Stalinism 1928-1940, Patriotic war 1941-1945, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era

Khrushchev's indictment was neither complete nor unalloyed. The Stalin he portrayed had been a paragon until the mid- 1930s. Although oppositionists had not deserved 'physical annihilation', they had been 'ideological and political enemies'. Khrushchev not only spared Lenin and the Soviet regime itself, he glorified them, but his speech stunned his audience. Many in the hall

This chapter draws extensively on my book, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York: Norton, 2003).

1 'O kul'te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh: doklad pervogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. Khrushcheva N. S. XX s"ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza', in Izvestiia TsK kpss 3 (1989): 131,133,144-5,149,154-5.

were unreconstructed Stalinists. Others, who had secretly feared and hated Stalin, could not believe his successor secretly shared their view. The speech was met with 'a deathly silence', Vladimir Semichastnyi, who would later become Khrushchev's KGB chief, recalled. 'We didn't look at each other as we came down from the balcony,' remembered Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a minor Central Committee functionary, and later Mikhail Gorbachev's collaborator in perestroika, 'whether from shame or shock or from the simple unexpectedness of it.'[101]

Khrushchev's speech was supposed to be kept secret. However, the ruling Presidium approved distributing it to local party committees; local authorities read the text to millions of party members and others around the country; and Polish Communist leaders allowed thousands of copies to circulate, one of which reached the US Central Intelligence Agency The US State Department eventually released the text to the New York Times, which published it on 4 June 1956.

'I very much doubt Father wanted to keep it secret', recalled Khrushchev's son Sergei. 'He wanted to bring the report to the people. The secrecy of the session wasonlyaformalconcessiononhispart...'[102] Yet, at numerous meetings at which the speech was read and discussed, criticism of Stalin exploded way beyond Khrushchev's. Why had it taken so long to admit Stalin's crimes? Had not current leaders been his accomplices? Why had Khrushchev himself kept silent for so long? Was not the Soviet system itself the real culprit? Some meetings tried to call for rights and freedoms, and for multi-party elections to guarantee them.[103] In April 1956, the KGB reported that portraits and busts of Stalin had been defaced or torn down, that Communists at one party meeting had declared him 'an enemy of the people', and at another had demanded his body be removed from the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum. On the other hand, those who defended Stalin included not only unreconstructed party officials but ordinary citizens, some of whom hailed Stalin for 'punishing' the party and police officials who had oppressed them.[104] In Stalin's native Georgia, some 60,000 people carried flowers to his monument, and when some of them marched on the radio station, at least twenty demonstrators were killed in the clashes with troops.[105]

Not long after his 'secret' speech, 'Khrushchev sensed the blow had been too powerful, and ... increasingly he sought to limit the boundaries of critical analysis, lest it end up polarising society .. .'[106] His retreat climaxed in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June which blamed Stalin at most for 'serious errors'.[107] However, the retreat came too late to prevent turmoil in Poland and a revolution in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at a cost of some 20,000 Hungarian and 1,500 Soviet casualties.

Personality and history

The year 1956 was pivotal in the Khrushchev period. De-Stalinisation was at the heart of his effort to reform Soviet Communism. But in the years that followed, virtually all his reforms were marked by the kind of alternating advance and retreat that occurred in 1956. What triggered the burst of change that was central to the Khrushchev years? What limited it? Why did the reforms of the Khrushchev period go as far as they did, but no further? Answers to these questions can be found at the intersection of personality and history, of Khrushchev and his character, on the one hand, and, on the other, impersonal forces such as Stalin's legacy, the nature of the Soviet system, the influence of the world outside the USSR, even the nature of nuclear weapons.

Three conditions justify singling out a political leader and his or her per­sonality as decisive influences on events. Obviously, such a leader must have the sheer political power to affect those events. Second, a leader who acts idiosyncratically, rather than doing what others would do in his position, is not simply reacting to the dictates of a situation, or reflecting values that he and his colleagues share. Thirdly, actions that are particularly costly and self- destructive are likely to be products of internal drives and compulsions rather than of external circumstances.[108]

Khrushchev fits all three criteria. Stalin's successor may have wielded less power than his former master, but more than enough to allow him to initiate reforms and then throttle them back. Perhaps his most important decisions (to unmask Stalin in 1956, to dispatch nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962 and then suddenly to remove those missiles) were moves which, in all probability, no other Soviet leader of his time would have made. In a sense, Khrushchev's life is a stunning success story (if one does not count the corpses over which he clambered on his way to the top), but no sooner had he survived and succeeded Stalin, and assumed full power himself, than he began making devastating miscalculations, which ended in his unceremonious removal in October 1964.

Yet, Khrushchev also acted in a historical context that shaped and limited him. Having come to political maturity under Stalin and served for years in the dictator's inner circle, Khrushchev himself was a Stalinist before he became a 'de-Stalinist'. In addition, Stalin's legacy - a dysfunctional economy, a super-centralised polity and a self-isolating foreign policy - was nearly insur­mountable. Martin Malia goes so far as to contend that the Soviet system which Khrushchev tried to reform was essentially unreformable.[109] Kremlinologists like Myron Rush, Carl Linden and Michel Tatu have portrayed Kremlin power struggles that determined Khrushchev's policies.[110] Stephen F. Cohen pointed to the 'larger political forces in Soviet officialdom and society', particularly the 'friends and foes of change', which influenced the pace and pattern of de-Stalinisation.[111] Not to mention the effect of Russian inertia, explicated, for example, by Tim McDaniel in The Agony of the Russian Idea,[112] but characterised more crudely by Khrushchev in a 1963 conversation with Fidel Castro: 'You'd think I, as first secretary, could change anything in this country. Like hell I can! No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia's like a tub full of dough, you put your hand in it, down to the bottom, and you think you're master of the situation. When you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That's what Russia is like!'[113]

The outside world posed both mortal threats and irresistible opportuni­ties to a superpower on the make like the USSR. Pursuing 'expansion and coexistence'[114] simultaneously was difficult for any Soviet leader. As Alexander Yanov has argued, the United States 'consistently [tried] to undermine a Soviet reformist leader, thus practically shutting one of the rare Russian windows into political modernity and inviting a ferocious arms race'.[115] But Khrushchev him­self was also at fault: the awesome power of nuclear weapons reinforced his conviction that war with the United States would be an unmitigated catas­trophe, but it also tempted him to engage in nuclear bluff and blackmail that ended up endangering Soviet security as well as his own.

Biography

Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894 in the poor southern Russian village of Kalinovka, and his childhood there profoundly shaped his character. His parents dreamed of owning land and a horse but did not obtain either. His father, who later worked in the mines of Iuzovka in the Donbass, was a failure in the eyes of Khrushchev's mother, a strong-willed woman who invested her hopes in her son. That made it all the more important for Khrushchev to outdo his father, yet the very success he craved risked evoking guilt at succeeding where his father had not. The fact that Khrushchev had no more than two to four years of elementary education not only equipped him ill to cope with governing a vast transcontinental state, it also explains the insecurity he felt, especially when jousting with the intelligentsia, and the super-sensitivity to slight which made him vindictive towards those he thought had demeaned or betrayed him. His parents' religiosity helps to account for his sense of rectitude and for the conscience that endured even after he violated his own moral code by becoming Stalin's accomplice in terror.

From 1908 until the late 1920s, Khrushchev lived and worked mostly in the Donbass. Until the revolution, he laboured as a metalworker whose ambition was to become an engineer. The revolution and civil war 'distracted' him into Bolshevik politics (he joined the party in 1918), witness the fact that he twice returned to an educational path that seemed designed to lead to an industrial career. Strange as it may sound, Khrushchev might have made a better manager than a political leader whose native gifts sustained him during his rise to the top, but failed him when he reached the summit of power. Both in 1925 and 1930, he chose careers in the Communist Party apparatus, first in Ukraine, then in Moscow, where he quickly became Moscow party boss. Returning to Ukraine as party leader in 1938, he remained there (except for the war years) until Stalin summoned him back to Moscow in 1949.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Khrushchev played a central role in Stalinism. His positive contributions included supervising construction of the Moscow metro, energising Ukrainian agriculture and industry after the Great Purges, and attempting to ameliorate the post-war famine which Stalin's draconian policies caused. On the other hand, as he himselflater admitted, his arms were 'up to the elbows in blood' of those who perished in the purges. 'That', he continued shortly before he died, 'is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul'.[116] Khrushchev believed in socialism and took great pride in his role in 'building' it. But he also felt a deep guilt about his complicity in Stalinism, guilt that helps to explain both his anti-Stalin campaign and why he retreated from it lest his own complicity be fully revealed.

The 'secret speech' was a sign of Khrushchev's repentance. As early as 1940 he confided his sense of anger about Stalin's terror to a childhood friend in the Donbass: 'Don't blame me for all that. I'm not involved in that. When I can, I'll settle with that "Mudakshvili" [Khrushchev altered Stalin's real name, Dzhugashvili, by playing on the Russian word for 'prick', mudak] in full. I don't forgive him any of them - not Kirov, not Iakir, not Tukhachevskii, not the simplest worker or peasant.'[117]

Stalin was Khrushchev's mentor and tormentor, the man who raised him to the heights, but mocked him for his limitations as he did so. Khrushchev managed to survive and succeed Stalin by playing the simple peasant slogger, the very role which he aspired to transcend. But despite his miraculous rise, his doubts about both his capacities and his sins remained, exacerbated by the domestic and foreign-policy troubles that came crowding in on him, troubles to which he responded with increasingly desperate and reckless actions which, rather than consolidating and extending his achievements, ultimately ensured his defeat.

Succession struggle

The battle to succeed Stalin was largely about power (and the personalities who competed for it), but it was also about policies which his would-be heirs wielded as weapons against each other. Stalin's legacy created his successors' agenda. What was to be done about some 2.5 million prisoners still languishing in labour camps, and about those who had imprisoned them? How to give the party elite and the intelligentsia, which had been particularly terrorised, an increased sense of security? How to allow a cultural thaw without unleashing a flood? How to revive agriculture, which had virtually been ruined by Stalin, while boosting the production of housing and consumer goods which the dictator had so badly neglected? How to breach the isolation in which the USSR found itself after Stalin managed to alienate almost the whole world - not just the capitalist West, and influential neutrals like India, but key Communist allies like Yugoslavia, and even China, whose leader, Mao Zedung, paid Stalin public obeisance but nursed resentments that would soon boil over? How to counter American nuclear superiority? How to prevent the strains of the succession struggle itself from sapping Soviet strength in the Cold War? The capitalists knew, Khrushchev later recalled, 'that the leadership that Stalin left behind was no good because it was composed of people who had too many differences among them'.[118]

Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's former secret police chief, was hardly a closet lib­eral. Had he prevailed, he would almost certainly have exterminated his col­leagues, but in the first months after Stalin's death, he played the reformer in a vain effort to cleanse his image. He proposed a mass amnesty of non- political prisoners, and revealed that the Doctors' Plot, which had allegedly prepared to assassinate the Soviet leaders, was a fabrication. He condemned the predominance ofRussians and Russian language in non-Russian republics. Confronted with a flood of East Germans fleeing westward, itself a response to Walter Ulbricht's hyper-Stalinist rule, Beria apparently toyed with the idea of abandoning East German Communism, allowing reunification of a neutral Germany in exchange for substantial Western compensation.[119]

It was not deep policy differences that turned his colleagues against Beria; although they rejected his East German proposal, they later adopted other reforms of the sort he had proposed. Their main fear was that he would get them if they did not get him first. Khrushchev led a conspiracy that culminated in Beria's arrest on 26 June 1953. In December, Beria was executed. With him out of the way, Georgii Malenkov, who had succeeded Stalin as head of the Soviet government, and Khrushchev, who had taken the late dictator's other job as party boss, shared the leadership. The two men complemented each other in other ways: Khrushchev was impulsive; Malenkov was steadier. Khrushchev craved the limelight; Malenkov might have settled for a lesser role. The Khrushchev and Malenkov families had socialised frequently since the 1930s. However, Kremlin political culture bred mutual suspicions, and personal resentments sharpened them.

