agricultural question was ‘solved’. Khrushchev proposed to increase, not cut, investment in the agricultural sector, above all through the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme—an ambitious scheme to convert huge tracts of pastureland in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan to arable land. By shifting wheat production to the Virgin Lands, the Ukraine could grow the corn needed to provide fodder for greater meat and milk production.

Khrushchev’s programme, however, proved a hard sell in the party. Investment in agriculture (a radical break from Stalin’s utter neglect) encountered stiff opposition from conservatives in the centre, especially the ‘metal-eaters’ in heavy industry; it also elicited opposition from Central Asians, who feared wind erosion, Moscow’s intervention and control, and a mass influx of Russians. By August 1954, however, the First Secretary had prevailed: a joint party-government decree endorsed the Virgin Lands programme and raised the target for newly cultivated land from 13 million to 30 million hectares by 1956. Blessed with unusually good weather, the Virgin Lands programme initially brought huge increases in agricultural output (a 35.3 per cent increase between 1954 and 1958), causing the ebullient Khrushchev to make the foolhardy prediction that in two or three years the Soviet Union could satisfy all its food needs.

Simultaneously, Khrushchev declared war on ‘bureaucracy’. In part, he was seeking to undermine Malenkov’s power base—the state apparatus, which was indeed bloated (with 6.5 million employees by 1954). But Khrushchev, the former provincial party chief, also recognized the need to decentralize and shift power and responsibility to the republic level. As a result, by 1955 he had cut the number of Union-level ministries in half (from 55 to 25) and state employees (by 11.5 per cent). This decentralization significantly enhanced the authority of national republics; for example, enterprises under republic control rose from one-third of total industrial output (1950) to 56 per cent (1956). The shift was especially marked in Ukraine, where the republic-controlled output rose from 36 to 76 per cent.

By late 1954 Khrushchev’s programme, and its main architect, had triumphed over Malenkov. The latter, defeated on policy issues and confronted with ominous references to his ‘complicity’ in fabricating the ‘Leningrad affair’, resigned in December 1954. Two months later, he was formally replaced by N. Bulganin as premier, Khrushchev’s nominal co-equal in the leadership.

Cultural Thaw and De-Stalinization

Amid the struggle over power and policy, the regime cautiously began to dismantle the Stalinist system of repression and secrecy. Symbolically, in late 1953 it opened the Kremlin itself to visitors; during the next three years, eight million citizens would visit this inner sanctum of communist power. Openness also extended to culture, hitherto strait-jacketed by censorship and ideology. The change was heralded in V. Pomerantsev’s essay ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (December 1953), which assailed the Stalinist canons of socialist realism that had prevailed since the 1930s. Thus began a cautious liberalization that took its name from Ilia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (1954), and that extended to many spheres of cultural and intellectual life. It even applied to religion—long a favourite target of persecution; a party edict of 10 November 1954, responding to complaints about illegal church closings, admonished party zealots to avoid ‘offensive attacks against clergy and believers participating in religious observances’.

The most important change, however, was crypto-de-Stalinization—a cautious repudiation of the ‘cult of personality’ that commenced immediately after Stalin’s death. The initiative came from above, not below. Not that all in the leadership supported such measures; Stalin’s henchmen, such as Voroshilov and Kaganovich, themselves deeply implicated, remained inveterate foes of de-Stalinization. Apart from some early veiled critiques (for example, Malenkov’s comment about ‘massive disorders’ under the ‘cult of personality’), the principal sign of Stalin’s ‘disgrace’ was sheer silence about the leader. For example, the regime declined to ‘immemorialize’ Stalin by renaming the Komsomol in his honour, dropped plans to transform Stalin’s ‘near dacha’ into a museum, and let 1953 pass without mention of the ‘Stalin prizes’ or the customary celebration of his birthday. Servile quotations from Stalin quietly disappeared; authors who persisted were roundly criticized for ignoring Marx and Lenin. The silence did not go unnoticed; in July a party secretary in Moscow wrote to Khrushchev to enquire ‘Why have editorials in Pravda recently ceased to include quotations and extracts from the speeches and works of I. V. Stalin?’

Why did Stalin’s closest associates decide to demote the Leader to a non-person? Apart from a desire to distance themselves from Stalin’s (and their own) crimes, de-Stalinizers had several motives. Zealous ‘de-Stalinizers’ (including Khrushchev) were zealous communists: they denounced the cult for its voluntarism and for crediting Stalin, not the party or people, for the great achievements of industrialization and victory over fascism. That is why, for example, authorities decided to interdict a poem by A. Markov that failed to show the people as the ‘creative force in history’ and assigned ‘the main place in the poem’ to Stalin, who is ‘shown in the spirit of the cult of personality’. In a memorandum of 27 April 1953 the philosopher G. A. Aleksandrov denounced the cult and opposed reprinting the Stalin biography—partly because of its ‘many factual inaccuracies and editorial mistakes’, but mainly because of its ‘populist-subjectivist view on the role of the individual and especially of leaders in history’ and because of its failure ‘to elucidate sufficiently the role of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the struggle of the Soviet people for socialism and communism’. Khrushchev similarly complained that Stalin had been ‘a demigod’, who ‘was credited with all accomplishments, as if all blessings came from him’.

Zealous de-Stalinizers, moreover, had personally experienced Stalin’s fearsome tyranny. Close family members of Stalin’s top associates were counted among his victims—kinsmen, even immediate family members, of members in the Politburo. Postwar campaigns like the ‘Leningrad affair’ swept away top figures in the party, leaving many others feeling profoundly vulnerable. The philosopher Aleksandrov himself had been a victim of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign: after A. A. Zhdanov denounced his history of Western philosophy (for exaggerating West European influence on Marxism) in June 1947, Aleksandrov was replaced as ideological watchdog by M. A. Suslov. In Stalin’s final years top aides grew fearful that the dictator had new designs on them; according to Khrushchev, only the dictator’s death prevented him from carrying out plans to arrest Molotov and Mikoyan.

Khrushchev himself had reason to fear the ageing tyrant. The most dramatic incident involved Khrushchev’s proposal to increase agricultural output by merging kolkhozy into larger ‘agrocities’. He advertised this idea in a Pravda article on 4 March 1951, but without first obtaining Stalin’s endorsement—probably because Stalin no longer read many documents. After Stalin subjected the article to devastating criticism, a terror-stricken Khrushchev hastily sent Stalin a letter of abject self-abasement and pleaded for the opportunity to denounce himself: ‘Profoundly distraught by the mistake I committed, I have been thinking how this could best be corrected. I decided to ask you to let me correct this mistake myself. I am prepared to publish in the press and to criticize my own article, published on 4 March, examining its false theses in detail’.

Khrushchev and his supporters also addressed the question of the cult’s victims and initiated a cautious rehabilitation, beginning first with élite figures. A typical early case involved I. M. Gronskii, a former editor of Izvestiia; sentenced to fifteen years in prison for ‘wrecking’, in June 1953 he petitioned the Central Committee to review his case. An investigation confirmed that his ‘confession’ was obtained through coercion and that he was innocent. In May 1954 the party established special commissions to review the cases; during the first year, these cautious commissions rehabilitated 4,620 individuals, leaving the mass of politicals—and ordinary criminals—in the maws of GULAG.

Apart from appeals for rehabilitation, the regime had other reasons for concern about GULAG. Above all, this prison empire became increasingly volatile, with frequent and violent disorders. The most famous, at ‘Gorlag’ (Norilsk) in 1953, required a military assault that left more than a thousand prisoners dead. Insurrections also exploded at Steplag (1954), Kolyma (1955), and Ozerlag (1956). More important, the ‘corrective labour’ system was anything but corrective: rates of recidivism were shockingly high. According to one study (April 1956), 25 per cent of current prisoners were former inmates. But such results were inevitable for a system manned by people with abysmally low professional standards: three-quarters of the camp administrators did not even have a secondary education. The size and complexity of GULAG also militated against better results. The population of camps and prisons (2,472,247 on 1 January 1953) declined after the Beria amnesty, but then increased sharply. On 1 January 1956 the prisons held 1.6 million inmates (with another 150,000 in transit or under investigation); GULAG’s 46 corrective labour camps and 524 labour colonies held another 940,880 people (including 113,739 guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’). In short, initial measures had barely altered the Stalinist prison-camp system; it was the Twentieth Party Congress that would open the floodgates for rehabilitation and reform.

