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The Brezhnev era
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.
3
Finally, scholars also lack a consensual ana-
lytical 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.
4
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
historicalaccounts of both RussianandWestern 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 remem-
ber that perhaps the most influential school of thought 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 develop-
ment over the ‘Utopian’ impulses of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.
5
Scholars
3 Memoirs that cover the Brezhnev era in some depth include Luba Brezhneva, The World
I Left Behind: Pieces of a Past (New York: Random House, 1995); Anatoly Dobrynin, In
Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1 962–1986) (New
York: Random House, 1995); Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Moscow: Novosti,
1995); Evgenii I. Chazov, Zdorov’e i vlast’: vospominaniia ‘kremlevskogo vracha’ (Moscow:
Novosti, 1992); Vladimir Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoi (Moskva: ‘Russlit’, 1994); Aleksandr
I.Yakovlev, Omut pamiati (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000); Viktor V. Grishin, Ot Khrushcheva do
Gorbacheva: politicheskie portrety piati gensekov i A.N. Kosygina: memuary (Moscow: ASPOL,
1996); A. S. Cherniaev, Moia zhizn’ i moie vremya (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia,
1995); and Andrei M. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva: vospominaniia diplo-
mata, sovetnika A. A. Gromyko, pomoshchnikaL. I. Brezhneva, Iu. V. Andropova, K. U. Chernenko
i M. S. Gorbacheva (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia, 1994). For a pathbreaking
study of the late Soviet era based on eyewitness accounts, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything
was Forever, until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton; Princeton University
Press, 2006).
4 Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘The Soviet Political System: Transformation or Degeneration?’,
in Brzezinski (ed.), Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1969), pp. 1–34.
5 Richard Lowenthal, ‘Development vs. Utopia in Communist Policy’, in Chalmers John-
son (ed.), Change in Communist Systems (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1970),
pp. 33–116.
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