In August 1953, Malenkov proposed a reduction in stifling agricultural taxes, an increase in procurement prices which the state paid for obligatory collective- farm deliveries, and encouragement of individual peasant plots, which pro­duced much of the nation's vegetables and milk. Khrushchev had wanted to announce the new policy, and, according to Presidium colleague Anastas Mikoyan, he was 'indignant' when Malenkov stole the mantle of reformer. Khrushchev tried to grab it back with a speech of his own to the Central Com­mittee in September, but he 'could neither forget nor forgive' Malenkov for 'getting the glory'.[120] The reforms Malenkov proposed involved land already under cultivation, and as such they would take time to boost output. So Khrushchev's next proposal called for a crash programme to develop the so- called Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan and western Siberia. Over the next few years, as Khrushchev precipitously increased the area brought under new cultivation, his gamble raised overall output far above that of Stalin's last years. But it also became a source of dissension between him and Viach- eslav Molotov, and by the early 1960s, Virgin Lands output proved to be disappointing.

For both Khrushchev and Malenkov, a prime obstacle to change was the Stalinist image of the outside world. If capitalist states were irredeemably hos­tile, and new world war was therefore inevitable, then the USSR could hardly afford the luxury of domestic reform. Malenkov challenged these axioms when he insisted there were 'no contested issues in US-Soviet relations that cannot be solved by peaceful means', and warned that a nuclear war could destroy not just capitalism, but 'world civilization'. Khrushchev himself would even­tually adopt similar stances, but seeking to attract the arch-Stalinist Molotov into an anti-Malenkov alliance, he attacked the latter's heresies, charging that Malenkov's alarm about nuclear war had 'confused the comrades'.[121]

After a February 1955 Supreme Soviet session demoted Malenkov from prime minister to minister of electrification, Khrushchev's next target was Molotov. The two men collaborated against Beria and Malenkov, and although they disagreed on Virgin Lands development (Molotov favoured investing in previously cultivated areas instead), Khrushchev at first kept clear of Molotov's foreign-affairs bailiwick. In 1954, however, Khrushchev had pushed for rap­prochement with Tito's Yugoslavia, partly to correct what he regarded as one of Stalin's most grievous sins, but also as a way to undermine Molotov, who had been a prime architect of the Moscow-Belgrade split in 1948. When Molotov objected to Khrushchev's trip to Belgrade in May 1955, Khrushchev responded with an assault on Molotov at aJuly 1955 Central Committee plenum. Although he was replaced as foreign minister in mid-1956, Molotov kept his seat on the Presidium. Like Malenkov, who also remained on the Presidium, Molotov would never forgive Khrushchev, would hold every error he made against him and would take the first opportunity to get even. The turmoil of 1956 gave them that chance.

Khrushchev was not the only Soviet leader who favoured addressing the Stalin issue at the Twentieth Congress. Beria's arrest, investigation and trial had widened the circle of those fully aware of Stalin's crimes. After his execu­tion, requests poured in for reconsideration of high-level purges. By the end of 1955 thousands of political prisoners had returned home, bringing stories of what had gone on in the camps, and in the process adding many of their relatives to those who would support de-Stalinisation. Yet the Gulag system was still functioning, the most famous show trials of the 1930s had not been re-examined, and labour camps and colonies still held hundreds of thousands of inmates. Mikoyan recalled that he pressed Khrushchev to denounce Stalin, saying, 'There has to be a report on what happened, if not to the party as a whole, then to delegates to the first congress after his death. If we don't do that at the congress, and someone else does it sometime before the next congress, then everyone would have a legal right to hold us fully responsible for the crimes that occurred.'²³ On 13 February, the day before the congress convened, the Presidium as a whole decided that Khrushchev would address the subject at a closed session.²⁴ But Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov had grave reservations, and Molotov, in particular, later insisted on the

pp. 155, 166. Khrushchev's remarks in RGANI (Russian State Archive ofRecent History),

f.2, op. 1, d. 127.

23 Mikoian, Tak bylo, p. 591. 24 RGANI, f.2, op. 1, d. 181, lines 2, 4-5.

30 June Central Committee statement that in effect revised Khrushchev's secret speech.

Early in 1957, Khrushchev himself began taking back what he had said. At a New Year's Eve reception for the Soviet elite and the diplomatic corps, he declared that he and his colleagues were all 'Stalinists' in the uncompromis­ing struggle against the class enemy. After the invasion of Hungary sparked protests among Soviet students and intellectuals, Khrushchev approved a new round of arrests.[122] Sensing that his authority was eroding, he launched a counter-offensive which ended up further undermining his position. His Febru­ary move to abolish most national economic ministries and replace them with regional economic councils antagonised central planners and ministers. His May pledge that the USSR would soon overtake the United States in per capita output of meat, butter and milk, made without being cleared with the Presid­ium, was ill-conceived. His bullying of writers at a gala spring picnic played into the hands of Kremlin colleagues who had no use for literary liberals but used Khrushchev's boorish behaviour to discredit him.

On 18 June 1957, Khrushchev's colleagues (he later labelled them the 'anti- party group') launched their move to remove him as party leader. Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich led the assault, supported by Bulganin, Voroshilov, Mikhail Pervukhin, Maksim Saburov and Dmitrii Shepilov. The first seven of these constituted a majority of the Presidium's full members. They lost when Khrushchev and Mikoyan, backed by several Presidium candidate members and Central Committee secretaries, insisted that the Central Committee itself, in which Khrushchev supporters predominated, decide the issue.

The 'anti-party group' (which did not in fact oppose the party and was so racked by internal divisions as hardly to constitute a group) accused Khrushchev of erratic and irrational personal behaviour, but its deeper reason for attacking him was fear that he would use the Stalin issue against them. He did tar them with Stalinist crimes, both at the June 1957 Presidium meet­ing, which lasted until 22 June, and the Central Committee plenum, which stretched seven more days after that. After the plenum, most of the plotters lost their positions, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Shepilov immediately, the others more slowly so as to obscure how many of them had conspired against Khrushchev. It was only in 1961 that Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and

Shepilov were expelled from the party, but after 1957 Khrushchev faced no more top-level opposition until his own proteges in the Presidium began to conspire against him in 1964. Until then he was free virtually to dictate domestic and foreign policy and to undermine himself as the result.

Reforming agriculture

Khrushchev's first priority was agriculture. Yet, in addressing this and other areas, he quickly encountered the ideological limits of the Soviet system, social resistance and bureaucratic behaviour that magnified his own errors. At times Khrushchev sounded like a born-again free marketeer: 'Excuse me for talking to you sharply,' he once told state farm workers, 'but if a capitalist farmer used eight kilos of grain to produce one kilo of meat he'd have to go around without trousers. But around here a state farm director who behaves like that - his trousers are just fine. Why? Because he doesn't have to answer for his own mess; no one even holds it against him.'[123] Yet Khrushchev was still wedded to collectivist agriculture. In 1953 he had defended individual material incentives: 'Only people who do not understand the policy of the party . . . see any danger to the socialist system in the presence of personally owned productive livestock.'[124] But he himself saw such a danger, and so preferred to rely on party mobilisation and exhortation, and on quick fixes of technology and organisation.

Corn had long been grown in the USSR, but Khrushchev took the United States as his model. His American guru when it came to corn, Iowa farmer Roswell Garst, stressed necessary preconditions - hybrid seeds, fertilisa­tion, irrigation, mechanisation, plus use of insecticides and herbicide - but Khrushchev pushed on without them, not just in suitable southern regions but in Siberia and the north as well. Collective farmers resisted planting corn because its cultivation was particularly labour intensive. That drove Khrushchev to press his corn campaign all the harder, while zealous bureau­crats who wanted to please him exacerbated the situation by insisting on extending corn acreage without adequately preparing peasants first.

Despite these and other mistakes (such as the virtually overnight abolition of machine tractor stations, which provided collective farms with machinery and the people to run it), agriculture at first boasted big gains. Between 1953 and 1959 farm output rose 8.5 per cent annually and 51 per cent overall. But 1960 proved to be the worst year for agriculture since Stalin's death, and despite optimistic forecasts in the summer of 1961, that autumn's harvest was no better. Khrushchev's response was to resort to more institutional tinkering. In 1962 he moved to abolish district party committees, the fabled raikomy which had overseen agriculture for decades, and to replace them with 'territorial production administrations', which added another layer of bureaucracy between the countryside and the capital. That same autumn he proposed dividing the Communist Party into two separate branches, one specialising on agriculture, the other on industry. Ever since Lenin, the party had jealously guarded its monopoly of power by centralising its own ranks. Khrushchev was convinced that local party officials shied away from rural problems, and he was determined to force them to concentrate on feeding the people.

These panaceas also failed. The 1963 harvest was disastrous: only 107.5 million tons compared to 134.7 in 1958; the Virgin Lands produced their smallest crop in years, although the sown area was now 10 million hectares larger than in 1955. As a result Moscow had to buy wheat from the West. 'Father didn't understand what was wrong', his son, Sergei, remembered. 'He grew nervous, became angry, quarreled, looked for culprits and didn't find them. Deep inside he began subconsciously to understand that the problem was not in the details. It was the system itself that didn't work, but he couldn't change his beliefs.'[125]

Industry and housing

Energising industrial management and rendering it more efficient, another post-Stalinist task, also encountered systemic obstacles. The centralised Soviet planning system, which excelled at 'extensive' heavy industrial development, was not suited for 'intensive' development of an increasingly complex and diversified economy. Yet Soviet leaders of the Khrushchev period were not inclined to pursue proposals for fundamental, structural reform. Although the Moscow-based ministries, which Khrushchev abolished in February 1957, had favoured the narrow needs of their own industries at the expense of local areas in which their plants were located, the sovnarkhozy which replaced them fostered localism while losing sight of all-Union interests. That soon led to a process of recentralisation in which the number of regional economic councils was reduced, a new agency called the Supreme Economic Council was created to co-ordinate them and a series of state committees was formed to duplicate the role of the departed ministries. Nor did Khrushchev's division of the party produce positive industrial results. Although Soviet GNP grew at a rate of 7.1 per cent until 1958, after that it dipped down to 5.4 per cent in 1964, not nearly enough to allow the USSR to 'catch up and overtake' the United States which, although it was growing more slowly, had a much larger economic base.

While the economy did not grow fast enough to satisfy Soviet leaders, the lives of ordinary citizens improved. Wages rose, meat consumption increased, consumer goods like televisions, refrigerators and washing machines became widely available. Stalin's legacy included a dreadful housing crisis: massive overcrowding, armies of young workers living in dormitories, multiple families crowded into communal apartments, with each family occupying one room and all sharing a single kitchen and bathroom. In the Khrushchev period, the annual rate of housing construction nearly doubled. Between 1956 and 1965, about 108 million people moved into new apartments, many of them in standardised five-storey apartment houses built out of prefabricated mate­rials in rapid, assembly-line fashion. Millions were grateful, but Khrushchev encouraged ever higher expectations, particularly by promising, in a speech presenting a new party programme to the Central Committee in June 1961, that the communist utopia itself would be 'just about built' by 1980.[126]

Culture

Members of the scientific and artistic intelligentsia were a natural constituency for reform. Having been singled out for special suffering under Stalin, many of them enthusiastically welcomed de-Stalinisation. 'I like [Khrushchev] ever so much', gushed Andrei Sakharov in 1956. 'After all, he so differs from Stalin.'[127]However, they were also increasingly dismayed - not only by Khrushchev's continual retreats from anti-Stalinism, but by the incredibly boorish behaviour of a man whom artist Ernst Neizvestny described as 'the most uncultured man I've ever met'.[128] Anticipating just such condescension from intellectuals, Khrushchev dreaded encounters with them even as he craved their respect. They did not realise that their resistance to his calls for ideological discipline challenged not just the party line but his self-esteem. That is why clashes with recalcitrant intellectuals provoked him into swirls of angry rhetoric, simultaneously offensive and defensive, lashing out at his audience in a violent disconnected way.

