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revolutionary, the Soviet ‘way of life’ began to lose coherence precisely when
it had become successful enough to be ordinary.
TheBrezhnev 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 moderni-
sation 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 identi-
ties, 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.
12
In what follows, I will first trace the emergence of the Brezhnev leader-
ship’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 d
´
etente in Brezhnev’s political econ-
omy. 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 per-
ceived 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 rekin-
dle 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’
12 Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder,pp.121–58.
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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 peo-
ple’. 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, resis-
tance 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 of the Bolshevik revolution and civilwar. 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
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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 hierarchi-
cal 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 formulationthat
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 ‘vol-
untarism’, 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 con-
tinued to avoid positive references to Stalin himself; in more conservative
publications, however, a return to hagiographic treatments of Stalin’s leader-
ship became increasingly common.
13
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 of the USSR and pub-
lished 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
13 Viktor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State,pp.3–21.
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asylums.
14
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. In particular, 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 capa-
ble 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.
15
The greater leeway in the Soviet academic press given to arguments for eco-
nomic 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
J
´
anos K
´
ad
´
ar 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 Czechoslo-
vakia, however, similar arguments for reform eventually sparked an escalating
rebellion against Leninist rule, especially after the removal of the hard-line
Stalinist party leader Anton
´
ın Novotn
´
y and his replacement by Alexander
Dub
ˇ
cek in February 1968. The resulting ‘Prague Spring’ saw censorship
14 Lyudmilla Alexseyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and
Human Rights (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985).
15 Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1 991, 3rd edn (London and New York:
Penguin, 1992); George Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority
in Soviet Politics (London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1982).
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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 the USSR itself. By the summer, the entire Soviet Politburo –
including Kosygin himself – became convinced that the Prague Spring repre-
sented a grave threat to socialism.
16
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 author-
ity 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 of all forms of dissent. 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 inter pares 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.
17
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
16 Mark Kramer, ‘The Czechoslovak Crisis and the Brezhnev Doctrine’, in Carole Fink,
Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker (eds.), 1968:TheWorldTransformed(Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 111–71; Kieran Williams, ‘New Sources
on Soviet Decision Making during the 1968 Czechoslovak Crisis’, Europe–Asia Studies 48,
3 (May 1996).
17 Clifford Gaddy, The Price of the Past:Russia’sStrugglewith the Legacy of a Militarized Economy
(Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1996).
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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 Gen-
eral 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.
18
This terminology has its weak-
nesses, 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.
19
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 econ-
omy’, a limited form of social mobility and the creation of tightly controlled
spheres for the expression of non-Russian national identities.
20
The first of
these elements, job security, had been an implicit component of the Stalin-
ist 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 ‘secu-
rity’ 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 propor-
tion to an enterprise’s workforce, so it made sense for enterprise managers
18 Linda J. Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why it Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers’
Politics from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter
Hauslohner, ‘Gorbachev’s Social Contract’, Soviet Economy 3, 1 (1987): 54–89.
19 Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder,p.227.
20 The analysis in this section closely follows that of Zaslavsky, Neo-Stalinist State.
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to hire hundreds of otherwise superfluous workers to use in periods of ‘storm-
ing’ to fulfil the plan. Typical industrial enterprises were thus absurdly over-
staffed by comparison with their Western competitors. Brezhnev’s agricultural
subsidies, meanwhile, perpetuated a system of inefficient collective farms sup-
porting 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 of worry 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.
21
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 econ-
omy’ during the 1970s helped further ameliorate the rigidities of the Soviet
planning system.
22
The free market for agricultural products grown on peas-
ants’ private plots, officially legalised under Stalin, continued to supply the
majority of fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Soviet citizens. Techni-
cally 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 oth-
erwise unattainable designer blue jeans, popular cassette tapes and portable
appliances. Special stores open only to the Soviet elite sold a wider variety of
21 Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Sunday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2001); Cook, The Soviet Social Contract,p.85.
22 Gregory Grossman, ‘The “Second Economy” of the USSR’, Problems of Communism, 26
(Sept.–Oct. 1977): 25–40.
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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 impor-
tance 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 ener-
gies of Soviet citizens in officially approved directions.
23
With the routinisation
of the Stalinist socio-economic system in the 1970s, a kind of locational hierar-
chy 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.
24
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 activitiessupposedlydemandeda higher degree of control over
residency and where, not coincidentally, one found the greatest variety of con-
sumer 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
23 Viktor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State,pp.130–64.
24 Alexander Yanov, The Drama of the Soviet 1 960s: A Lost Reform (Berkeley: Institute of
International Studies, University of California, 1984).
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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 cul-
tural expression by non-Russian minorities within the USSR.
25
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 administra-
tive units formally designated for titular ethnic groups.
26
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 organisa-
tion. 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.
27
Still, Soviet federalism under Brezh-
nev, 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 oblig-
atory Soviet passport, which essentialised and made hereditary the official
25 Terry Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
26 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); Rogers Brubaker, Nation-
alism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal
Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review 53, 2
(Summer 1994): 414–52.
27 Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Gail Lapidus, ‘Ethnona-
tionalism and Political Stability: The Soviet Case’, World Politics 36, 4 (July1984): 555–80;
Victor Zaslavsky, Neo-Stalinist State,pp.91–129.
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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 net-
works to become politically entrenched in such places as Kazakhstan under
Kunaev, Ukraine under Shcherbitskii, Uzbekistan under Sharaf Rashidov and
Azerbaijan under Heidar Aliev.
28
Taken as a whole, such policies fostered
nationalist subcultures that would later, under Gorbachev, generate signifi-
cant resistance to Soviet rule.
Taken together, these five elements of the Brezhnev social contract – job
security,low prices, 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 d
´
etente
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 demon-
strates.
29
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 ‘d
´
etente’ – in Russian, razriadka,or
28 John P. Willerton, Patronage and Politics in the USSR (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992).
29 Christopher J. Ward, ‘Selling the “Project of the Century”: Perceptions of the Baikal–
Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) in the Soviet Press, 1974–1984’, Canadian Slavonic Papers
43, 1 (Mar. 2001): 75–95.
305