Twentieth Party Congress (1956)

The first such assembly since Stalin’s death, the Twentieth Party Congress was a watershed in the political history of modern Russia. It sought to revitalize the party by including many new faces, not only among the 1,349 voting delegates, but also in the leadership: roughly half of the oblast and regional secretaries, even the Central Committee, were new. That turnover reflected Khrushchev’s campaign to consolidate power: one-third of the members of the Central Committee came from Khrushchev’s Moscow and Ukrainian ‘tail’ or entourage. The congress began in humdrum fashion, with little hint of the coming fireworks; Khrushchev’s report as First Secretary made only passing reference to Stalin. Critical tones, however, reverberated in the speeches of M. Suslov (about the ‘cult of the individual’) and Anastas Mikoyan (who attacked the cult and Stalin’s last opus, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR).

But the bombshell exploded unexpectedly on 24 February when delegates were summoned to an unscheduled, late-night speech by Khrushchev behind closed doors. His speech on ‘the cult of the personality and its consequences’, a text of 26,000 words requiring four hours for delivery, offered a devastating account of Stalin’s crimes after Kirov’s murder in December 1934. It presented shocking statistics on the number of party members, congress delegates, and military leaders who perished in the 1930s amid ‘mass violations of socialist legality’. The report also blamed Stalin for catastrophic mistakes in the Second World War, for the mass deportation of entire peoples, and for other crimes after the war. By suggesting that the cult appeared after collectivization and industrialization (which were thus not called into question), Khrushchev sought to distinguish between Stalin’s crimes and Soviet achievements and to uphold the principle that ‘the true creators of the new life are the popular masses led by the Communist Party’. The main thrust of the speech was incorporated in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956 ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’.

By then the rehabilitation process was already in high gear. The regime advised investigatory commissions that many convictions were based on un-proven accusations or ‘confessions obtained through the use of illegal methods of investigation’. Nevertheless, it exempted whole categories from rehabilitation: ‘nationalists’ in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics who had fought against the Soviet Union during the war as well as those ‘who were really exposed as traitors, terrorists, saboteurs, spies and wreckers’. To accelerate the process, a party commission was sent to interview political prisoners and judge whether they should be released. The undertaking was enormous, involving more than one hundred thousand ‘counterrevolutionaries’. According to a report from 15 June 1956, authorities had already released 51,439 prisoners (including 26,155 politicals) and reduced the sentences for another 19,093. Although restricted to cases initiated after 1935 (on the specious grounds that ‘mass violation of individual rights’ commenced only then), by 1961 rehabilitation gradually enveloped a large number of Stalin’s victims, including half of the politicals who had been executed.

De-Stalinization was also fraught with foreign repercussions. Khrushchev’s secret speech, leaked by a Polish communist, quickly found its way into print (with the assistance of the American CIA). It had an extraordinary impact on foreign communists—many of whose comrades-in-arms had perished in the Stalinist repressions. In April 1956 the Pravda correspondent in Bonn reported that West German communists reacted favourably to the speech, yet wanted to know why the CPSU had failed to stop Stalin and, more important, ‘where is the guarantee that the Soviet comrades will not again make mistakes and bring harm to the fraternal parties through their new mistakes?’ Khrushchev personally had to fend off similar questioning from Italian communists. The attack on Stalin also contributed to the rebellious mood in Poland, where demonstrations in Poznan ended in bloodshed and brought a change in party leadership.

The main explosion came in Hungary: in late April 1956 the Soviet ambassador, Iurii Andropov, warned Moscow that de-Stalinization had exacerbated internal tensions and provoked criticism from Stalinists in the Hungarian Politburo. By September Andropov’s dispatches became increasingly alarmist, with warnings about an anti-communist movement and disintegration of the Hungarian Communist Party. The popular movement culminated in street demonstrations on 23 October, when angry crowds smashed Stalinist statues and shouted demands for democratization and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The next day the Hungarian party elected Imre Nagy as its chief, and he promptly summoned Andropov to ask about Soviet troop movements in eastern Hungary. The denouement came soon: after Hungary declared itself a neutral state, on 4 November the Russian army invaded and suppressed the popular insurrection with raw force. A week later the KGB chief reported that Soviet forces had arrested 3,773 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and seized 90,000 firearms.

The attack on Stalin also had reverberations inside the USSR. Rehabilitation involved such vast numbers that even Khrushchev became anxious. Thus, to protect ‘state interests’ and understate the scale of repression, the KGB falsely informed relatives that many of the executed had received sentences of hard labour and died of natural causes. More problematic was the fate of entire peoples deported to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration—such as the Karachai, Chechens, Ingushi, Kabardinians, and Balkars. Although the government began in April 1956 to allow certain groups (the main exceptions being the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars) to return home, repatriation created new problems of its own when returnees demanded restitution of property. The result was fierce ethnic conflict, such as the four-day riot in August 1958 that involved Russians, Chechens, and Ingushi.

But the political resonance from de-Stalinization was muted in Russia. A KGB report on ‘anti-Soviet’ activities during celebrations for the October Revolution in 1956 cited only minor incidents—for example, ‘hooligans’ demolished two sculptures of Stalin in Kherson, shredded photographs of party leaders in Sevastopol, defaced a portrait of Khrushchev in Serpukhov, and disseminated anti-Soviet leaflets in Batumi. The action of a tenth-grade student in Iaroslavl (who marched past the tribune with a banner that read: ‘We demand the removal of Soviet troops from Hungary’) was as unique as it was courageous. Nevertheless, the ‘vigilant’ leaders became anxious and on 14 December 1956 approved the proposals of a special commission (chaired by L. I. Brezhnev) to combat the growth of anti-Soviet sentiments and activities. The next year the KGB crushed a student democratic movement at Moscow State University that, under the leadership of L. Krasnopevtsev, had distributed leaflets and agitated in favour of full-scale democratization. In Archangel the police uncovered a tiny group that categorically repudiated the Stalinist legacy: ‘Stalin, having destroyed his personal adversaries, established a fascist autocratic regime in the USSR, the brutality of which has no equals in history’.

All this galvanized Stalinists to oppose Khrushchev and his policies. Although Khrushchev later claimed to have broad support in the party, many party members—including several members of the Politburo—opposed de-Stalinization. Stalwarts like A. M. Peterson of Riga openly challenged the new policy: ‘Comrades in the Central Committee, do you really not feel that the party expects from you a rehabilitation of Stalin?’ Pro-Stalinist sentiments were particularly strong in Stalin’s home republic of Georgia; news of Khrushchev’s secret speech had even ignited street demonstrations in Tbilisi.

The foreign and domestic turbulence impelled Khrushchev to retreat from a public campaign against Stalin, with the rationalization that the ‘people’ were not yet ready for the new line. Although individual rehabilitations continued, the regime took steps to curtail debate and criticism of Stalin. A telling sign of the change was the famous ‘Burdzhalov’ affair in October 1956 involving a historical journal (Voprosy istorii), which had published revelations about Stalin’s role in 1917 and subsequent falsification in Soviet historiography. By reprimanding the chief editor and cashiering the assistant editor (E. N. Burdzhalov, the principal culprit), the regime made clear that it would not tolerate anything that might delegitimize the revolution and its own claims to power.

The zig-zags in policy aroused confusion and criticism from below. Local party officials quoted one member as complaining that ‘the leaders of party and state have become muddled in criticizing the cult of personality of Stalin: at first they condemned him, but now they have started to praise him again’. In January 1957 an engineer wrote to the Central Committee to complain that ‘there are two N. S. Khrushchevs in the Central Committee of CPSU: the first N. S. Khrushchev with complete [adherence to] Leninist principles directly exposes and wages battle against the personality of Stalin; the second N. S. Khrushchev defends the actions of Stalin that he personally perpetrated against the people and party during his twenty years of personal dictatorship.’ Individual rehabilitation continued, but Khrushchev now turned his attention from de-Stalinization to political and administrative reform.