What has been called the 'Thaw' began after Stalin's death but picked up momentum after the Twentieth Party Congress. After the long night of Stalinism, with its pogrom against writers and artists, critic Maya Turovskaya recalled, 'the coming of Khrushchev and the Twentieth Congress felt like a great holiday of the soul'.[129] Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw (Otepel') included biting criticism of the ruling elite. In Vladimir Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone (Ne Khlebom edinym), an idealistic engineer is thwarted by mindless, heartless officialdom. Literaturnaia Moskva (Literary Moscow), a literary almanac ofprose, poetry, plays, criticism and social commentary published in i956, included works mocking the official image of'the new Soviet man'. Mikhail Kalatozov's film, The Cranes are Flying (Letiatzhuravli), Grigorii Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate) and Sergei Bondarchuk's Destiny of a Man (Sud'ba cheloveka) took a fresh look at the sacred subject of the Russian soldier in the Second World War (see Plate 22). Concern for the individual, rather than the nation or the state, began to appear in the work of a new generation of film-makers such as Andrei Tarkovsky.

During the World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957, thousands of young people from around the globe flooded the city, singing and dancing late into the night to the beat of African drums, Scottish bagpipes and jazz bands, cheering open-air poetry readings and carousing along gaily decorated streets. Masses of young Muscovites turned out to meet the foreign guests. The jamboree impressed the world with Moscow's new openness, but the Soviet young peo­ple who turned out were even more impressed with Western popular culture. After the Twenty-Second Congress in October 1961, at which Khrushchev launched another attack on Stalin, the Thaw gathered more momentum. Prompted by Khrushchev, the Presidium approved publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den' Ivana Deniso- vicha), and on 2i October i962, Pravda published Evgenii Evtushenko's poem, 'The Heirs of Stalin' (Nasledniki Stalina), which had been circulating privately without hope of publication.

However, Khrushchev recoiled at the very process of liberalisation which he encouraged. When Boris Pasternak allowed his novel, Doctor Zhivago, to be published in the West, Khrushchev ordered his Komsomol chief to 'work over' Pasternak, telling him to compare the great poet unfavourably to a pig who 'never makes a mess where it eats and sleeps', and to invite 'this internal emigrant' to become 'a real emigrant and go to his capitalist paradise'.[130] After his overthrow in 1964, Khrushchev finally read Doctor Zhivago. 'We shouldn't have banned it', he said. 'I should have read it myself. There's nothing anti- Soviet in it.'[131]

As Khrushchev's troubles mounted, he sought new ways to motivate and inspire the Soviet people while attacking old traditions like religion, which in his view was distracting them from the task of building Communism. 'Within twenty years', he told the Central Committee in presenting the new party pro­gramme in June 1961, the USSR would 'steadily win victory after victory' in economic competition with the United States. The Soviet countryside would blossom with 'such an array of appurtenances - apartment houses equipped with all modern conveniences, enterprises providing consumer services, cul­tural and medical facilities - that in the end the rural population will enjoy conditions of life comparable to those found in cities'.[132] Khrushchev was a true believer, impatient for the day when his fellow citizens, who had sacrificed so much for so long, would at last enjoy the good life.

Although religion had always been anathema to the Bolsheviks, Stalin had eased religious persecution, if only to unite the populace for the war effort, and to impress his wartime Western allies. It was Khrushchev who mounted an all-out assault that reached its peak in 1961: anti-religious agitation was intensified, taxes on religious activity increased, churches and monasteries closed, with the result that the number of Orthodox parishes dropped from more than 15,000 in 1951 to less than 8,000 in 1963. Khrushchev's anti-religion campaign was a price he paid for de-Stalinisation - in the sense that it was popular with Stalinist ideologues like Central Committee secretary Mikhail Suslov - but he may also have seen it as a form of de-Stalinisation, in that it reversed Stalin's compromise with religion and returned to Lenin's more militant approach.

Khrushchev's approach to the 'nationality question' fitted the pattern of trying to remove the Stalinist stain from socialism while at the same time bringingthe USSRcloserto utopia itself. He allowed smallpeoples ofthe North Caucasus, such as Chechens, Ingush and Balkars, to return from their Stalinist exile, although he did not invite the Crimean Tatars to return to Crimea. His efforts to decentralise political power by transferring some of it to regional leaders strengthened the position of non-Russian nationalities, some of whom were to break away from Russia three decades later. If Khrushchev did not fear that outcome, that was because he could not imagine it. He counted on the various peoples of the USSR to fuse together into a single Soviet nation. He took the borders between Soviet republics so lightly that in 1954 he transferred the Russian-dominated Crimea from the Russian Federation to Ukraine to celebrate the 300th anniversary of a treaty linking Ukraine with Russia.[133]

The Soviet bloc

Having had little exposure to the outside world (and almost none to the Great Powers) during the first fifty years of his life, Khrushchev was hardly ready to direct Soviet foreign policy, but initially at least, he did not have to. With Beria and Malenkov taking the lead in designing overall strategy, and Molotov conducting diplomacy, Khrushchev did not attend to world affairs until 1954, at which point his focus was on relations with other Communist states. Between 1953 and 1956 Moscow agreed to build, or aid in the construction of, some 205 Chinese factories and plants valued at about $2 billion, with a large proportion of the cost financed with Soviet credits, all when the Russians themselves were suffering shortages. But Khrushchev's failure to consult the Chinese before unmasking Stalin, and his handling of the Polish and Hungarian crises later in 1956, alienated Mao. Khrushchev hoped to play the benevolent tutor to the Chinese leader, so it was personally devastating when Mao began condescend­ing to him, not just denying Khrushchev the satisfaction of outdoing Stalin in Sino-Soviet relations, but returning Khrushchev to his former role of an upstart mortified by a new master.

When Mao came to Moscow to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn of 1957, Khrushchev showered him with attention and hospitality. But Mao practically oozed dissatisfaction and con­descension in return.[134] The years 1958 and 1959 brought a sharp downturn in Sino-Soviet relations which two Khrushchev trips to Beijing not only failed to reverse, but actually deepened. The trigger for the dispute was a Soviet request for long-wave radio stations, necessary for communicating with Soviet sub­marines, on Chinese territory, and a proposal for a joint submarine fleet, both of which, Mao feared, would deepen Chinese dependence on the USSR.

Sino-Soviet differences extended to Chinese ideological boasting about the communes they were constructing, the Sino-Indian clash in 1959 and Moscow's pursuit of detente with the United States, all overlaid with growing personal animosity between the two leaders. Alone with Soviet colleagues in a Beijing reception room that must have been bugged, Khrushchev likened Mao in 1959 to old 'galoshes', a term that is colloquial for condoms in Chinese as well as Russian. Mao saw himself as a 'bullfighter', one of his interpreters recalled, and 'Khrushchev as the bull'.³⁸

In i960, Khrushchev suddenly decided to pull all Soviet advisers, of whom there were more than a thousand, out of China, and to tear up hundreds of contracts and scrap hundreds of co-operative projects, a radical step that not only wounded the Chinese but deprived Moscow of the chance to gather invaluable intelligence. Although the two sides adopted an uneasy truce the next year, the dispute flared up again when Zhou En-Lai walked out of the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow, further intensified when Beijing characterised Khrushchev's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis as 'adventur­ism' followed by 'capitulationism', and deteriorated beyond repair when the two parties started exchangingpropagandabarrages, involving other Commu­nist Parties in their conflict, and even quarrelling about potentially explosive Sino-Soviet border disputes.

Khrushchev's i955 journey to Belgrade reflected a new, post-Stalinist for­mula for holding together the Soviet bloc: to tolerate a modicum of diver­sity and domestic autonomy, to emphasise ideological and political bonds and reinforce economic and political ties, and to weave all this together with Khrushchev's own personal involvement. Yugoslav leader Josip Tito was eager for reconciliation, but on his own terms: his aim was to reform the Communist camp, not buttress it; to preserve Yugoslav independence, including ties with the West, not restrict it. Having broken with Stalin before Khrushchev did, Tito was proud and touchy. Khrushchev needed Yugoslav concessions to prove he was right to conciliate Belgrade, whereas Tito was determined to postpone the closer party-to-party ties that Khrushchev sought until Stalinism was dead and buried in the USSR. As a result, although Soviet-Yugoslav tensions never again plummeted to their post-i948 depths, they did not become as close as Khrushchev wanted either.

The year i955 also marked the post-Stalin leadership's first major venture into the Third World. For Stalin, who was famous for concentrating on coun­tries of great geopolitical significance, and for cutting his losses in those

38 Recollections of former Soviet and Chinese officials and interpreters at 1997 Symposium on Sino-Soviet Relations and the Cold War, Beijing, 1997.

he could not hope to control, the developing world had been a sideshow. Khrushchev, in contrast, welcomed the prospect of revolutions that might bring the USSR new allies, and courted neutrals whom Stalin had disdained. In October 1955, he and Bulganin undertooka lengthy tour of India, Burma and Afghanistan. In February i960, he revisited these three while adding Indonesia to his itinerary. Egypt received a visit from him in May i964. In the meantime, he devoted considerable attention to the Congo, supporting the short-lived, left-leaning presidency of Patrice Lumumba, and of course Cuba, whose fiery new leader seemed intent on turning his island into a Soviet ally only 150 kilo­metres from Florida (see Plate 17). None of these ventures, however, brought anything like the dividends Khrushchev hoped for.

East-West relations

While China and Yugoslavia could challenge the USSR, and the Third World tempted it, the United States could destroy it. The centrepiece of Khrushchev's diplomacy was a campaign for what a later era would label detente. As he saw it, reducing Cold War tensions could undermine Western resistance to Communist gains, tempt capitalists to increase East-West trade and project a more appealing image to the world, while at the same time allowing Soviet energies and resources, which had previously been devoted to the military, to be shifted to civilian uses.

