The Brezhnev Era, 1964-82
After Khrushchev came the triumvirate of Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksey N, Kosygin, and N, V, Podgorny, The first was the party leader, the second headed the government, and the third became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a ceremonial position. By the late 1960s Brezhnev was clearly the dominant leader. His strengths were in manipulating party and government cadres, but he was weak on policy ideas. He ensured that there was an unprecedented stability of cadres within the Communist Party and the bureaucracy, thereby creating conditions for the rampant spread of corruption in the Soviet political and administrative structures. Under Brezhnev, Russia dominated the union as never before, and the republic accounted for about three-fourths of the Soviet GNP. In the mid-1970s the USSR reached its apogee: it acquired nuclear parity with the United States and was recognized as a world superpower. Detente flourished in the 1970s but was disrupted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
The economy, at first in the hands of Kosygin, needed attention. He found that the central direction of the economy became more and more difficult to achieve. There were many reforms, but all to no avail. The economy had become very complex, but there was no mechanism, in the absence of the market, to coordinate economic activity in the interests of society. A bureaucratic market took over. Bureaucrats and enterprises negotiated the acquisition of inputs and agreed where the final product should go. The goal of every enterprise was to become a monopoly producer. The core of this system was the military-industrial complex, which accounted for the top quarter of output and had first call on resource allocation.
LEONID BREZHNEV (1906-82) Soviet leader
Brezhnev worked as an engineer and director of a technical school in Ukraine and hetd local posts in the Communist Party; he became regional party secretary in 1939. In the Second World War he was a political commissar in the Red Army and rose to major general (1943), In the 1950s he supported Nikita Khrushchev and became a member of the Politburo, though in 1964 he was the leader of a coalition that ousted Khrushchev, and soon he emerged as general secretary of the party (1966-82). He developed the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the right of Soviet intervention in such Warsaw Pact countries as Czechoslovakia (1968).
In the 1970s Brezhnev attempted to normalize relations with the West and to promote detente with the United States. He was made marshal of the Soviet Union in 1976 and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1977, becoming the first to hold the leadership of both the party and the state. He greatly expanded the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex, but in so doing he deprived the rest of the Soviet economy. Despite frail health, he retained his hold on power to the end.
On the positive side, the rapid expansion of the chemical, oil, and gas industries boosted exports so that Russia earned most of the union's hard-currency income. The middle class grew in size, as did its average salary, which more than doubled in two decades. Ownership of consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars, became a realistic expectation for a
growing part of the population. Until the early 1970s the availability of medical care, higher education, and improved accommodation reached levels unprecedented in the Soviet context.
These successes and a few others - some defence sectors and the space industry, and the sale of Russia's natural resources - allowed the Soviet regime to evade undertaking necessary but potentially politically dangerous structural economic reforms. According to US estimates for the years 1966-70 and 1976-80, the Soviet economy went into sharp decline in terms of industrial growth, agricultural output, and investment. Agricultural performance was even worse than the figures implied: over the years 1971—5 there was negative growth annually of 0.6 per cent, despite huge investments in agriculture, with one ruble in three going into agriculture and agriculture-related industry. The result was large annual imports of grain, paid for in US dollars. This was made possible by the explosion of oil prices in the 1970s, which saw the terms of trade turn in favour of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately the oil bonanza was wasted, and little use was made of foreign technology. After the initial improvement in living standards came stagnation or decline. The black market grew to plug the holes of the planned economy. Along with this went corruption, which had filtered down from the political elites; it eventually became pervasive. Increasing defence expenditure at a time of slowing economic growth led to cuts in investment. Education and medical and social services suffered most. At the end of the Brezhnev era the medical care of the population was a disgrace. In sum, by the early 1980s, continued economic stagnation posed a serious threat to the world standing of the USSR and to the regime's legitimacy at home.
ANDREY SAKHAROV (1921-89)
Russian nuclear physicist and human rights advocate
Sakharov worked with I. Y. Tamm (1895-1971) to develop the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb, but in 1961 he opposed Nikita Khrushchev's plan to test a 100- megaton hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere. In 1968 he published in the West "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom", which called for nuclear arms reduction and criticized Soviet repression of dissidents. He and his wife, Yeiena G. Bonner, continued to advocate civil liberties and reform in the Soviet Union.
in 1975 Sakharov received the Nobel Prize for Peace but was forbidden to travel to Oslo to receive it. In 1980 he was exiled to the closed city Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod); his wife was exiled there in 1984. They were released in 1986 and returned to Moscow. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in April 1989, Sakharov had his honours restored and saw many of the causes for which he had fought and suffered become official policy under Mikhail Gorbachev.
It was in the Brezhnev era, thanks largely to the publication in 1973 of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 by the dissenting novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that the extent and horror of the Gulag system of labour camps was fully revealed. Reaction to this work, whose title likens the camps scattered through the Soviet Union to an island chain, was immediate, and provoked outrage and public criticism of Russia's policies.
Also during the 1970s the state gradually lost its monopoly on information control. A counterculture influenced by western pop music, especially rock, spread rapidly. Russian youth
had become enamoured of western pop stars, and the advent of the audiocassette made it easier to experience their music. The widespread teaching of foreign languages further facilitated access to outside ideas. By the end of the Brezhnev era, the Russian intelligentsia had rejected Communist Party values. The party's way of dealing with uncomfortable critics - such as Solzhenitsyn - was to deport them. These exiles then became the voice of Russian culture abroad. The academician Andrey Sakharov could not be imprisoned, for fear of western scientists cutting off contact with the Soviet Union, but he was exiled until 1986 to the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod).
The 1960s and 1970s were also a period when the Cold War bipolar struggle between the Soviet and American blocs gave way to a more complicated pattern of international relationships in which the world was no longer split into two clearly opposed spheres of influence. A major split had occurred between the Soviet Union and China in 1960 and this widened over the years, shattering the unity of the communist bloc. In the meantime, western Europe and Japan achieved dynamic economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, reducing their relative inferiority to the United States. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and often showed themselves resistant to superpower coercion or cajoling.