Democratization and Decentralization

The years 1957–61 marked the apogee of Khrushchev’s attempt at structural reform along two main lines. One was ‘democratization’, a campaign to dislodge an entrenched bureaucracy and to shift responsibility directly to ‘the people’. Khrushchev was the consummate populist, fond of hobnobbing with workers and peasants and flaunting his closeness to the people. He was also profoundly suspicious of ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘partocrats’ (party functionaries). And their numbers were legion; as a Central Committee resolution (21 May 1957) acidly observed, since 1940 primary party organizations had increased twofold, but their number of salaried functionaries had grown fivefold. To combat bureaucratization and ensure ‘fresh forces’, Khrushchev applied term limits not only to regional and oblastsecretaries (two-thirds of whom were replaced between 1955 and 1960), but even to those in élite organs: two-thirds of the Council of Ministers and one-half of the Central Committee changed between 1956 and 1961. The objective, as a party resolution explained in 1957, was to eradicate the cult of personality and ‘ensure the broad participation of the working masses in the management of the state’. This also meant an expansion of party membership, which increased from 6.9 million to 11.0 million members between 1954 and 1964 (60 per cent of whom were listed as workers and peasants in 1964). Khrushchev also sought to expand the people’s role in running the state—for example, by increasing the authority of organs of ‘popular control’ and reviving ‘comrade courts’ to handle minor offences and misdemeanours.

The second, related thrust of reform was decentralization—a perennial Russian panacea for solving problems and inciting initiative at the grass roots. By 1955 Khrushchev had already transferred 11,000 enterprises (along with planning and financial decisions) from central to republican control. Moscow went further in May 1956, reassigning the plants of twelve ministries to republic jurisdiction. The capstone to decentralization came in 1957 with the establishment of sovnarkhozy—105 regional economic councils given comprehensive authority over economic development. Republican authorities gained so much power that their prime ministers became ex officio members of the USSR Council of Ministers. Khrushchev also dismantled much of the old bureaucracy (including 140 ministries at the republic, union-republic, and union levels). The underlying idea was to bring decision-making closer to the enterprise to ensure better management and greater productivity.

Decentralization, together with resentment over de-Stalinization, fuelled growing opposition to Khrushchev. Although Khrushchev had strong support in the Central Committee (where republic and provincial secretaries—the main beneficiaries of reform—dominated), he faced stiff opposition in the ruling Presidium. The latter represented old party élites and entrenched officialdom in Moscow, who not only watched their empires shrivel or disappear, but sometimes had to relocate to a provincial site. When, for example, Khrushchev relocated the main offices of the Ministry of Agriculture 100 km. from Moscow (to be closer to the fields!), top officials had a daily commute of two to three hours in each direction.

One month after the sovnarkhoz reform was promulgated, Khrushchev faced a full-blown revolt in the Presidium. On 18 June his nominal co-equal, Bulganin, asked Khrushchev to convene a meeting of the Presidium, where a majority was prepared to vote his dismissal. Khrushchev, however, insisted that only the body that elected him—the Central Committee—could authorize his dismissal; with the assistance of military aircraft (supplied by his ally, Marshal Zhukov), Khrushchev flew Central Committee members from their provincial posts to Moscow. His adversaries in the Presidium finally agreed to convene a special plenum of the Central Committee. The result was a complete rout of Khrushchev’s opponents, who were denounced as ‘the Anti-Party Group’ and their leaders (Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Molotov) expelled from the Central Committee. The new Presidium included critical supporters, such as Marshal Zhukov, and high-level functionaries like L. I. Brezhnev and A. I. Kosygin who would later have Khrushchev himself removed. Although, for the sake of appearances, Bulganin was allowed temporarily to remain head of the state, in March 1958 Khrushchev assumed his post as chief of state.

Having tamed the opposition, Khrushchev next dealt with his key supporter—Marshal Zhukov. The latter had begun to voice the military’s dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s decision to scale down the army (from 5.8 million in 1950 to 3.6 million in 1960) and to deny costly weapons systems (cutting the military’s share of the budget in 1956 from 19.9 per cent to 18.2 per cent). On 29 October 1957, just a few weeks after the spectacular launch of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik (4 October), a party resolution denounced Zhukov for restricting its role in the army (thereby ‘violating Leninist party principles’) and for propagating ‘a cult of Comrade G. K. Zhukov … with his personal complicity’. The last major political counterpoint to Khrushchev appeared to have been removed.

Economy, Society, and Culture

The late 1950s represented the golden age for the Khrushchev economy, which boasted extraordinarily high rates of growth in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Altogether, the annual rate of growth in the GNP increased from 5.0 per cent in 1951–5 to 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 (the Fifth Five-Year Plan). The most spectacular progress was to be found in the industrial sector: the total growth (80 per cent) even exceeded the ambitious plan target (65 per cent). In 1987 Soviet analysts revealed that this was by far the most successful industrial growth of the whole post-Stalinist era. With labour productivity rising by 62 per cent and the return on assets (‘profit’) amounting to 17 per cent, the Soviet economy made enormous strides. The launching of the satellite Sputnik seemed to demonstrate the might, if not superiority, of the Soviet system. As Soviet industrial production increased from 30 to 55 per cent of American output between 1950 and 1960, Khrushchev seemed to have good ground for his bravado about ‘overtaking and surpassing’ America.

Agriculture, the unloved stepchild of Stalinist economics, became a new focus of development. The policy yielded immediate results, as output increased 35.3 per cent (1954–8); the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme opened up an additional 41.8 million hectares of arable land, which produced high yields and a spectacular bumper crop in 1958. Altogether, the average annual output between 1949–53 and 1959–63 increased by 43.8 million tons (28.9 million tons of which came from the virgin lands). Not only gross output but productivity was higher: the yield per hectare rose from 7.7 centners (100 kg.) per hectare (1949–53) to 9.1 (1954–8). Encouraged by this success, Khrushchev cut back the investment in agriculture (its share of investment falling from 12.8 per cent in 1958 to 2.4 per cent in 1960), on the assumption that the virgin lands would sustain large harvests. He also forced kolkhozniki to grow more maize, though at the expense of other grains (oats production, for example, fell by two-thirds). And he applied decentralization to agriculture, chiefly by liquidating ‘machine tractor stations’ (January 1958) and undercutting the power of party bureaucrats.

‘Democratization’ also meant a higher standard of living for ordinary citizens—a rather unexpected policy, given Khrushchev’s earlier criticism of Malenkov for ‘consumerism’. There was much social inequity to overcome: because of Stalinist wage differentials, the ‘decile coefficient’ (the official standard for income distribution, measured as the difference between the ninth and first deciles) was 7.2 in 1946—far higher than that in capitalist countries (the comparable figure for Great Britain in the 1960s was 3.6). Resentment against the privileged informed this anonymous letter to the Komsomol in December 1956: ‘Please explain why they babble (if one may so speak) about the well-being of the people, but there is really nothing of the sort; things are getting worse—and worse for us than in any capitalist country’. The letter derided the endless radio propaganda about progress towards communism: ‘You [party élites] of course have communism; we have starvationism, inflationism, and exploitationism of the simple working people’. A letter from eleven workers in Lithuania ridiculed state propaganda ‘that people live badly under the capitalists’ and declared that the common people live worse in the USSR, that ‘this is not socialism, but just a bordello (bardak) and hard labour’.

Khrushchev took important steps to improve popular well-being. One was a revolution in labour policy: he decriminalized absenteeism and turnover, made drastic reductions in wage differentials, and established a minimum wage. After fixing a ‘poverty line’, the regime reduced the number below this limit from 100 million in 1958 to only 30 million a decade later. As a result, the decile coefficient dropped from the Stalinist 7.2 (1946) to 4.9 (1956) and then to 3.3 (1964). Considerable improvements were made among the lowest-paid segments of society—rural labour: between 1960 and 1965, the average income of kolkhozniki rose from 70 to 80 per cent of the average-paid state employees. Although the kolkhoznik remained a second-class citizen (without pensions, sickness benefits, or even a passport), his material condition had improved significantly.

Khrushchev also increased social services, housing, and educational opportunities. Expenditure on social services increased by only 3 per cent in 1950–5, but rose by 8 per cent in 1956–65. As a result, the housing stock doubled between 1955 and 1964; although built mostly as the notorious ‘Khrushchev barracks’ (with low ceilings, tiny rooms, and shoddy construction), it was a serious response to the housing shortage and rapid urbanization. Notwithstanding the ideological antipathy towards ‘private ownership’, in 1955 the regime launched a programme to construct privately owned flats from personal savings (with a down-payment of 15–30 per cent and a mortgage with 0.5 per cent interest rate). The Khrushchev regime also ‘democratized’ the educational system: dismayed that 80 per cent of all university students were coming from the intelligentsia, in 1958 Khrushchev abolished school and university tuition fees and dramatically restructured secondary schooling to force all children into the labour force for two years to learn a trade.