Khrushchev's first major achievement was the Austrian State Treaty, signed in May i955, under which Soviet occupation forces pulled out in return for an Austrian declaration of neutrality. Next came the four-power Geneva summit conference in July 1955. The main issues discussed at Geneva (the German question, European security and disarmament) offered no room for compro­mise, but Khrushchev's main impression from the meeting, that 'our enemies probably feared us as much as we feared them', would soon encourage him to practise nuclear blackmail so as to play on Western fears.[135] When Israel attacked Egypt, with British and French support, in October i956, Premier Bulganin ominously asked Prime Minister Anthony Eden, 'What situation would Britain find itself in if she were attacked by stronger states possessing all kinds of modern destructive weapons?' Later, after a Suez ceasefire was agreed to, Khrushchev claimed it was the 'direct result' of this Soviet warning.[136] In fact, it was American rather than Soviet pressure that forced Egypt's attackers to cease fire, for Soviet threats had been issued only after that outcome was no longer in doubt.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary, which coincided with the Suez crisis, put Khrushchev's detente campaign on hold. He resumed it in 1957 and 1958, including a series of hints that he would welcome an invitation to come to the United States for informal talks with President Eisenhower, but got lit­tle response.[137] In the meantime, the German situation worsened, with East Germany lagging behind West Germany economically, and steadily losing skilled workers and professionals to the West, and with West Germany seem­ing likely to gain access to nuclear weapons. By the autumn of 1958, recalled Khrushchev's foreign policy adviser, Oleg Troianovskii, West Germany was 'being drawn ever deeper into the Western alliance; the arms race was gather­ing steam and spreading into outer space; disarmament negotiations were get­ting nowhere with defence spending weighing more heavily on the economy; East Germany was isolated and under pressure as before; the Soviet Union was being surrounded by American military bases; new military blocs were being set up in Asia and the Middle East'. To make matters worse, Troianovskii remembers 'voices saying ever more distinctly that if the Soviet Union had to choose between the West and China, preference should be given to the latter'.[138]

Khrushchev's answer to practically all these problems was the Berlin ulti­matum that he issued in November 1958: If the West did not recognise the German Democratic Republic, Moscow would give it control over access to Berlin, thus abrogating Western rights established in the post-war Potsdam accords. If the West tried forcibly to prevent East Germany from carrying out its new duties, the USSR would fight to defend its ally. This ultimatum was Khrushchev's way offorcing the Western powers into talks, but his 'plan' had several serious flaws. He was not sure exactly where he was going or how to get there. Nor did he realistically assess the obstacles in his way, par­ticularly the shrewdly stubborn German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, the imperiously disdainful French president, Charles de Gaulle, the well-disposed but insufficiently influential British prime minister, Harold Macmillan and the unexpectedly unreliable President Eisenhower.

The Berlin ultimatum produced a deadlock until Eisenhower suddenly invited Khrushchev to visit the United States in September 1959. While

Khrushchev's reception was mixed, the very fact of the visit, the first ever by a Soviet leader, was stunning. But the diplomatic results were also mixed: Khrushchev's only concession was to lift the ultimatum, or rather, not to deny that he had done so. All he got in return was Eisenhower's promise to attend Khrushchev's long-sought summit, which neither committed NATO allies to do so, nor ensured that useful accords would ensue if they did.

After a delay of several months (occasioned by French and German resis­tance), the four-power summit convened in Paris in May i960, or rather, failed to convene because of a crisis triggered by an American U-2 spy plane's over­flight of the USSR on 1 May. Once the summit collapsed, after Eisenhower rejected Khrushchev's demand that he apologise and promise never to do it again, the Soviet leader angrily gave up on Eisenhower and placed his hopes for progress in the next American president, John Kennedy. But their bilateral summit, in June i96i in Vienna, produced a further stalemate, while convinc­ing Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak. 'What can I tell you?' Khrushchev said to Troianovskii after his first negotiating session with Kennedy. 'This man is very inexperienced, even immature. Compared to him, Eisenhower was a man of intelligence and vision.'[139] So that when the summit was followed by an exchange of threats, which further accelerated the flight of East German refugees, Khrushchev dared to authorise construction of the Berlin wall. The wall was a second-best substitute for the more general German solution he had been seeking since i958, but Khrushchev was pleasantly surprised when President Kennedy accepted it, an impression that convinced him that he could pressure Kennedy again, thus setting the stage for the most explosive Cold War crisis of all in Cuba.

In the summer and early autumn of i962, Moscow secretly sent to Cuba missiles capable of reaching the American homeland. The crisis that ensued after Washington discovered the rockets lasted until Khrushchev agreed to remove them in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba, as well as a secret American undertaking to remove US missiles stationed in Turkey. Historians have cited several Soviet motives for the missile deployment: to protect Cuba from an invasion following on from the failed intervention at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961; to rectify what had turned out, despite Khrushchev's atomic boasting, to be a strategic nuclear imbalance in Washington's favour; to prepare a new move to achieve the larger German solution which had eluded Khrushchev since 1958. In fact, all three motives probably played a role, as filtered through the mind of a man who by 1962 was also besieged by agricultural and other troubles at home and was looking for a Cuban triumph that might solve, or at least overshadow, all these problems.[140]

When the crisis was over, Khrushchev declared a kind of victory: it had proved possible, he told the USSR Supreme Soviet on 12 December, 'to prevent the invasion', and to 'overcome a crisis that threatened thermonuclear war'.[141]'He made a show of havingbeen brave,' his Presidium colleague Petr Demichev recalled, 'but we could tell by his behaviour, especially by his irritability, that he felt it had been a defeat.'[142]

Endgame

After the collapse of his Cuban adventure, Khrushchev tried to address foreign and domestic problems whose solutions had so far eluded him, but without the positive momentum which a Cuban triumph would have provided. He did manage to negotiate a treaty with the Americans and the British banning nuclear testing in the air, underwater and in outer space, the most important arms control agreement since the start of the Cold War, as well as one estab­lishing a 'hot line' for communicating during crises. But the assassination of President Kennedy in November i963 put an end to hopes for another sum­mit which would establish a new Soviet-American relationship, as the Vienna meeting had not.

The division of the Communist Party into agricultural and industrial branches, about which a Soviet journalist heard 'not one good word', but 'only bewilderment and outright rejection' behind the scenes at the Novem­ber i962 Central Committee plenum which unanimously adopted the plan, failed to energise agriculture, and neither did a plan for quadrupling Soviet chemical fertiliser production in four years.[143] When drought struck in 1963, the Soviet people found themselves standing in bread queues only two years after having been promised milk and honey without limit in the new party programme. Moscow eventually agreed to purchases of 6.8 million tons of grain from Canada, almost 2 million from the United States, 1.8 million from Australia, even 400,000 from lowly Romania.

As late as November i962, liberal writers and artists were still pushing the Thaw forward. The publication that month of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich seemed a harbinger of more gains to come. Rather than sparking a sustained burst of glasnost', however, November marked a retreat as cultural conservatives, who had been waiting for an opportunity to move against their intelligentsia foes, cleverly exploited Khrushchev's sour post-Cuba mood. By moving a small exhibit of avant-garde art from an artist's studio to the huge Manezh exhibition hall, and then inviting Khrushchev to view it, they provoked him into an obscenity-laced tirade against the offending artists. He tried to revert to his more open-minded, benevolent self by inviting some four hundred intellectuals to a lavish reception on 17 December, but instead he erupted again in a vituperative attack on unorthodox art. Yet a third surreal session with artists, writers and others followed in March 1963 at the Kremlin. As in December, Khrushchev's aides had prepared a balanced, moderate text, but once again, one of them recalled, Khrushchev 'did not use a word of it'.[144]Instead he lambasted writers like Andrei Voznesenskii and Vasilii Aksionov so wildly as to raise doubts as to whether Khrushchev himself was in his right mind.

Khrushchev's reformist impulses were not entirely finished. In his last years in office, proposals for radical economic reform developed by Khar'kov economist Evsei Liberman started appearing in Pravda. During a visit to Yugoslavia in the late summer of 1963 Khrushchev displayed interest in Yugoslav 'self-management' based on 'workers' councils'. But he was no longer capable of implementing radical new ideas even if he had adopted them. By this time he was also ignoring his Presidium colleagues, having withdrawn instead into an inner circle of aides and advisers. Nor was he listening to high-ranking military men. They had previously been alienated by three rounds of deep cuts in Soviet armed forces which Khrushchev had ordered between 1955 and 1957, in 1958 and again in i960 (approximately 2 million, 300,000 and another 1.2 million respectively), and by his decision to rely on nuclear missiles rather than conventional forces. Their leader hardly hid his assumption that he knew military affairs better than they did, and they could not conceal their resentment.[145]

Overthrow

The Soviet Union possessed no established procedure for transferring power. After Lenin and Stalin died, the battle to succeed them had shaken the political system. The trouble with a fixed term for the leader, and a regularised process for replacing him, was that they would limit the leader himself. Even hand- picking a successor was problematic since an ambitious heir apparent could threaten his sponsor. The way to reduce that danger was to have two rival heirs share power, but that might ensure a destructive contest later on.

In 1962, Frol Kozlov, the former Leningrad party boss who had become Khrushchev's de facto deputy, led the field of future contenders. But Kozlov began to alienate his boss in early 1963 (less because he led a conservative faction as some Western Kremlinologists surmised at the time, and more as a result of what seemed like personal arrogance to Khrushchev), and later that year he suffered a major stroke that removed him from the running. In 1964 Khrushchev in effect elevated Leonid Brezhnev to deputy party leader, but at the same time he made Ukrainian party boss Nikolai Podgornyi a rival heir apparent. Beginning in the spring of that year, the two men put aside their mutual suspicions and combined in a conspiracy against Khrushchev. In March, they began approaching fellow Presidium members about remov­ing Khrushchev. In June Brezhnev went so far as briefly to consider having Khrushchev arrested as he returned from a foreign trip. Instead, he and his fellow plotters spent the summer and early autumn secretly securing the sup­port of Central Committee members so as to avoid the fate of Khrushchev's rivals in 1957.

On the evening of 12 October, Brezhnev telephoned Khrushchev, who was vacationing in Pitsunda on the Black Sea coast, and asked him to return to the Kremlin for a meeting of the Presidium. After initially objecting, Khrushchev agreed to fly back the next day. When he arrived, his Presidium colleagues took turns indicting him for destructive policies both foreign and domestic, ranging from agriculture to Berlin and Cuba. Most of all they emphasised his personal shortcomings: his impulsiveness and explosiveness, his unilateral, arbitrary leadership, his megalomania. After a brief and halting attempt to defend himself, Khrushchev offered no resistance. No one defended him, not even his closest associate on the Presidium Anastas Mikoyan, who was willing to have Khrushchev stay on as prime minister while stepping down as party

leader.[146]

The next day the Presidium granted Khrushchev's 'request' to retire 'in connection with his advanced age and deterioration of his health'. Khrushchev lived under what amounted to house arrest for the next seven years. He died on 11 September 1971.

Legacy

As a man and a leader, Khrushchev was as two-sided as the Ernst Neizvestny monument, consisting of intersecting slabs of white marble and black granite, which stands at his grave site: Stalinist-turned-de-Staliniser, complicit in great evil yet also the author of much good. The legacy of the Khrushchev period as a whole is more unambiguously positive. Mikhail Gorbachev and his reformist colleagues came to political maturity at the time and remembered its greater openness with optimism and nostalgia. Gorbachev's generation, he once said, considered itself 'children of the Twentieth Congress', and regarded the task of renewing what Khrushchev had begun as 'our obligation'.[147] And in this they had the support of a much wider circle of shestidesiatniki (men and women of the 1960s) who had long dreamed of recapturing the hope and idealism of their youth. As Lyudmilla Alexseyeva, who later became a leading dissident, recalled, Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin 'put an end to our lonely questioning of the Soviet system. Young men and women began to lose their fear of sharing views, knowledge, beliefs, questions. Every night we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read "unofficial" prose, and swap stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country. That was the time of our awakening.'[148]

Beneath the surface, the reforms of the Khrushchev period, awkward and erratic though they were, allowed a nascent civil society to take shape where Stalinism had created a desert. It would take nearly three decades for the seeds that were planted under Khrushchev to bear fruit, but eventually they did.

