Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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‘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 d

etente 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 WillyBrandt 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

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was designed in large part to increase American leverage over Soviet decision

makers in pursuit of this goal). On both 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

nuclearmissile 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 d

etente while negotiations on the stricter regulation of nuclear

missiles outlined in the SALT II treaty continued.

The early promise of d

etente, 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 Polit-

buro of hard-liners such as Iurii Andropov of the KGB, Minister of Defence

Andrei Grechko, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko hardly inspired con-

ﬁdence 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 East-

ern 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.

A ﬁnal asymmetry between the Soviet and Western understanding of

etente became clear by the mid-1970s, this time connected to foreign policy

30 Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise

of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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towards the Third World. Kissinger had assumed that the ‘linkage’ between

Soviet trade agreements and Soviet foreign policy would induce the Brezh-

nev 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 of this.

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 d

etente throughout the West.

Brezhnevism in decline, 1976–82

As the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress of the CPSU opened in Moscow in Febru-

ary 1976, Brezhnev thus faced serious challenges to his orthodox Leninist

domestic and foreign-policy strategy. Despite the initial success of d

etente,

the boom in Western investment and trade anticipated by the Soviet leader-

ship 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 indus-

trial enterprises. Declining labour productivity and worker alienation became

a subject of serious and intense discussion among Soviet social scientists.

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 pri-

ority of military and heavy industrial production, the importance of interna-

tional support for ‘countries of socialist orientation’ such as Vietnam and Cuba,

the need for new investments in agriculture and, above all, the imperative of

31 John Bushnell, ‘Urban Leisure Culture in Post-Stalin Russia: Stability as a Social

Problem?’, in Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon (eds.), Soviet Society and Culture:

Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988).

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rapid development of Siberian energy reserves.

Notwithstanding the banal-

ity 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 Gri

skevi

cius, the ﬁrst sec-

retary 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’.

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 of incapacitation due to arteriosclerosis, and,

in part to reduce the stress of his tense relationship with his family, he became

dangerously addicted to sedatives.

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.

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.

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 Com-

mittee 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. ii (Moscow: Novosti, 1995),

p. 68.

36 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy,p.202; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva,pp.

271–3.

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The only major exception to this pattern was the selection of the forty-

seven-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev to replace Fedor Kulakov as Central Com-

mittee Secretary with responsibilities for agriculture upon the latter’s death

in 1978.

The senescence of the CPSU leadership only symbolised the larger sclero-

sis 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 com-

bined 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 corrup-

tion. 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 nation-

alist subculture that paradoxically resented the treatment of the Slavic pop-

ulation by what was ostensibly a Russia-dominated empire. In some of its

manifestations, this new Russian nationalism shaded over into anti-Semitic

fascism.

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.

Social pathologies such as alcoholism and worker absen-

teeism became overwhelming problems; even among Soviet

emigr

es, who

37 Brudny, Reinventing Russia. 38 Jowitt, New World Disorder,pp.121–58.

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might have been expected to come predominantly from better-managed enter-

prises, 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’.

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 interven-

tion 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 of Nur 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 upris-

ings in Herat; Taraki and Amin began 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 replacedby Amin as PDPA leader. With the unpredictableAmin

now in charge of Afghanistan, and reports that Chinese, Pakistani, Iranian and

39 Paul Gregory, ‘Productivity, Slack, and Time Theft in the Soviet Economy’, in James

Millar (ed.), Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 266.

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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 sup-

porter of ‘national liberation movements’ was fatally undermined; the US and

the USSR now seemed to be two equally imperialistic superpowers. Presi-

dent Jimmy Carter, who had previously tried to sustain the momentum of

etente, despite increasing public criticism of the Soviet human rights record

and growing scepticism about Soviet intentions in the Third World – in partic-

ular, 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 partic-

ipation 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 ﬁght-

ing 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 of psycholog-

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 elec-

trician Lech Wal

e¸sa. Poland had long been one of the most restive coun-

tries in the Soviet bloc, and due to Soviet compromises with Gomul

ka 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 Commu-

nism. 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

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The Brezhnev era

Polish indebtedness, the stage was set for a genuinely revolutionary upris-

ing. Strikes in the Lenin Shipyards of Gda

nsk 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 d

etente 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, Wal

e¸sa and Solidarity fought courageously

to wrest political and economic power away from the PUWP. The ailing

Gierek was replaced as party leader by Stanisl

aw 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.

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

Polishparty-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 chal-

lenge 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.

40 Mark Kramer, ‘Jaruzelski, the Soviet Union, and the Imposition of Martial Law in Poland:

New Light on the Mystery of December 1981’, Cold War International History Project

Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 5–16.

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stephen e. hanson

Given the symbolic importance of ‘parity’ with the United States to Brezhnev’s

conception of ‘developed socialism’, Reagan’s triumphant patriotism consti-

tuted a particularly difﬁcult ideological challenge. Reagan’s straightforward

declaration that the Soviet Union was ‘evil’, his absolute dismissal of the idea

of d

etente 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 inter-

national 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 pub-

lic 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 run-

ning 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 corrup-

tion 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.

The death of staunch Brezhnev supporter Mikhail Suslov on 25 Jan-

uary, at the age of seventy-nine, marked the beginning of an open struggle

for Soviet leadership succession, with the Andropov faction generally out-

manoeuvring the status quo-oriented Chernenko circle. With both Andropov

and Chernenko themselves now already quite unwell, the problem of gener-

ational 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

41 For Churbanov’s view of events, see Yurii M. Churbanov, Ia rasskazhu vse, kak bylo –

(Moscow: Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 1992).

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The Brezhnev era

correct speech about Azerbaijan.

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.

315