Although decentralization abetted the special interests of individual nationalities, Khrushchev detested ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’. That attitude clearly informed school language policy where Moscow took steps to promote Russian language instruction. This policy elicited considerable opposition from minority nationalities; a Belorussian complained in 1956 that his ‘language has now been expelled from all state and Soviet institutions and institutions of higher learning in the republic’. The main objective was not simply closer ties (sblizhenie), but the assimilation (sliianie) of small nations into Soviet Russian culture.

Twenty-Second Party Congress (October 1961)

The ‘extraordinary’ Twenty-First Party Congress of 1959 dealt with primarily economic questions (including a scheme to restructure the five-year plan into a seven-year plan), but otherwise did not mark a significant event. That could hardly be said of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, attended by some 4,400 voting delegates. Above all, it signalled a new and open offensive against Stalinism. Khrushchev himself implicated Stalin in Kirov’s murder and suggested that several leading cadres (Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov) personally abetted Stalin in perpetrating the crimes. The Congress also raised the question of Stalin’s mummified corpse, which since 1953 had rested alongside Lenin in the Mausoleum. This time the party was blessed with instructions from the next world, kindly transmitted by a deputy from Leningrad, D. A. Lazurkina: ‘Yesterday I asked Ilich [Lenin] for advice and it was as if he stood before me alive and said, “I do not like being beside Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the party”.’ The congress resolved to remove Stalin because of his ‘serious violations of Leninist precepts, his abuse of power, his mass repressions of honest Soviet people, and his other actions during the cult of personality’. The former dictator was reburied in an unmarked grave along the Kremlin wall.

The congress also adopted a new party programme, the first since 1919. It included brash predictions that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States by 1970 and complete the construction of communism by 1980. It also included new rules to ensure ‘democratization’ in the party and preclude the formation of a vested bureaucratic class. It also called for ‘the active participation of all citizens in the administration of the state, in the management of economic and cultural development, in the improvement of the government apparatus, and in supervision over its activity’. To ensure popular participation, the new party rules set term limits on officials at all levels—from a maximum of sixteen years for Central Committee members to four years for local officials. The goal was to ensure constant renewal of party leadership and the infusion of fresh forces—even at the top, where a quarter of the Central Committee and Presidium were to be replaced every four years. However, the rules had an escape clause for ‘especially important’ functionaries (such as Khrushchev himself, presumably). Finally, the programme sought to replace full-time functionaries with volunteers and part-time staff, thereby reducing the number of paid functionaries and ensuring more involvement by the rank and file. The new programme, understandably, was the kind that would not do much to raise Khrushchev’s popularity among the ‘partocrats’.

From Crisis to Conspiracy

Despite Khrushchev’s apparent triumph at the party congress in 1961, within three years the very men who led the ‘prolonged, thunderous ovations’ were feverishly conspiring to drive him from power. The populist was becoming unpopular, not only in the party, but among the broad mass of the population. Several factors help to account for his fall from power.

One was a string of humiliating reverses in foreign affairs. Khrushchev, for example, took the blame for the Sino-Soviet split: although relations were already strained (because of Chinese resentment over insufficient assistance and respect), the tensions escalated into an open split under Khrushchev. De-Stalinization was partly at issue, but still more divisive was Khrushchev’s ‘revisionist’ theory of peaceful coexistence and his refusal to assist the Chinese in acquiring a nuclear capability. Next came the Berlin crisis of 1961; although provoked by the East German leadership (as is now known), at that time the crisis was blamed on Khrushchev, who appeared to have fecklessly brought Soviet–American relations to the brink of war. That débâcle was soon followed by the Cuban missile crisis. After publicly denying the presence of missiles, the Soviet Union was embarrassed by clear CIA aerial photographs, prominently displayed at a stormy session of the United Nations Security Council. Confronted by an American ‘quarantine’ of Cuba, Khrushchev was forced to back down; although he obtained important concessions in secret negotiations, the public impression was one of total Soviet capitulation. Khrushchev suffered another fiasco in India, the recipient of massive economic and military aid, but an unreliable ally—a ‘neutral’ that did not hesitate to criticize the Soviet Union or its surrogate Communist Party in India. But India was hardly the only recipient; by 1964, for example, the USSR had given 821 million dollars to Egypt, 500 million to Afghanistan, and 1.5 billion to Indonesia (which became pro-Chinese in 1963). Such foreign aid brought scant political return and became increasingly unpopular at home, especially amid the food shortages and sputtering economy. Finally, party élites were embarrassed by Khrushchev’s penchant for vulgar jokes and crude behaviour—as in the infamous ‘shoe-pounding’ escapade during Harold Macmillan’s speech at the United Nations session in 1960.

A second factor in Khrushchev’s demise was his cultural policy, which gradually alienated both the intelligentsia and general population. Even earlier, as in the 1958 campaign of vilification against Boris Pasternak (whose Doctor Zhivago—illegally published abroad—had won a Nobel Prize), Khrushchev made clear that the ‘thaw’ did not mean artistic freedom. Nor was he even consistent: one month after authorizing publication of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he publicly castigated modern art at the ‘Thirty Years of Moscow Art’ exhibition. He was also increasingly distrustful of writers; as he declared in 1962, ‘Do you know how things began in Hungary? It all began with the Union of Writers.’ In December 1962 and March 1963 Khrushchev and party ideologues convened special meetings with writers to reaffirm the limits on literary freedom. One early victim was the future Nobel prizewinning poet, Joseph Brodsky who did not belong to the official Writers’ Union and was therefore convicted of ‘parasitism’ in February 1964. The intelligentsia was not the only victim: in 1961 Khrushchev launched a vigorous anti-religious campaign, ending nearly a decade of qualified tolerance. The campaign affected all religious confessions, but was particularly devastating for the Russian Orthodox Church: over the next four years, the regime closed 59 of its 69 monasteries, 5 of its 8 seminaries, and 13,500 of its 22,000 parish churches.

A third reason for Khrushchev’s downfall was economic, as his policies and panaceas began to go awry. As Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan demonstrated, the growth rate in the early 1960s declined by a factor of three—the result of systemic inefficiency, waste, and backwardness permeating every sector of the economy. And, despite official claims of ‘full employment’, the real unemployment rate was 8 per cent nationally and as high as 30 per cent in small towns. Aganbegian identified three main causes: (1) massive defence allocations, which diverted 30 to 40 per cent of the work-force into primary or secondary defence plants; (2) failure to modernize and automate production; and, (3) ‘extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters’, compounded by a primitive planning apparatus that lacked computers or even reliable economic data. ‘We obtain many figures’, he noted, ‘from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration’. The result was hoarding, low labour productivity, shoddy quality, forced savings, and the omnipresent defitsity (goods shortages) that fed inflation and a booming black market. Recent data confirm Aganbegian’s analysis, showing a sharp drop in the growth indicators for the gross domestic product (from 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 to 5.0 per cent in 1961–5) and investment (from 16 per cent in 1958 to 4 per cent in 1961–3).

But economic problems were most apparent in agriculture: although average grain output rose from 98.8 million tons in 1953–6 to 132.1 in 1961–4, that yield fell short of expectations and demand. According to one calculation, the grain output needed to satisfy demand in 1955 was 160 tonnes; that was about 20 per cent more than average output in 1961–4. Moreover, output fell behind increases in personal income: although per capita agricultural production increased slightly during 1959–65, disposable money income rose dramatically (48 per cent in 1958–64). The increased demand was also due to population growth (33 per cent) and urbanization (250 per cent), leaving more and more people dependent on the agricultural sector. In short, Khrushchev had severely underestimated demand and overestimated output.

The miscalculation had several causes. One was just bad luck: the drought of 1963 caused an abysmal harvest of 107 million tonnes—larger than a Stalin harvest, but only 61 per cent of plan targets. The low harvest forced the Soviet Union, which had recently boasted of overtaking America, to take the ignominious step of purchasing twelve million tonnes of grain abroad. But it was not only bad luck and bad weather: Khrushchev himself contributed to the failure in agriculture. He was blindly devoted to maize; apart from climatic and technological problems, its cultivation met with adamant peasant resistance, duly reported by the KGB: ‘We don’t need to sow corn; it will just cause a lot of trouble and bring little use’. But the First Secretary, sullied as the kukuruznik (‘maize-man’), was determined, especially after his visit to the United States in 1959, to grow maize. By 1962 he had forced peasants to plant 37 million hectares of maize, of which only 7 million ripened in time for harvest. Nor did his panacea—the Virgin Lands programme—work the expected miracle. As a result of drought, erosion, and weed infestation, the output from the virgin lands fell far short of plan expectations. After the first bumper harvests, output steadily declined in the late 1950s, partly for want of grass covers and fertilizers to renew the soil. Worse still was the irreversible damage caused by feckless cultivation of areas unsuited for grain production: in 1960–5 wind erosion ruined twelve million hectares of land (four million in Kazakhstan alone)—roughly half of the virgin lands.