The Brezhnev era

STEPHEN E. HANSON

The nature of Soviet politics and society during Leonid Brezhnev's tenure as General Secretary of the CPSU from 1964 to 1982 has until recently remained a comparatively unexplored scholarly topic. Among historians, the turn towards social history 'from below' that has so greatly enriched our understanding of the Soviet regime under Lenin and Stalin has yet to inspire a parallel re­examination of everyday life in the Brezhnev era.¹ Meanwhile, political scien­tists, with few exceptions, have given up study of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union to focus on more contemporary themes.² Compounding these gaps within history and political science are continuing problems of documenta­tion. Although the records of Central Committee plenums and many materials from the CPSU General Department archive from the period are now avail­able, and important archival materials are also accessible in many of the former Soviet republics, other key historical archives from the period - in particular, the so-called Presidential Archive containing documentation of meetings of the CPSU Politburo and Secretariat, as well as the KGB, military and foreign intelligence archives - remain largely closed to independent scholars. Post- 1991 memoirs by Soviet high officials and their relatives - although many do cover the Brezhnev era - have tended to emphasise developments during the

The author would like to thank Mariana Markova and Toregeldi Tuleubayev for research assistance, and Mark Kramer for invaluable feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.

1 Useful accounts of everyday life in the Brezhnev era can be found in Caroline Humphrey KarlMarx Collective: Economy, Society, andReligion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Victor Zaslavsky The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1982); and John Bushnell, Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

2 The exceptions include Steven Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Brian Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Collapse of the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Gorbachev period. And despite the presence of millions of eyewitnesses still living in the former Soviet Union today, transcriptions of oral histories of the period are practically non-existent.[149] Finally, scholars also lack a consensual ana­lytical framework for making sense of Brezhnevism as a regime type. Indeed, several contradictory labels for the period continue to coexist in both popular and scholarly accounts.

One influential approach derived from the totalitarian model of Soviet politics saw the Brezhnev era as one of'oligarchical petrification', in which the essential institutional features of the Stalinist system were left intact with only minor adjustments, leading to a long-term pattern of political immobilism and economic decline.[150] This interpretation later got an unanticipated boost from Mikhail Gorbachev, whose ritual invocation of the phrase 'era of stagnation' (era zastoia) to describe the pre-perestroika period has greatly influenced the historical accounts ofboth Russian and Western scholars. Brezhnev andhis elite are thus remembered as a group of sick old men, with dozens of meaningless medals pinned to their chests, presiding over an increasingly dysfunctional military-industrial complex.

Of course, this image captures some important part of the reality of the Brezhnev regime, particularly in its later stages. Yet it is instructive to remem­ber that perhaps the most influential school ofthought among Soviet specialists during the Brezhnev era itself, the modernisation approach, saw the post-1964 period very differently - as marking the triumph of rationality and develop­ment over the 'Utopian' impulses of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.[151] Scholars in this camp competed in the 1970s to apply a whole series of models drawn from the comparative politics of developed countries to help interpret the new, seemingly more stable and successful, Soviet reality Jerry Hough saw the Brezhnev regime as a 'return to normalcy' in which an 'institutional pluralism' similar to that characterising Western democracies had taken shape; Soviet regional party secretaries, in his view, functioned very much like 'prefects' in modern France, using personal initiative to solve local economic prob­lems in an essentially rational manner.[152] Skilling and Griffiths edited a widely read volume of essays applying Western 'interest group theory' to the Soviet case.[153] George Breslauer termed the Brezhnev regime a form of 'welfare-state authoritarianism'; Valerie Bunce and John Nichols, while sharing Breslauer's emphasis on the Soviet regime's social welfare orientation, preferred the term 'corporatism'.[154]

Given that most of these models were designed to explain what was then seen as the relative stability and success of Brezhnevism, it is easy to discount their conceptual utility now. Yet modernisation theory, with its emphasis on understanding how Soviet institutions actually functioned, captured some­thing important about the Brezhnev era that is too often lost in post-1991 analyses. This was, after all, a leadership that endured for nearly two decades, during which time the USSR was universally acknowledged to be second only to the United States in world power and influence. Brezhnev himself initially impressed his subordinates as far more competent and reasonable than his predecessor Khrushchev - at least until his illness in the later 1970s, when as one high-ranking party official put it, 'the Brezhnev we used to know had become completely different'.[155] In the popular mythology of contemporary Russia, too, Brezhnev's reign is often seen as a 'golden era' of stability and con­sumer abundance, when Soviet achievements in space exploration and sport were the envy of the world. Such nostalgia cannot substitute for objective historical understanding of the period, but its persistence and power among many who lived through the period must nonetheless be explained.

In short, the Brezhnev era was somehow both a time of modernisation, stability and accomplishment and a time of decay, stagnation and corruption. How are we to make sense of this paradox? This chapter will argue that the complex nature of Brezhnevism must be understood through a deeper anal­ysis of the underlying ideological project of the Soviet regime from 1917 to 1991. The totalitarian model interpreted the Bolshevik revolution as a power grab by revolutionary extremists whose ultimate goal was total control over society; Brezhnevism from this perspective was simply a degenerate form of one-party rule in the same basic mould as its Stalinist predecessor. The mod­ernisation approach saw the Bolshevik revolution as containing the seeds of a breakthrough towards 'modern' forms of political and economic organisation; Brezhnevism (like Khrushchevism before it and Gorbachevism after it) was thus seen as another stage in the inevitable emergence of a more fully 'ratio­nal' Soviet system. Neither school, however, fully grasped the ways in which Lenin, Stalin and their successors interpreted their own historical mission: as the creation of a new, socialist way of life, meant to make modernity itself 'revolutionary'. Lenin's invention of the Bolshevik 'party of professional rev­olutionaries', and Stalin's imposition of a socio-economic system built upon 'planned heroism', can both be understood as institutional expressions of this attempted synthesis of modern bureaucratic rationality and charismatic tran­scendence of social constraints.[156]

With Brezhnev's emergence as party leader in 1964, power passed to the first generation to come of age under Soviet rule, whose promotions within the party and state apparatuses were a direct reward for their fidelity to this project and success in implementing it (including their willingness to arrest and kill millions of supposed 'enemies' of socialism).[157] Five decades after the Bolshevik revolution, however, the revolutionary dream of transforming the nature of modernity itself was increasingly giving way to complacency among the older generation - who had already proven their credentials as socialist heroes - and to cynicism on the part of many Soviet young people, for whom ideological rhetoric about perfecting socialism sounded increasingly irrelevant and embarrassing. Given the regime's professed goal of making modernity revolutionary, the Soviet 'way of life' began to lose coherence precisely when it had become successful enough to be ordinary.

The Brezhnev period can be best understood, then, as marking the routinisa- tion of Soviet revolutionary modernity. Such an interpretation helps to explain why those focusing on the Soviet regime's professed revolutionary aspirations (including Gorbachev) have tended to see Brezhnevism as a bankrupt and stagnant compromise, while those focusing on the USSR's efforts at moderni­sation could see genuine progress in Soviet administration during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, such an approach highlights a further paradox: namely, as maintaining 'revolutionary modernity' in a stable society proved to be increasingly oxymoronic in practice, 'neo-traditional' forms of political and economic organisation, based on personal networks and communal identi­ties, emerged as the dominant principle governing everyday Soviet social life - simultaneously subverting the regime's aspirations to generate a new type of communist personality and its efforts to maintain bureaucratic rationality in order to catch up and overtake the capitalist West.[158]

In what follows, I will first trace the emergence of the Brezhnev leader­ship's 'orthodox Leninist' consensus from 1964 through the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. I will then examine the 'social contract' that emerged as the basis of social stability in the years of 'high Brezhnevism' from 1969 to 1976, noting the important role of detente in Brezhnev's political econ­omy. Finally, I will discuss the decline of Brezhnevism from 1976 to 1982, both domestically and internationally.

The rejection of Khrushchevism

Brezhnev's brand of orthodox Leninism was a direct reaction to the per­ceived failures of his predecessor as General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev's strategy for building a socialist culture while rejecting Stalinist methods of coercion involved perpetual heroic campaigns designed to rekin­dle the revolutionary enthusiasm of ordinary Soviet citizens - the Virgin Lands campaign, the meat and milk campaign, the chemicals campaign and so on. But in each case, the initial promise of such campaigns had given way to declining production, extraordinary economic waste and exhausted human and natural resources. In international affairs, too, Khrushchev's style was impulsive and often reckless, as his nuclear brinkmanship during the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated. Even the 1956 'Secret Speech' to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin's cult of personality and terror launched a campaign of sorts - one that endeavoured to replace the charisma of Stalin with a new mythology of the 'heroism of the Soviet peo­ple'. In sum, Khrushchev appeared to take his famous promise to achieve full communism 'in the main' by 1980 quite literally, even if this meant adopting increasingly unrealistic domestic and foreign policies. By the early 1960s, resis­tance to Khrushchev's leadership had spread to every major Soviet institution, from the military-industrial complex to the party itself. Khrushchev's last-ditch attempts to maintain his power and programme - introducing the rotation of party cadres to new positions every five years, dividing the party apparatus into parallel hierarchies for agriculture and industry, and encouraging rank-and-file party members to criticise party officials - thus only hastened the bloodless coup against him in October 1964.

To a great extent, a common loathing of Khrushchev's chaotic style of rule was the key factor uniting the 'collective leadership' proclaimed by the inner core of the Brezhnev Politburo after 1964 (consisting of chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Aleksei Kosygin, chief CPSU ideologist Mikhail Suslov, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Nikolai Podgornyi, deputy chairman of the RSFSR Central Committee Andrei Kirilenko and of course Brezhnev himself). These five men had had remarkably similar life experiences: all were born between 1902 and 1906, all had been promoted rapidly as party and state officials during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, and all had reached positions of leadership in large part due to Stalin's Great Terror in the mid- 1930s, which eliminated the Old Bolsheviks previously making up the Soviet elite. Khrushchev was born in 1894 and was thus old enough to remember life under tsarism; he had still judged revolutionary success in terms of the transformational ethos ofthe Bolshevik revolution and civil war. The Brezhnev generation, by contrast, were barely teenagers in 1917, and their careers as mature revolutionaries were coterminous with, and essentially due to, the rise of Stalin. Khrushchev's struggles to reach pure communism must have struck them as quite irrelevant to the real issues facing the USSR: above all, the need for domestic and international consolidation of the Soviet system, which in their view had proven almost miraculously successful. For the Brezhnev generation, the post-Stalin USSR already represented a successful 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - after all, all of them had been Leninist proletarians in the 1920s, and now they ruled the second most powerful country in the world!

Thus the first two years of the Brezhnev era witnessed the rapid reversal of just about every institutional and cultural initiative undertaken during the preceding decade. The bifurcation of the party apparatus was repealed, plans for rotation in office were quietly dropped and a new policy of 'trust in cadres' was loudly proclaimed. In September 1965, Khrushchev's experiment with sovnarkhozy (regional economic councils), which had been designed to spur local economic initiative, was abandoned in favour of a return to hierarchi­cal control over production by planning officials and state ministries. At the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, the 'Presidium' was renamed the Politburo, and the 'First Secretary' was renamed the General Secretary, restoring the standard terminology of the Stalin era.

These institutional measures were accompanied by a parallel rejection of Khrushchev's optimistic revolutionary timetable. References to the 'full-scale construction of Communism' and to the 'party' and 'state of the whole people' in the Soviet press became more and more infrequent; the USSR was instead now described as being at the stage of'developed socialism' - a formulation that focused attention on the successes of the past rather than the promise of the future. Khrushchev was no longer referred to by name, either; Khrushchevian policies were instead ritually dismissed as 'hare-brained scheming' and 'vol­untarism', so that the history of the CPSU leadership now oddly appeared to skip directly from Lenin to Brezhnev.

