Taken together, these five elements of the Brezhnev social contract - job security, lowprices, 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 detente
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 demonstrates.[175] 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 'detente' - in Russian, razriadka, or '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 detente 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 Willy Brandt 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 was designed in large part to increase American leverage over Soviet decision makers in pursuit ofthis goal). Onboth 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 nuclear missile 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 detente while negotiations on the stricter regulation of nuclear missiles outlined in the SALT II treaty continued.
The early promise of detente, 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 Politburo of hard-liners such as Iurii Andropov of the KGB, Minister of Defence Andrei Grechko, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko hardly inspired confidence 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 Eastern 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.30
175
Christopher J. Ward, 'Selling the "Project of the Century": Perceptions of the Baikal- Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) in the Soviet Press, 1974-1984',