Moreover, Khrushchev’s ‘decentralizing’ strategy weakened administrative control, inviting evasion, resistance, and malfeasance. The most famous case involved the party secretary of Riazan, A. N. Larionov, who ‘over-fulfilled’ the meat quota in 1959 threefold, but by illicit means—by slaughtering dairy as well as beef cattle and by purchasing meat from neighbouring provinces. His miraculous achievements were loudly celebrated in Pravda, but the next year the newly minted ‘Hero of Socialist labour’ committed suicide to avoid the awful day of reckoning. His case was hardly exceptional. An official investigation revealed that party secretaries in Tiumen oblast ‘engaged in all kinds of machinations to deceive the government, included reports on unproduced and unsold production to the state, thereby creating an apparent prosperity in agriculture in the oblast and inflicted great harm to the state, kolkhoz, and sovkhoz’. The problem was bad policy, not just bad people. After years of massive allocations to agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly reduced the flow of investment. Difficulties for this sector were further compounded by the decision in 1958 to abolish machine tractor stations, forcing collective farms to purchase this equipment and divert scarce resources into capital goods. Moreover, Khrushchev ambitiously pursued his earlier fetish for merging collective farms into ever larger units, their total number falling by nearly a third in 1953–8 (from 91,200 to 67,700); such mergers, however, failed to bring ‘economies of size’ and eroded effective administration. It also reinforced the kolkhoznik’s devotion to his individual plot, which yielded over half their income in 1960 (with even higher proportions in some areas—for example, 75 per cent in Lithuania). When Khrushchev urged collective farmers to abandon their monomaniacal cultivation of private plots, one peasant in Kursk eloquently summarized popular sentiment in an encounter with the First Secretary: ‘Nikita, what’s got into you, have you gone off your rocker?’

Although the regime took special measures to provide cities with basic necessities, it also attempted to dampen demand in June 1962 by raising prices—38 per cent on meat and 25 per cent on butter. The price increases aroused intense popular discontent and even disorders. To quote a KGB report from June 1962: ‘In recent years some cities in our country have experienced mass disorders, accompanied by pogroms of administrative buildings, destruction of public property, and attacks on representatives of authority and other disorderly behaviour’. Although police tried to blame ‘hooligan’ elements (including people so diverse as former ‘Nazi collaborators, clergy, and sectarians’), the root cause of course lay much deeper.

Those causes were clearly visible in the most famous disorder of all—in Novocherskassk in June 1962. It began at a locomotive plant, where workers rebelled against rising food prices, wage cuts (30 per cent), and a backlog of unresolved grievances (housing shortages, work safety, and even food-poisoning of 200 workers). The workers quickly won the support of local townspeople; as the KGB later reported, the ‘man-in-the-street’ believed that ‘prices should have been left as they were, that the salaries of highly paid people should be reduced, [and] that aid to underdeveloped socialist countries should cease’. When the striking workers marched into the centre of Novocherkassk, they attracted a crowd of some 4,000 people and managed to repulse the assault of local police and, later, even armoured units. ‘Mass disorders’ continued the next day, as the insurgents seized the offices of the city party committee and tried to storm the KGB and militia headquarters. Moscow hastily dispatched a key Khrushchev aide, F. R. Kozlov, who denounced the ‘instigators’ as ‘hooligan elements’, defended the price rise, but promised to improve the food supply. Troops were eventually able to restore order, but not before taking scores of civilian lives.

But Khrushchev’s fatal error was to attack the ‘partocracy’—the central and local élites who comprised the only real organized political force. His attempt to democratize and ensure renewal, especially through ‘term limits’, posed a direct threat to career officials, from highest to lowest echelons. Decentralization itself was anathema to apparatchiki, especially those holding power in Moscow. His original scheme of sovnarkhozy not only reduced the power of Moscow functionaries, but also forced many to depart for provincial posts—‘I myself had to work in a sovnarkhoz’, a high-ranking functionary later complained. In 1962 Khrushchev undermined his base of support even among provincial officialdom through his scheme to divide the party into industrial and agricultural branches at the regional and oblast levels, thereby undercutting the power of local potentates. And, for all the pain, decentralization seemed only to beget corruption, falsified reports, and non-compliance. In response, Khrushchev was forced to build a new layer of intermediate bodies and central organs to co-ordinate—and control—the sovnarkhozy. The drift towards recentralization culminated in a decision of March 1963 to establish the ‘Supreme Economic Council of the USSR’—in essence, an attempt to reassert central control over the lower economic councils.

Finally, Khrushchev’s colleagues came to feel that he had begun to rule imperiously and, at the time of his removal, denounced him for taking decisions impetuously and ignoring collective opinion. Although Khrushchev gamely responded (‘But you, who are present here, never spoke to me openly and candidly about my shortcomings—you always nodded in agreement and expressed support!’), the critique was not amiss. As a high-ranking functionary, A. Shelepin, observed, Stalin—but not the cult—had expired: ‘[Khrushchev] was also a vozhd′ [Leader]. And the same psychology of the vozhd′ remained. And in the subordinates’ relationship to the vozhd′. No one had the courage to speak out against him’. The fact that Khrushchev had assumed both party leadership and the top position in the state—because it was too much work, because it centralized too much power—also elicited criticism. There was keen resentment too over his tendency to promote family members, such as his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei, who was made editor of Izvestiia and recipient of undeserved awards and privileges.

The plot to depose Khrushchev evidently commenced as early as February 1964, led primarily by Nikolai Podgornyi and Brezhnev. Khrushchev did receive some prior warnings, but did not take them seriously. The opportunity came in October, as Khrushchev was vacationing at his Crimean dacha: the conspirators summoned him back to Moscow for an extraordinary session of the Central Committee and subjected him to devastating criticism. In his defence Khrushchev emphasized that he had ‘worked all the time’, but professed to greet his removal, through democratic means, as a ‘victory of the party’ over Stalinist illegalities. The public announcement of his ‘retirement’ castigated the former First Secretary for ‘crudeness’, ‘bombastic phrases and braggadocio’, and ‘overhasty conclusions and hare-brained schemes divorced from reality’. Granted a ‘personal pension’, Khrushchev lived in obscurity until his death on 11 September 1971.

Perils of Restoration

With Khrushchev’s removal, the ‘old guard’—most of whom had served under Stalin—sought to restore stability and order to the political system. Although initially evincing interest in economic reform, this ‘new old régime’ became increasingly restorationist, even with respect to the persona of Stalin, and averse to extensive change in policies or personnel. Subsequently castigated as the ‘era of stagnation’, the two decades after Khrushchev’s removal were a marvel of contradictions—economic decline amid apparent prosperity, détente and confrontation, harsh repression and a burgeoning human rights movement. By the early 1980s, however, restoration had plainly failed, stagnation devolving into the systemic crisis that would trigger the frenetic reformism of perestroika and final demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

From Reform to Restoration

The regime made the dismantling of Khrushchev’s unpopular reforms its first priority. It abolished the 1961 rules on ‘term limits’ (in favour of ‘stability’ in party leadership) and reasserted the principle of centralization—and, by extension, the power and prerogatives of the Moscow partocracy The new regime quickly abolished Khrushchev’s sovnarkhozy and re-established ‘all-union’ ministries in Moscow, with a corresponding reduction of authority at the republic and oblast levels. It also scrapped Khrushchev’s educational reform, which had proven immensely unpopular. Restoration was the principal theme of the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, which reinstated old terms like ‘Politburo’ (for ‘Presidium’) and ‘General Secretary’ (for ‘First Secretary’).