Finally, consistent with the neo-Stalinist ideological tendencies cited above, the Brezhnev Politburo sharply curtailed the tentative moves towards free cultural expression that had been permitted as part of Khrushchev's 'Thaw'. De-Stalinisation came to a halt, although the major party newspapers con­tinued to avoid positive references to Stalin himself; in more conservative publications, however, a return to hagiographic treatments of Stalin's leader­ship became increasingly common.[159] The works of openly critical writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - who had already run afoul of Khrushchev after the publication of his Gulag memoir One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - were now entirely suppressed. In August 1965, authors Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel', whose samizdat writings had been smuggled out ofthe USSR and pub­lished in the West, were arrested, and in February 1966 both were sentenced to years of forced labour. A petition signed by prominent cultural figures such as Solzhenitsyn and Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov on behalf of Siniavskii and Daniel' led only to greater repression of the emerging dissident movement, with new articles inserted into the Soviet Criminal Code in December 1966 to outlaw the dissemination of 'anti-Soviet slander' in any form. Dissent on issues of nationality and ethnicity was also dealt with ruthlessly; activists bold enough to fight publicly for such causes were arrested or committed to mental asylums.[160] The power of the KGB, placed under the leadership of hard-liner Iurii Andropov in 1967, grew precipitously.

In sum, the new collective leadership of the CPSU had, within a few years, undone all of the major reforms of the Khrushchev period - except, of course, for his decision to abandon mass terror as an instrument of rule. But there were still significant divisions of opinion within the Politburo concerning precisely how to manage future socialist economic development, both in the USSR and in the Soviet bloc. Inparticular, Prime Minister Kosygin, who had been a textile factory manager in the 1920s and whose entire career had involved work in light industry, began to articulate a strategy for economic change with striking similarities to that promoted by Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov in the early post-Stalin period. Like Malenkov, Kosygin declared that so-called 'Group B' industries - those producing consumer goods - should receive greater priority relative to 'Group A' heavy industries. Under Kosygin's sponsorship, Soviet economists began to argue for a more decentralised style of management, in which enterprise directors would orient themselves towards attaining profits rather than simply trying to meet and exceed gross output targets set by Gos- plan. Innovations such as the 'Shchekino experiment' - in which factories capa­ble of achieving planning targets with fewer personnel were allowed to shed excess labour and split the total wage funds among the remaining workers - were introduced, albeit only on a small scale. At the same time, Kosygin argued for lower levels of investment in unproductive collective farms in order to finance the expansion of light industry.[161]

The greater leeway in the Soviet academic press given to arguments for eco­nomic decentralisation inspired similar calls for reform in the East European Soviet bloc states, whose economies had never fully recovered from the ravages of the Stalinist occupation. In Hungary, where the 'goulash communism' of janos Kadar had already reversed much of the hypercentralisation of the Stalin period, the 'New Economic Mechanism' formally adopted on 1 January 1968 successfully enacted most of the Kosygin reform programme. In Czechoslo­vakia, however, similar arguments for reform eventually sparked an escalating rebellion against Leninist rule, especially after the removal of the hard-line Stalinist party leader Antonin Novotny and his replacement by Alexander Dubcek in February 1968. The resulting 'Prague Spring' saw censorship abolished, restrictions on freedom of assembly lifted and clear moves towards a multi-party system. Ukrainian party leader Petro Shelest' began to warn of the potential spread of secessionist sentiment from Ukrainian populations in Czechoslovakia to theUSSRitself. By the summer, the entire Soviet Politburo - including Kosygin himself - became convinced that the Prague Spring repre­sented a grave threat to socialism.[162] On 20 August 1968, the Soviet Union, along with Warsaw Pact allies Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany, sent 500,000 troops to crush the Czechoslovak rebellion (see Plate 19). Within the USSR, the 'Kosygin reforms' were largely dropped from public discussion.

The crushing of the Prague Spring marked the full consolidation of Brezh- nevian orthodoxy: a reassertion of Leninist principles of hierarchical author­ity and obedience, Stalinist principles of central planning and a neo-Stalinist cultural policy based upon an insistence on fidelity to ideological dogma and severe repression ofall forms ofdissent. The Politburo's public announcement that 'socialist internationalism' required Soviet armed intervention wherever a threat of 'capitalist restoration' appeared in the Soviet bloc - the 'Brezhnev Doctrine', as it later became known both in the USSR and in the West - made Brezhnevian orthodoxy mandatory for Eastern Europe as well. By and large, the 'little Brezhnevs' in the Soviet satellite states enforced this 'really existing socialism' for the rest of the Brezhnev era.

Brezhnev's social contract

By 1969, Brezhnev had clearly emerged as the primus interpares in the Politburo. The tentative experimentation with economic decentralisation sponsored by Kosygin gave way to a renewed emphasis on the authority of the planners and industrial ministries in overseeing production. Although increased consumer goods production remained a formal priority for Soviet planners, the military- industrial complex received the lion's share of investment.[163] In agriculture, tentative efforts to improve productivity through new incentive systems were halted, replaced by Brezhnev's preferred policy of investing massively in new farm equipment and fertiliser while increasing agricultural subsidies. In 1967, Kosygin could still represent the USSR at the Glassboro summit meeting with

United States President Lyndon Johnson; by 1969, Brezhnev had taken full personal control over Soviet foreign policy as well. When the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress of the CPSU in 1971 ratified the expansion of the Central Committee to include forty-six new Brezhnev appointees, and Brezhnev allies Dinmukhamed Kunaev, Viktor Grishin, Fedor Kulakov and Vladimir Shcher- bitskii (replacing Shelest') were subsequently added to the Politburo, the Gen­eral Secretary's dominance over the Soviet political system was complete.

The political and social stability of the Brezhnev regime at its height has led numerous scholars to conclude that it rested on a sort of 'social contract' between the party and the Soviet population.[164] This terminology has its weak­nesses, overemphasising the degree of social consensus underlying the Soviet dictatorship; Ken Jowitt, for example, has argued that Brezhnevism operated more like a 'protection racket' than a social contract.[165] Still, as widespread post-Soviet nostalgia for the Brezhnev era suggests, important features of Brezhnevian stability really did appeal to broad strata within Soviet society. Moreover, the unravelling of the Brezhnev social contract under Gorbachev played an important role in delegitimating the Soviet regime altogether.

The Brezhnev social contract consisted of five key elements: job security, low prices for basic goods, the de facto toleration of a thriving 'second econ­omy', a limited form of social mobility and the creation of tightly controlled spheres for the expression of non-Russian national identities.[166] The first of these elements, job security, had been an implicit component of the Stalin­ist economic system ever since its foundation in the 1930s; the declaration that the capitalist problem of unemployment had been 'solved' by socialism was an important and perennial Soviet propaganda theme. But such 'secu­rity' was undercut under Stalin by constant blood purges affecting all ranks of society, and under Khrushchev by general institutional turbulence. After the roll-back of the Kosygin reforms, however, politically loyal Soviet citizens in every occupational category could expect to keep their positions - except in cases of extreme incompetence or insubordination - until retirement or death. The Stalinist system's emphasis on plan target fulfilment as the sole criterion of success meant that enterprise managers had every incentive to hoard labour, and no incentive at all to use it efficiently. Wage funds were set in propor­tion to an enterprise's workforce, so it made sense for enterprise managers to hire hundreds ofotherwise superfluous workers to use in periods of'storm- ing' to fulfil the plan. Typical industrial enterprises were thus absurdly over­staffed by comparison with their Western competitors. Brezhnev's agricultural subsidies, meanwhile, perpetuated a system ofinefficient collective farms sup­porting millions of unproductive farmers. Meanwhile, due to the 'trust in cadres' policy, party and state bureaucrats themselves no longer had to worry about being replaced either.

The Brezhnev regime's subsidies for basic foodstuffs, housing and welfare provision eliminated another long-standing source ofworry for ordinary Soviet citizens. After Khrushchev's 1962 price hikes touched off riots in Novocherkassk that were put down by military force, the prices of such staples as baked goods and dairy products were left unchanged for more than two decades.[167]Health care, public transportation, education and a variety of recreational and vacation facilities were available at nominal cost to most Soviet citizens. Rent and domestic utilities, too, were provided practically free of charge to most Soviet workers. Of course, such artificially low prices inevitably led to massive shortages and queues for a wide range of products. Everyday goods such as underwear or toilet paper sometimes disappeared for months at a time. Meanwhile, luxuries such as automobiles remained far beyond the means of typical Soviet families. Still, for a Soviet population whose parents and grandparents made up an impoverished peasantry just a generation earlier, the cheap consumer and welfare goods of the Brezhnev era were a genuine achievement.

Moreover, Brezhnev's de facto toleration of a vast, informal 'second econ­omy' during the 1970s helped further ameliorate the rigidities of the Soviet planning system.[168] The free market for agricultural products grown on peas­ants' private plots, officially legalised under Stalin, continued to supply the majority of fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Soviet citizens. Techni­cally illegal 'free markets', however, existed for almost all other consumer goods as well. Workers in Soviet retail stores sold the choicest items from their inventories after official store hours at inflated prices or bartered them for other hard-to-obtain products. Soviet youth, especially those who had learned some English or German, bargained with Western tourists for oth­erwise unattainable designer blue jeans, popular cassette tapes and portable appliances. Special stores open only to the Soviet elite sold a wider variety of consumer products; these supplies, too, often found their way onto the black market. Although cheap vodka sold by the state alcohol monopoly was one of the mainstays of the official Brezhnev economy, myriad forms of samogon (moonshine) were always available in the informal sector as well. The impor­tance of personal connections - or blat, in the Soviet slang - for success in the second economy could be exasperating, even humiliating, for less well- positioned consumers. Yet such informal economic networks also played an important role in humanising life under orthodox Leninist dictatorship.

A fourth component of the Brezhnev social contract was a limited form of social mobility - one hardly comparable to the massive promotions of Soviet workers during the Stalinist 1930s, yet still important in channelling the ener­gies of Soviet citizens in officially approved directions.[169] With the routinisation of the Stalinist socio-economic system in the 1970s, a kind oflocational hierar­chy had emerged in Soviet society, and ambitious young people did their best to climb it. At the bottom of this hierarchy were the kolkhozy and sovkhozy; Soviet villages often still resembled Russian villages of the nineteenth century, with unpaved roads, few modern conveniences and only rudimentary welfare services. Unsurprisingly, young and energetic individuals did their utmost to escape agricultural employment; as a result, Soviet collective farms were left with an ageing, largely unskilled population.[170] Somewhat better life chances were available in 'open cities', that is, those with few or no residency controls. Here, a wider variety of consumer goods was available, greater educational opportunities existed and everyday life was a little less boring. Higher up the locational hierarchy were the 'closed cities' - those where political, scientific and/or military activities supposedly demanded a higher degree of control over residency and where, not coincidentally, one found the greatest variety of con­sumer goods and most exciting cultural opportunities. Access to such cities, for those outside the elite, depended upon proven loyalty to the CPSU, high levels of educational attainment, marriage to a city resident and/or good personal connections with, or bribes of, Communist Party officials. At the very apex of the residential hierarchy stood Leningrad and especially Moscow, where the standard of living was famously and dramatically better than anywhere else in the USSR, and where dependable access to foreign tourists meant an even greater range of consumer products on the black market. Desire to live in Moscow was so great, in fact, that a substantial population of workers allowed into the city on temporary work permits - the so-called limitchiki - stayed there as illegal migrants, working in the shadow economy and constantly trying to avoid expulsion. Thus, the Brezhnev economy, though intensely frustrating for skilled workers assigned to jobs that were often poorly compensated and outside their areas of specialisation, still offered opportunities to 'work the system' so as to ascend the residential hierarchy. Those who had managed to attain 'higher' spots in this hierarchy had a substantial incentive not to challenge the system that maintained it.

