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]
149
Memoirs that cover the Brezhnev era in some depth include Luba Brezhneva,
1995) ; Evgenii I. Chazov,
1996) ; A. S. Cherniaev,
150
Zbigniew Brzezinski, 'The Soviet Political System: Transformation or Degeneration?', in Brzezinski (ed.),
151
Richard Lowenthal, 'Development vs. Utopia in Communist Policy', in Chalmers Johnson (ed.),
152
JerryF.Hough,
153
H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths (eds.),
154
George Breslauer, 'On the Adaptability of Soviet Welfare-State Authoritarianism', in Erik P. Hoffmann and Robin F. Laird (eds.),
155
Ziia Nuriev, quoted in Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White,
156
KenJowitt,