Initially, at least, the regime professed an interest in economic reform. Responding to earlier proposals (most notably, a famous article in 1962 by Evsei Liberman entitled ‘The Plan, Profit and Bonus’) and current assessments of the Soviet economy, the government—under the leadership of Aleksei Kosygin—sought to change the economy itself, not simply the way it was administered. Although favourably disposed towards recentralization, the reforms attempted to overcome the crude quantitative criteria of gross output that purported to show plan fulfilment but actually produced mountains of low-quality output. The reform proposed to measure (and reward) real economic success by placing more emphasis on sales and profits; it also assessed a small charge on capital to ensure efficiency and to limit production costs. In September 1965 the regime adopted plans to rationalize planning and introduce computers, to enhance the power of plant managers, to merge plants into larger production units (ob ′edinenie), and—most important—to replace gross outputs with gross sales. The new strategy also included tighter controls, a stress on automation, and the purchase of advanced technology from the West (for example, the 1966 contract with Fiat to build a plant in Stavropol oblast called Togliatti).

The reforms yielded short-term gains (especially in labour productivity), but soon foundered on several major obstacles. First, despite the incentives for productivity (e.g. penalties for excessive production costs), it was the State Price Committee, not the market, that set prices and therefore determined costs, value, and ‘profitability’. Second, managers lacked the authority to discharge unproductive or redundant workers—a legacy of caution after events in Novocherkassk. Third, despite lip-service to technological innovation, ‘success’ meant fulfilling quarterly and annual production plans; that low time horizon effectively militated against long-range strategies and drove managers to focus on short-term results. Recentralization meant tighter control by the Moscow partocracy a major impediment to innovation and change. And despite the fanfare about ‘automation’ and ‘cybernetics’, the Soviet Union missed the computer revolution: the number of computers per capita in the United States was seventeen times higher and at least a full generation ahead. By the late 1960s the Soviet leadership abandoned the pretence of economic reform and settled into an unruffled commitment to the status quo.

As reform at home stalled, the regime intervened to suppress change elsewhere in the Soviet bloc—above all, the famous ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. After the Czech Action Programme’ of April 1968 proclaimed the right of each nation to follow its ‘own separate road to socialism’, the country was engulfed by autonomous movements demanding not only economic efficiency, but fundamental changes in the social and political order. On 10 August the Communist Party itself drafted new party statutes to require secret balloting, set term limits, and permit intra-party factions. Although the party chief Alexander Dubček promised to stay in the Warsaw Pact (seeking to avoid Hungary’s provocative mistake in 1956), Soviet leaders found the experiment of ‘socialism with a human face’ too threatening and led a Warsaw Bloc invasion on 21 August to restore hardliners to power.

The regime also had to suppress dissent at home. It had grounds for concern: the KGB reported that 1,292 authors in 1965 had composed and disseminated 9,697 ‘anti-Soviet’ documents (mostly posters and leaflets). It identified about two-thirds of the authors—a motley array that included workers (206), schoolchildren (189), university students (36), state employees (169), pensioners (95), collective farmers (61), and even party members (111). Protest also became public for the first time in decades, as some two hundred dissidents held a demonstration on Pushkin Square, with one demonstrator bearing the sign, ‘Respect the Constitution’.

Although most dissenters were dealt with ‘prophylactically’ (a KGB euphemism for intimidation), the Kremlin leadership decided to send a clear message to dissidents. In February 1966 it staged the famous show trial of two dissident writers, Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel, who had published satirical works abroad and, of course, without official permission. The court predictably found them guilty of ‘anti-Soviet’ activity and meted out harsh sentences (seven years of hard labour for Siniavskii, five for Daniel). The KGB boasted that the trial not only evoked an outpouring of popular demands that the ‘slanderers’ be severely punished, but also that it had intimidated the intelligentsia. Simultaneously, authorities launched an attack on Alexander Nekrich’s historical monograph, 22 June 1941, which blamed Stalin personally for the Nazis’ initial success in the war and thus contravened official plans to rehabilitate Stalin. In response, party functionaries campaigned against Nekrich’s study as allegedly based on ‘the military-historical sources of capitalist countries’.

The repression was harsh but ineffective. When, for example, the regime organized a public discussion of Nekrich’s work at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in February 1966, the audience openly supported Nekrich and subjected a ‘loyal’ party hack to humiliating insults and censure. Sixty-three Moscow writers signed an open letter of protest against the Siniavskii-Daniel trial, and another two hundred prominent intellectuals sent a letter to the Twenty-Third Party Congress demanding that the case be reviewed. Nor did the demonstrative repression intimidate the intelligentsia or even end public demonstrations: a few days after the invasion of Czechoslovakia dissidents staged a short demonstration on Red Square, carrying placards that read ‘Hands off the ČSSR’, ‘For Your and Our Freedom!’ and ‘Down with the Occupiers!’. Dissent was particularly animated among national minorities. For example, the Crimean Tatars—still denied repatriation and restitution—organized a demonstration in April 1968 that culminated in hundreds of arrests. The Muslim peoples of Central Asia also became increasingly restive; as the KGB reported (after a fierce mêlée at Semipalatinsk in June 1965), Kazakhs resented the fact that Russian was the official language and that ethnic Russians monopolized the best positions in the army, state, and administration.

Years of Stagnation

Amid all this turbulence, Brezhnev steadily consolidated his power. An associate observed that, in contrast to Khrushchev, ‘Brezhnev never read anything except Krokodil’, a lightweight satirical magazine that he even brought to meetings of the Politburo. As the years passed Brezhnev also grew increasingly vain, fond of medals and praise. He encouraged fawning and toadying, like that in a 1973 report by the KGB head, Iurii Andropov, claiming that people regarded Brezhnev’s recent speech as ‘a new creative contribution to the theory of Marxism-Leninism’, that it ‘brilliantly reveals the paths and prospects of communist construction in the USSR and inspires new heroic feats of labour in the name of strengthening our multinational state, the unity and solidarity of the Soviet people’. Three years later Brezhnev was awarded the rank of ‘marshal of the Soviet Union’, his fifth medal for the ‘Order of Lenin’, and his second medal as ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’. (Satirists later speculated that he died from a chest operation, undertaken to broaden his chest to hold more medals.) The same year he ‘won’ a Lenin Prize for his memoirs, with this explanation: ‘For their popularity and their educational influence on the mass of readers, the books of Leonid Ilich are unrivalled.’ Popular demand, however, was less than insatiable: after his death, a report on state bookshops disclosed a backlog of 2.7 million copies of unsold, let alone unread, books. After a new constitution in 1977 established the office of president as titular head of state, Brezhnev assumed that position as well. With good reason, A. N. Shelepin argues that ‘Brezhnev was a great, very great mistake’.

Brezhnev consolidated not only his own power but also that of the partocracy: article 6 of the new constitution formally established the CPSU as the leading force in Soviet society. The party also expanded its presence through sheer growth: although the rate of growth after 1964 was slower, the party none the less increased its ranks from 12.5 million (1966) to 17.5 million (1981), an increase of 40 per cent.

But the most significant accommodation was Brezhnev’s ‘trust in cadres’ and resolve to end ‘the unjustified reshuffling and frequent replacement of cadres’. In contrast to Khrushchev, who sought to rejuvenate the party through democratization and turnover, Brezhnev left most members in their position until death or incapacitation. As a result, the average age of Politburo members rose from 55 to 68 between 1966 and 1981; by then half were over the age of 70 and would die within the next few years. The pattern was true of the Central Committee: because of the high rate of return (rising from 54 per cent in 1961 to 89 per cent in 1976–81), 44 per cent of the membership of the Central Committee was unchanged between 1966 and 1981, with an inevitable rise in the average age from 56 to 63. Low turnover rates also characterized lower echelons of the party; thus the proportion of oblast secretaries retaining their positions rose from 33 per cent under Khrushchev to 78 per cent in the period 1964–76.

This partocracy ossified into gerontocracy, devoid of dynamic leadership. It was not only inimical to change but physically incapable; Brezhnev himself, ravaged by ailments and strokes, gradually deteriorated into a breathing mummy. His colleagues were likewise so infirm that, shortly after his death, the Politburo solemnly addressed the issue of age and ‘solved’ the problem by setting limits on the hours and days that its members should work. This ossified leadership invited rampant corruption and crime, not only in the outlying republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but also in core Russian oblasti like Krasnodar, Rostov, and Moscow itself. Although the party periodically purged the corrupt (nearly 650,000 lost party membership on these grounds between 1971 and 1981), it did little to stop the rot, especially at upper levels. That decay even touched Brezhnev’s own family, as police arrested close friends and associates of his daughter.