The final element of the Brezhnev social contract involved the institution- alisation of what Terry Martin has called the 'affirmative action empire' - that is, the creation of opportunities for career advancement and limited cul­tural expression by non-Russian minorities within the USSR.[171] As scholars such as Ronald Suny, Rogers Brubaker and Yuri Slezkine have shown, Soviet nationalities policy in the Brezhnev era, while officially still committed to the creation of a supranational 'Soviet man', nevertheless inadvertently reinforced national and ethnic identities in the Soviet republics and in other administra­tive units formally designated for titular ethnic groups.[172] Of course, it would be a mistake to overstate the degree of freedom for national self-expression in a regime that brutally suppressed all forms of independent political organisa­tion. Russian (and to a lesser extent Ukrainian) dominance over the USSR as a whole was ensured through such policies as appointing ethnic Russians as the 'second secretaries' of every Soviet republic, requiring Russian-language education for all elite positions and forcing non-Russians in the Soviet army to serve outside their home republics.[173] Still, Soviet federalism under Brezh­nev, however circumscribed, had significant cultural effects. Each of the Soviet republics had the right to provide education in the titular language and - with the important exception of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) itself- its own Academy of Sciences and its own republican party and state bureaucracies. National identities were inscribed as well on the oblig­atory Soviet passport, which essentialised and made hereditary the official ethnic identities established and enforced under Leninist rule. Propaganda endeavouring to show the 'friendship of the peoples' of the USSR highlighted the regime's support for 'indigenous' folk music and art, museums of (regime- approved) republican history and ethnography and official national literatures. At the same time, the 'trust in cadres' strategy allowed powerful ethnic net­works to become politically entrenched in such places as Kazakhstan under Kunaev, Ukraine under Shcherbitskii, Uzbekistan under Sharaf Rashidov and Azerbaijan under Heidar Aliev.[174] Taken as a whole, such policies fostered nationalist subcultures that would later, under Gorbachev, generate signifi­cant resistance to Soviet rule.

Taken together, these five elements of the Brezhnev social contract - job security, lowprices, the second economy, limited social mobility and controlled avenues for ethnic self-expression - allowed ordinary Soviet citizens to eke out something like a 'normal life', even within the confines of CPSU dictatorship. Still, the quiescence of much of the Soviet population in this period did not suffice to generate any deeper allegiance to the regime's numbing official Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Instead, the gap between the CPSU leadership's formal proclamations of Soviet revolutionary modernity and the social reality of widespread political apathy and cultural alienation became increasingly glaring. The leadership's attempts to counter such alienation with official propaganda touting continued Soviet achievements in space, sport and science often came across as laughable. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the 1970s were the heyday of the classic Soviet joke (anekdot).

The rise and decline of detente

The immobilism and social alienation of the Brezhnev era has given rise to the mistaken idea that Brezhnev himself did not care about his reputation as a revolutionary. Even concerning domestic policy, this view is not entirely accurate, as Brezhnev's promotion throughout the 1970s of the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM) project as a 'heroic' and 'Stakhanovite' endeavour demon­strates.[175] But it was largely in the realm of foreign policy that Brezhnev hoped to prove his credentials as a visionary and dynamic Leninist leader in his own right. The policies known in the West as 'detente' - in Russian, razriadka, or 'relaxation' of international tension - were, contrary to the perceptions of some contemporary Western analysts and policy makers, a major constitutive element of Brezhnev's orthodox Leninist strategy for consolidating 'developed socialism' in the USSR. Brezhnev's 'Peace Programme', announced in 1969, was predicated above all on the notion that the Soviet Union had now achieved military 'parity' with the United States - and, at least in terms of the number of long-range nuclear missiles each superpower now had pointed at the other side, this was in fact the case. Given this 'shift in the correlation of forces' towards the Soviet Union, Brezhnev argued, the United States and other main 'imperialist' powers could now be expected to make pragmatic concessions to Soviet interests.

Beyond this simple - but symbolically, extremely important - claim to equal superpower status, Brezhnev's vision of detente also represented an alternative, less politically dangerous strategy for addressing the rigidities of the Soviet economy. Grain purchases from world markets could ameliorate the continuing deficiencies of collectivised agriculture, while West European, Asian and US capitalists could be lured to invest in the development of Soviet industry and, especially, Siberian oil and gas reserves. Brezhnev could, and did, justify this approach to the capitalist powers as classically 'Leninist', just as in the early Soviet period, the imperialists would sell the Soviet Union the rope that would eventually be used to hang them. Given the 'inevitability' of new capitalist 'crises' - and indeed, the 1970s saw plenty of these, from the first oil crisis of 1973 to the 'stagflation' of the latter part of the decade - the USSR had no need to fear that increased economic ties with the West would undermine socialism in the long run.

Remarkably, just a year after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and in a period when tensions with Maoist China erupted in bloody border clashes in the Russian Far East, Brezhnev found a receptive audience for his Peace Programme in both Western Europe and the United States. In West Germany, the 1969 election of Social Democrat Willy Brandt as chancellor led within a few years to treaties ratifying the borders of the German Democratic Republic and settling the legal status of East Berlin, as well as significant new West German purchases of Soviet natural gas. Better relations with Western Europe led, in turn, to new loans by Western banks and governments to various Eastern European socialist states, temporarily easing the growing economic problems in the Soviet trade bloc, the COMECON. At the same time, in the United States, new President Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger saw improved relations with the Soviet Union as the key to extrication of US forces from Vietnam (and their strategic opening to Communist China was designed in large part to increase American leverage over Soviet decision makers in pursuit ofthis goal). Onboth sides, too, a genuine desire to curtail the escalating, expensive US-Soviet arms race provided another significant reason for compromise. Nixon's visit to Moscow in May 1972 led to the signing of several US-Soviet treaties, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty limiting each side to a single missile defence system, the SALT I treaty setting ceilings on nuclear missile deployments and a three-year agreement authorising American grain sales to the Soviet Union. Follow-up visits by Brezhnev to the United States in 1973, and by Nixon to the USSR in 1974, symbolically furthered the momentum of detente while negotiations on the stricter regulation of nuclear missiles outlined in the SALT II treaty continued.

The early promise of detente, however, soon began to fade amidst a series of international challenges. Domestic opponents of rapprochement with Brezhnev's USSR in both the United States and Western Europe increasingly demanded an end to the denial of basic human liberties by the Soviet regime as the price for further co-operation; the April 1973 promotion to the Polit­buro of hard-liners such as Iurii Andropov of the KGB, Minister of Defence Andrei Grechko, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko hardly inspired con­fidence in this respect. Nixon became embroiled in the Watergate scandal, drastically weakening his control over United States policy. Soviet support for Egypt during the surprise October 1973 attack against Israel nearly brought the two superpowers into direct military conflict. In the US Congress, Senator Henry M. Jackson argued successfully for the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 bill granting most-favoured nation status to the USSR, tying Soviet MFN status to freedom of emigration for Jews and other persecuted citizens; the Soviet leadership abrogated the US-Soviet Trade Agreement in response. Even the crowning achievement of Soviet diplomacy in these years - the 1975 signing of the Helsinki Accords legally ratifying the new borders of the East­ern European states conquered and reconfigured by Stalin during the Second World War - was attained only with accompanying Soviet pledges to uphold United Nations human rights standards in the socialist bloc. Dissident groups throughout the region quickly organised 'Helsinki watch groups' to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki human rights accords, further exposing the repressive nature of Leninist politics and the hypocrisy of Soviet foreign policy.³⁰

A final asymmetry between the Soviet and Western understanding of detente became clear by the mid-1970s, this time connected to foreign policy

30 Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, HumanRights, and the Demise ofCommunism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

towards the Third World. Kissinger had assumed that the 'linkage' between Soviet trade agreements and Soviet foreign policy would induce the Brezh­nev Politburo to cut back its growing engagements in post-colonial Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Meanwhile, Brezhnev assumed that the shift of the correlation of forces in the USSR's favour would allow enhanced Soviet support for 'national liberation movements' and 'countries of socialist orientation'. A clash between these two interpretations, at some point, was inevitable. The close relations between newly unified Communist Vietnam and the Soviet Union after the US withdrawal were one sign ofthis. But the issue broke into the open when, in November 1975, the USSR helped to transport 11,800 Cuban troops to support the Marxist-Leninist MPLA faction in recently decolonised Angola against the US-supported UNITA coalition. Later Soviet interventions in Mozambique, Ethiopia and Yemen would lead to a growing disillusionment with detente throughout the West.

Brezhnevism in decline, 1976-82

As the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress of the CPSU opened in Moscow in Febru­ary 1976, Brezhnev thus faced serious challenges to his orthodox Leninist domestic and foreign-policy strategy. Despite the initial success of detente, the boom in Western investment and trade anticipated by the Soviet leader­ship had failed to materialise. Loans to East European states were beginning to generate significant levels of indebtedness, further increasing their economies' dependence on Soviet energy subsidies. Soviet agriculture remained a disaster, despite ever-increasing levels of state support; widespread drought in 1975 had led to a particularly poor harvest. Meanwhile, the absolute job security of the Brezhnev social contract was quickly eroding work incentives in Soviet indus­trial enterprises. Declining labour productivity and worker alienation became a subject of serious and intense discussion among Soviet social scientists.[176]

Yet Brezhnev introduced no major institutional reforms in response to these growing challenges. His four-hour speech to the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress reiterated many of the General Secretary's favourite themes, including the pri­ority of military and heavy industrial production, the importance of interna­tional support for 'countries of socialist orientation' such as Vietnam and Cuba, the need for new investments in agriculture and, above all, the imperative of rapid development of Siberian energy reserves.³² Notwithstanding the banal­ity of Brezhnev's presentation, those assembled greeted it with paroxysms of praise. Rashidov called Brezhnev 'the most outstanding and most influential political figure of contemporary times', and Petras Griskevicius, the first sec­retary of the Lithuanian Central Committee, rhapsodised that he was 'a man with a great soul in whom is embodied all the best qualities of Man in capital letters'.³³ Shortly after the congress, Brezhnev received the rank of Marshal in the Red Army. In 1977, the politically ambitious Podgornyi was purged as chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and Brezhnev took over this position as well. Formally, Brezhnev's power and authority appeared stronger than ever.

But Brezhnev's growing personality cult and multiple new formal titles masked a rapid, serious decline in his health. As early as 1973, in fact, Brezhnev had begun to experience periods ofincapacitation due to arteriosclerosis, and, in part to reduce the stress of his tense relationship with his family, he became dangerously addicted to sedatives.³⁴ By 1975, the General Secretary's poor health became an increasingly public problem; he frequently had to be given powerful stimulants before official meetings with foreign leaders, his speech became slurred and he appeared increasingly disoriented.³⁵ As the 1970s wore on, Brezhnev spent more and more time relaxing with a handful of intimate friends at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, and less and less time at work. By the early 1980s, Politburo meetings often lasted only fifteen or twenty minutes, so as not to wear out the General Secretary.³⁶

Nor was Brezhnev the only leading figure within the CPSU leadership to be experiencing health problems. The inevitable result of the 'trust in cadres' policy, by the late 1970s, was an ageing and increasingly infirm Central Com­mittee and Politburo. Yet the Brezhnev generation remained largely unwilling to cede real power to younger party members. Minister of Defence Grechko died in 1976 at the age of seventy-three, and was replaced by the sixty-eight- year-old Dmitrii Ustinov. Brezhnev's sidekick from his days in Moldavia, Kon- stantin Chernenko, was promoted to full Politburo membership in 1978 at the age of sixty-seven. Aleksei Kosygin died in 1980 at the age of seventy- six, and was replaced by the seventy-five-year-old Brezhnev crony Tikhonov.