Economy and Society

Brezhnev’s stewardship also brought sharp economic decline. Whereas national income rose 5.9 per cent per capita in 1966–70, thereafter it fell sharply, bottoming out at 2.1 per cent in 1981–5. GNP followed a similar trajectory: 6 per cent in the 1950s, 5 per cent in the 1960s, 4 per cent from 1970–8, and 2 per cent in subsequent years. This corresponded, predictably, to a decrease in the rate of growth in investment capital (from 7.6 per cent in 1966–70 to 3.4 per cent in 1976–80, including a mere 0.6 per cent in 1979). The regime deftly juggled statistics to mask the malaise: by emphasizing not physical output but ‘rouble value’ (showing a 75 per cent increase in 1976–83), it took advantage of the hidden price inflation and concealed the modest increase in gross production (a mere 9 per cent in the same period).

Agriculture was still the Achilles heel of the Soviet Prometheus. Agricultural output at first increased (by 21 per cent in 1966–70, compared to 12 per cent in 1961–5), but thereafter the rate of growth declined (to just 6 per cent in 1981–5). Apart from bumper harvests (for example, 235 million tons of grain in 1978), most crops were mediocre or outright failures. Thus the yield for 1975 was a mere 140 million tons—the worst since 1963 and 76 million short of the goal. And because of limited port capacities, the government could import only 40 million tons, the shortfall causing a higher rate of slaughter and long-term consequences for animal husbandry. A desperate regime made new concessions on private plots and even encouraged city-dwellers to have garden plots. By 1974 private agriculture consumed one-third of all man-hours in agriculture and one-tenth in the entire economy. The private plots were phenomenally productive: in 1978, for instance, they occupied just 3 per cent of arable land but produced 25 per cent of total agricultural output.

Agriculture became a drag on the whole economy, devouring an ever larger share of scarce investment capital. According to G. A. E. Smith, its share of investment rose from 23 per cent (1961–5) to 27 per cent in 1976–80; allocations to the entire agro-industrial complex (for example, fertilizer plants) increased from 28 to 35 per cent. The United States, by comparison, allocated a mere 4 per cent of investment capital to agriculture. Although total output did increase (the yield for 1976–80 being 50 per cent greater than that for 1961–5), it did not keep pace with demand or rising production costs (covered primarily by gargantuan government subsidies). Subsidized bread prices were so low that peasants even used government bread for fodder. Nevertheless, spot shortages and price adjustments remained a source of hardship that periodically triggered food riots, such as those in Sverdlovsk (1969), Dnepropetrovsk (1972), and Gorky (1980).

The regime could boast of better results in the industrial sector, yet still failed to match past performance or reach plan targets. It could claim salient achievements like the mammoth ‘Baikal–Amur’ project—a 3,000 kilometre railway north of the old Trans-Siberian and linking eastern Siberia with the Pacific.

But the general record on output and productivity was dismal. Although the regime periodically spoke of revamping the system, it did little to raise critical indicators like product quality or labour productivity. Far more characteristic was the bureaucratic posturing, the attempt to solve economic problems with administrative decrees (which mushroomed to more than 200,000 in the late 1970s). Increasingly, the main goal was not reform but control, primarily through the formation of central industrial associations to ensure subordination and vertical integration in a specific sphere of industry.

This decline in industrial growth had many causes. Some were inherent in a ‘command economy’, with all its inefficiencies and bottle-necks, compounded by the incompetence of a superannuated leadership. Moreover, the hidden inflation of the Soviet price system (which allowed plants to reprice essentially the same products) encouraged managers to ignore productivity and avoid retooling that involved short-term costs and unwanted—and unnecessary—risks. So long as the state provided a guaranteed market and set the prices, it was pointless to cut costs or even worry about cost-effectiveness.

Labour constituted another major problem. The difficulty was partly quantitative: whereas the labour force had increased by 23.2 million in 1960–70, that growth fell to just 17.8 million in 1970–80 and to 9.5 million in 1980–90. For a labour-intensive economy heavily dependent on manual labour, the sharp reduction in labour inputs was devastating. Labour was also maldistributed, being concentrated not in industrialized areas but in backward regions like Central Asia, where the willingness to relocate was minimal. Labour also showed a high turnover rate (25 to 30 per cent) that directly undermined continuity and training. Nor was labour so tractable; strikes, rare under Stalin, openly challenged the regime’s authority. In 1968, for example, workers struck at twenty large industrial enterprises, chiefly because of grievances over wages and production norms, sometimes because of tactless management and unwarranted deductions.

Paradoxically, contemporaries saw the 1970s as a decade of unprecedented well-being. The Twenty-Fourth Party Congress (March 1971) renewed the perennial pledge to support heavy industry and defence, but also laid a new emphasis on consumer goods. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–5) even projected higher growth for consumer goods than for capital goods; although that goal was not met, it did signal a marked change. Given the precipitous decline in agricultural and industrial sectors, the ‘mirage’ of prosperity is puzzling.

Much of the explanation rests in fortuitous circumstances on foreign markets. The primary elixir was oil: after the 1973 oil crisis, the enormous profits from oil kept the leaky Soviet vessel afloat. A simultaneous commodity boom also increased revenues for an economy that exported primarily raw materials, making the terms of trade still more favourable. The surge in gold prices (for example, the 75 per cent increase in 1979) further added to state coffers. Although the USSR had already accumulated a substantial foreign debt (17 billion dollars), that sum paled in comparison with current revenues from hydrocarbon and raw material exports. As a result, the Soviet Union was able to use its hard-currency earnings to pay for the import of producer goods, consumer products, and endless shiploads of grain.

Alongside this inefficient state economy, a ‘second’ (or ‘black’) economy emerged to satisfy the demand for deficit goods and services. According to one estimate, some twenty million people worked on the black market to supply the demand for 83 per cent of the general population. Because of rampant corruption, repression of the black market became increasingly symbolic and inconsequential. The result was a subclass of ‘underground’ millionaires whose illicit earnings became a prime source of private investment after 1985.

‘High Brezhnevism’ also marked the apogee of the nomenklatura—a term denoting not merely the list of key positions, but the social and political élite who monopolized them. According to estimates for 1970, this élite included about 700,000 individuals: 250,000 people in state and party positions, 300,000 members in economic sectors, and another 150,000 in science and research. By 1982 this group had increased to some 800,000 people and, together with their families, comprised about 3 million people (1.2 per cent of the Soviet population).

Although a golden age for the nomenklatura, the Brezhnev era also attempted to improve the lot of the general population. Despite the rising cost of living (about 1 per cent per annum), real wages increased still more sharply (50 per cent between 1967 and 1977). The state also established a five-day working week, mandated a minimum vacation of 12–15 days, raised the minimum monthly wage (first to 60 roubles, later to 70 roubles), and expanded Khrushchev’s social welfare (which increased fivefold between 1950 and 1980). The regime gave particular attention to the ‘underclass’, as in the decision of 1974 to provide an income subsidy to alleviate poverty. It also made a concerted effort to improve the lot of collective farmers, three-quarters of whom initially fell below the official ‘poverty line’ (with a quarter even below the official subsistence minimum). The goal was not just to ensure social justice but to cauterize social haemorrhaging—the flight of rural labour, especially youths and males, from the village. As a result, by the 1970s rural wages were only 10 per cent lower than those for urban workers and were supplemented by a significant income from the private plots.

Despite petrodollars and state welfare, Soviet society revealed signs of acute stress. One was hyper-alcoholism: surplus income, amid widespread goods deficits, led to a massive increase in alcohol sales (77 per cent in the 1970s alone). Another disturbing indicator was infant mortality, which jumped from 22.9 (per 1,000 live births) in 1971 to 31.6 in 1976. Another cause of concern was the decrease in the average number of children per family (from 2.9 in 1970 to 2.4 in 1978). The demography carried ominous political and ethnic overtones: whereas the average family in the RSFSR in 1970 was 1.97, family size among the Muslim peoples of Central Asia was nearly three times higher—for example, 5.64 in Uzbekistan and 5.95 in Turkmenistan.

Détente

To counteract the international furore over the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Brezhnev government embarked on a policy of calculated détente. Whatever the motive, it led to an impressive array of agreements on trade, arms, human rights, and even the German question. This environment also favoured a marked improvement in Soviet–American relations. The end to the Vietnam War, long a festering issue, doubtless helped. But both sides found an array of common interests, especially in trade and military security, which could foster collaboration in spite of significant spheres of difference. The first important sign was SALT-I, a ‘strategic arms limitation treaty’ in 1972 that set limits on offensive missiles and anti-ballistic missiles for five years. This agreement was followed by others—on nuclear accidents, joint space operations, and a further arms agreement finally signed in June 1979 as ‘SALT-II’.

Nevertheless, the 1970s were years of instability and conflict. Apart from Western concern about domestic Soviet policy (especially with respect to human rights issues, including Jewish emigration and suppression of dissidents), Moscow continued efforts to increase its presence and influence around the globe, especially in underdeveloped countries. After failing to achieve a significant improvement in relations with China or to increase its authority in Asia, Moscow showed a growing interest in Africa and especially South Yemen (which became a Marxist republic in 1978). Moscow relied not only on subversion but subvention (to be sure, promises outpaced deliveries: of 13 billion dollars promised in 1954–77, only 7.2 billion actually materialized). And aid came increasingly in the form of military assistance and arms, as Soviet arms shipments increased exponentially.

The coup de grâce for détente was the decision to intervene in Afghanistan in December 1979. Ever since a Marxist faction seized power in April 1978, Moscow had given strong support to the regime in Kabul and its social and cultural transformation. Although willing to provide assistance (including Soviet ‘advisers’ to guide the ‘socialist transformation’), Moscow abjured a direct military role as likely to ‘expose’ the weakness of the Afghan government and to ‘inflict serious harm on the international authority of the USSR and significantly reverse the process of détente’. In December 1979, however, a rump meeting of the Politburo elected to intervene militarily because of the region’s strategic importance, popular opposition to the Afghan government, and rumours that Kabul was making overtures to the American government. Whatever the rationale, the result was catastrophic: the Soviet Union found itself snared in a military quagmire that consumed vast resources, cost enormous casualties, and had a devastating effect on the Soviet Union’s international position.

Dissent

The 1970s also marked the emergence of two broad-based dissident movements—one in defence of human rights, the other representing national minorities, both sharing a common cause against an authoritarian regime. They steadily gained in strength, notwithstanding domestic repression and foreign ambivalence bred by détente. A KGB report of December 1976 (on thousands of cases) gives some idea of the main currents of dissent: ‘revisionism and reformism’ (35 per cent), ‘nationalism’ (33.7 per cent), ‘Zionism’ (17.5 per cent), ‘religion’ (8.2 per cent), ‘fascism and neo-fascism’ (5.6 per cent), and other miscellaneous matters. Although samizdat included many different works, the main voice for the movement was a samizdat journal Chronicle of Current Events, which appeared first in 1968 and managed to publish bi-monthly issues almost uninterruptedly (except for an eighteen-month gap in 1972–4).

Compared to the preceding decade, this dissident movement of the 1970s was different in several respects. First, although belles-lettres remained important, the movement itself became much more political. A KGB report in 1970 noted that the earlier samizdat had been primarily literary, but of late consisted chiefly of ‘political programmatic’ materials, influenced mainly by Yugoslav and Czechoslovak literature. Second, dissent was more widespread, spilling beyond secret circles and tiny demonstrations to envelop larger segments of society, with nearly 300,000 adherents (mostly supporters and sympathizers, including some 20,000 political prisoners and people under surveillance or investigation). That was a far cry from the ‘35 to 40’ dissidents that the KGB reported a few years earlier. The growth of dissent was also apparent in the mushrooming of samizdat, which included some 4,000 volumes in 1979. The KGB warned that dissent was especially strong among the young—in its view, because they were denied access to professional organizations (for example, only 48 of the 75,490 members of the Union of Writers being under the age of 30). Third, dissent was better organized, especially after Andrei Sakharov (a full member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences and leading figure in Soviet nuclear development) and others founded the ‘Human Rights Committee’ in November 1970.

Predictably, the dissident movement aroused growing concern, especially in the KGB. Dismayed by the Politburo’s reluctance to deal with Sakharov, in September 1973 the KGB chief, Andropov, warned that the failure to act not only enraged honest Soviet citizens but also encouraged ‘certain circles of the intelligentsia and youth’ to flout authority. Their motto, he claimed, was ‘Act boldly, publicly, involve Western correspondents, rely on the support of the bourgeois press, and no one will dare touch you’. Emphasizing the need to interdict the ‘hostile activities of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov’, he proposed to put Solzhenitsyn on trial (afterwards offering him foreign exile) and to quarantine Sakharov in Novosibirsk. After Solzhenitsyn’s forced extradition and deprivation of citizenship in 1974, the regime focused increasingly on Sakharov, whom the KGB accused in 1975 of ‘evolution in the direction of open anti-Sovietism and direct support for the forces of international reaction’. Although the KGB urgently demanded vigorous action against Sakharov, the Politburo demurred—in large part for fear of the negative repercussions on détente. But patience wore thin, even for the timorous Brezhnev, who made this comment at a Politburo meeting of 8 June 1978: ‘The reasons for our extraordinary tolerance of Sakharov are known to all. But there is a limit to everything. To leave his attacks without a response is impossible.’ Western furore over Afghanistan removed the final inhibition; with nothing to lose, the regime approved a KGB proposal to exile Sakharov to the closed city of Gorky, thereby cutting off his access to Westerners.

While dissenters like Sakharov and writers like Solzhenitsyn captured world attention, no less significant was the political dissent sweeping minority nationalities. The most visible, for Western observers, was the Jewish movement, the product of official anti-religious repression (by the 1970s only thirty synagogues existed in European Russia) and an anti-Israeli foreign policy that fanned popular anti-Semitism. But powerful nationalist movements also appeared in all the republics, especially in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Caucasus. The intensity of nationalist sentiment was dramatically revealed in 1978, when mass demonstrations in Tbilisi forced the government to abandon plans to eliminate Georgian as the official state language inside the republic. Tensions also mounted in the Muslim republics of Central Asia, fuelled by a steady influx of Russian immigrants and the repression of Islam.

The government itself realized that it had failed to assimilate minorities. That failure was amply demonstrated in a secret report of 1978, which detailed the obstacles to Russification of schools, including a lack of qualified teachers: ‘Many of the teachers in minority elementary schools have only a poor knowledge of Russian. There are cases where, for this reason, Russian is not taught at all’. The failure of linguistic Russification was clearly apparent in Central Asia: the proportion claiming total ignorance of Russian language ranged from 24 per cent among Uzbeks to 28 per cent among Tajiks and Turkmen. Even graduates of specialized technical schools had a poor command of Russian. In response, the regime proposed to establish a special two- or three-month course in Russian for those due to perform military service. As Brezhnev admitted at the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February 1981, the government had made scant progress in its campaign to assimilate minorities and combat nationalism.

Towards the Abyss

When Leonid Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982, he bequeathed a country mired in profound systemic crisis. Its economic problems were daunting; amid falling prices on energy and commodities, the regime lacked the resources either to reindustrialize or to restructure agriculture. Although the KGB had seemingly decapitated the leadership of the democratic and nationalist movements, anti-regime sentiments were intense and widespread. Nor had the Brezhnev government achieved stability and security in foreign policy: the invasion of Afghanistan, débâcles elsewhere around the globe, even erosion of the Warsaw Bloc (especially in Poland) provided profound cause of concern and an endless drain on resources.

Neither of Brezhnev’s immediate successors, the former KGB chief Andropov or the quintessential party functionary Konstantin Chernenko, survived long enough to address the ugly legacy of the ‘years of stagnation’. Andropov placed the main emphasis on law and order, even for solving the economic crisis, with the explanation that ‘good order does not require any capital investment whatever, but can produce great results’. He also waged a vigorous campaign against corruption and, lacking Brezhnev’s veneration for ‘stability of cadres’, replaced a quarter of the ministers and oblast secretaries in a desperate attempt to revitalize the system. But within fifteen months he too was dead, with power devolving on Chernenko—an elderly partocrat whose only distinction was to have been Brezhnev’s chief adviser. In the end Chernenko became the old élite’s last hurrah—an ageing and ailing leader, he ‘reigned’ but only for one year before dying from emphysema and respiratory-cardiovascular problems in March 1985.

As the Politburo assembled to confirm the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the post of General Secretary, the prospects for survival were bleak. Internationally, it had paid an enormous cost for the Afghanistan invasion and faced an awesome challenge from the aggressively anti-communist administration of Ronald Reagan in Washington. Domestically, its economy had ground to a halt, paralysed by profound structural problems in agriculture and industry and now deprived of lucrative revenues from the export of energy and raw materials. The new General Secretary, whatever his personal proclivities, had good cause to ponder the options for a fundamental ‘perestroika’.