32 Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders; Thane Gustafson, Crisis amidst Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

33 Quoted in Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, p. 260.

34 Chazov, Zdorov'e i vlast', pp. 115-17.

35 Dmitri Volkogonov, Sem' vozhdei: galereia liderov SSSR, vol. 11 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), p. 68.

36 Gorbachev, Zhizn' i reformy, p. 202; Aleksandrov-Agentov, OtKollontai do Gorbacheva, pp.

271-3.

The only major exception to this pattern was the selection of the forty- seven-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev to replace Fedor Kulakov as Central Com­mittee Secretary with responsibilities for agriculture upon the latter's death in 1978.

The senescence of the CPSU leadership only symbolised the larger sclero­sis of the Soviet system as a whole during the last years of Brezhnev's reign. By the late 1970s, the combination of continued wasteful state spending on defence and agriculture, the declining productivity of Soviet labour, and the lack of serious investment in emerging new production technologies com­bined to reduce Soviet GDP growth nearly to zero. The Soviet economy had become increasingly reliant on revenues from oil and gas exports, and thus falling world energy prices in the early 1980s led to an incipient crisis. At the same time, the Brezhnev social contract began to unravel. Job security meant little in a society where, as the famous joke put it, 'we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us'. Officially cheap prices for consumer goods, similarly, were moot when even basic necessities were often unavailable in state stores; the profits made by 'speculators' who sold such goods on the black market now seemed especially unfair and exploitative. The limited social mobility that had allowed at least some ambitious Soviet citizens to rise through the hierarchy of kolkhozy, open cities and closed cities was transformed into an increasingly frustrating zero-sum competition for favoured positions - most of them, seemingly, obtained through high-level connections or outright corrup­tion. Finally, with rising popular frustration at Soviet stagnation and decline, expressions of nationality and ethnic identity were harder to contain within approved limits. Within the RSFSR itself, the perception of Soviet affirmative action in favour of non-Russians had given rise to a strong Russian nation­alist subculture that paradoxically resented the treatment of the Slavic pop­ulation by what was ostensibly a Russia-dominated empire. In some of its manifestations, this new Russian nationalism shaded over into anti-Semitic

fascism. [177]

In sum, Brezhnevian stability, by the end of the 1970s, had degenerated into a 'neo-traditional' form of rule in which Marxism-Leninism became a set of quasi-religious rituals, party bureaucracy was corrupted by pervasive patron-client networks and covert resistance to formal Soviet priorities spread throughout society.³⁸ Social pathologies such as alcoholism and worker absen­teeism became overwhelming problems; even among Soviet emigres, who might have been expected to come predominantly from better-managed enter­prises, nearly 40 per cent of those from blue-collar backgrounds surveyed reported that alcoholism and absenteeism had been problems at their place of work 'nearly all the time' or 'often'.[178]

Along with these growing signs of internal crisis, the Brezhnev elite at the turn of the decade faced a whole series of new challenges on the international arena: the turmoil caused by revolution and civil war in Afghanistan, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the election of the staunch anti-Communists Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Taken together, these challenges simultaneously undermined the USSR's international prestige in the Third World, in Europe and in the United States, at a time when the CPSU leadership as a whole was far too old and sick to respond with any vigour or creativity.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was the single most disastrous decision of the Brezhnev leadership. The origins of this interven­tion lay in Afghanistan's April 1978 Communist revolution by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) against the dictator Mohammad Daoud - with whom the USSR had previously had quite good relations. By the summer, the Khalq faction ofNur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin had manoeuvred to defeat the rival, more moderate Parcham faction, led by Babrak Karmal, and instituted a radical programme to achieve socialism in Afghanistan in short order. Agricultural collectivisation was initiated, Islamic religious leaders were attacked and women were unveiled and brought into schools and universities. In response, mass resistance broke out in much of the country. With the success of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution in Iran in February 1979, the civil war in Afghanistan appeared even more threatening to the USSR, with the potential to provoke Islamic uprisings throughout Soviet Central Asia and into the Russian heartland itself. In March, several dozen Soviet advisers and their families were killed during anti-Communist upris­ings in Herat; Taraki and Aminbegan to request direct Soviet military support. Still, at this stage, the Soviet leadership remained opposed to direct military intervention in Afghanistan. Then, in September, immediately after a trip to Moscow to meet with Brezhnev, Taraki was killed in a gunfight with Amin's forces, and was replaced by Amin as PDPA leader. With the unpredictable Amin now in charge of Afghanistan, and reports that Chinese, Pakistani, Iranian and

Saudi Arabian arms were flowing to support the mujahedeen forces, pressure on the Soviet Union to intervene increased. Finally, on 12 December 1979, a group of just four Politburo members - Ustinov, Andropov, Gromyko and Brezhnev himself, who was in such poor health that he was barely able to sign his name to the intervention order - made the decision to send 40,000 Soviet troops into Afghanistan.

The results were catastrophic. The Soviet military presence only further inspired the diverse anti-communist forces in Afghanistan to rally against the foreign invader. The USSR's reputation in the post-colonial world as a sup­porter of'national liberation movements' was fatally undermined; the US and the USSR now seemed to be two equally imperialistic superpowers. Presi­dent Jimmy Carter, who had previously tried to sustain the momentum of detente, despite increasing public criticism of the Soviet human rights record and growing scepticism about Soviet intentions in the Third World - in partic­ular, through efforts to convince the US Senate to sign the unratified SALT II treaty - now broke with Brezhnev completely. Carter announced an embargo on further US grain sales to the USSR, the cancellation of American partic­ipation in the Moscow Olympic Games of 1980 and a rapid increase in US defence spending. As the Soviet presence in Afghanistan dragged on, morale in the Red Army plummeted. Soviet soldiers, told that they would be fight­ing American and Chinese troops to defend socialism in Afghanistan, instead found themselves shooting at ordinary Afghan citizens waging a determined guerrilla struggle. Returning Afghan veterans suffered problems ofpsycholog- ical adjustment and drug addiction, contributing to the general social malaise of the late Brezhnev era.

Meanwhile, an equally serious challenge to Soviet legitimacy emerged in Poland with the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement, led by elec­trician Lech Walesa. Poland had long been one of the most restive coun­tries in the Soviet bloc, and due to Soviet compromises with Gomulka made after the uprisings of 1956, it still maintained a private agricultural sector and an independent Catholic Church. The Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), formed in 1976 in the wake of the signing of the Helsinki Accords and party leader Gierek's announced price rises, marked an important advance in the co-ordination of intellectual and working-class opposition to Polish Commu­nism. The election in 1978 of the Polish Pope John Paul II, and his subsequent

1979 visit to greet millions of supporters in Poland, further galvanised social resistance to the regime. When Gierek announced additional price hikes in

1980 in response to the growing economic crisis brought about by severe

Polish indebtedness, the stage was set for a genuinely revolutionary upris­ing. Strikes in the Lenin Shipyards of Gdansk soon led to an anti-Communist protest movement that quickly spread through every sector of the Polish population.

The rise of Solidarity confronted the Brezhnev elite with a severe ideological dilemma. How could one make Marxist-Leninist sense of a true workers' revolution - directed against the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP)? Were the Soviet Union to intervene militarily to crush the Solidarity movement, the notion that Communism represented the fruits of a workers' revolution would appear utterly farcical. Moreover, the last chances for detente with the West would surely disappear, and the resulting burden on the Red Army (already engaged in bloody battles in Afghanistan) might be overwhelming. While the Brezhnev Politburo debated, Walesa and Solidarity fought courageously to wrest political and economic power away from the PUWP. The ailing Gierek was replaced as party leader by Stanislaw Kania in September 1980; Kania, unable to stem the tide of Polish opposition, was in turn replaced by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, head of the Polish army, in October 1981. On 13 December, with full Soviet support, Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland and immediately arrested the Solidarity leadership. Over 10,000 Solidarity activists and supporters were jailed in the following months.[179] Jaruzelski's repression of Solidarity in Poland, while temporarily successful in quelling the direct threat of anti-Communist revolution, was nonetheless another major international defeat for the USSR. The need to rely on armed force to run the Polish party-state exposed the naked coercion underlying Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Nor did there seem to be any long-term solution to the growing economic burden of the failing East European economies on the Soviet Union. Solidarity itself continued its activities underground, and Communist control over Poland remained tenuous.

Jaruzelski's declaration of martial law also further validated the vehement anti-Communism of the new Western leaders: Margaret Thatcher in Britain (elected in 1979) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (elected in 1980). Indeed, the rise of Reagan and Thatcher constituted a third international chal­lenge to Brezhnev's orthodox Leninism. Their passionate anti-Soviet rhetoric and consistent focus on the sorry Soviet human rights record placed supporters of co-operation with the USSR in both countries very much on the defensive.

Given the symbolic importance of'parity' with the United States to Brezhnev's conception of 'developed socialism', Reagan's triumphant patriotism consti­tuted a particularly difficult ideological challenge. Reagan's straightforward declaration that the Soviet Union was 'evil', his absolute dismissal of the idea of detente and his commitment to accelerate the rapid defence build-up of the late Carter years all came as something of a shock to an ageing Politburo that had interpreted the stagflation of the 1970s as presaging the 'final crisis of capitalism'.

Indeed, the Brezhnev Politburo was by this stage in no position to respond effectively to Reagan and Thatcher - or anything else. The CPSU Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in the winter of 1981 had a farcical air; despite the multiple inter­national crises swirling around the Soviet Union, Brezhnev's keynote speech began by proclaiming the triumphant addition to the socialist camp of such powerful new allies as Ethiopia, Mozambique and North Yemen. Brezhnev's personality cult reached new depths of absurdity with the prolonged pub­lic celebration of the General Secretary's seventy-fifth birthday in December 1981. Not long afterward, the news broke that Brezhnev's daughter Galina, along with her lover Boris the Gypsy, a circus performer, was involved in run­ning a huge diamond-smuggling ring in which diamonds were shipped abroad while hidden in circus animals. The leak probably came from Andropov in an effort to position himself as an anti-corruption candidate for the succession to Brezhnev; in any case, it highlighted the truly ludicrous forms of corrup­tion taking place at the top levels of the CPSU. Indeed, as Gorbachev later revealed, Galina's husband Iurii Churbanov had, during the same period, been conspiring with Uzbekistan's party boss Rashidov in a scam to pocket billions of roubles by falsely inflating Uzbek cotton production statistics.[180]

The death of staunch Brezhnev supporter Mikhail Suslov on 25 Jan­uary, at the age of seventy-nine, marked the beginning of an open struggle for Soviet leadership succession, with the Andropov faction generally out­manoeuvring the status quo-oriented Chernenko circle. With both Andropov and Chernenko themselves now already quite unwell, the problem of gener­ational change in the Soviet leadership was obviously still far from resolution. But change was clearly coming, as Brezhnev was growing weaker by the month. In September 1982, in a particularly embarrassing incident, Brezhnev startled an audience in Baku when he spoke for several minutes about the future prospects of 'Afghanistan' - before distraught advisers handed him the correct speech about Azerbaijan.⁴² With the help of his doctors, Brezhnev managed to witness one last military parade in honour of the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution from the top of Lenin's mausoleum. Three days later, on 10 November 1982 he died of a heart attack. On 12 November, Iurii Andropov was announced as the new General Secretary of the CPSU.

42 Stephen White, Russia's New Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5.