A final asymmetry between the Soviet and Western understanding of detente became clear by the mid-1970s, this time connected to foreign policy
30 Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, HumanRights, and the Demise ofCommunism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
towards the Third World. Kissinger had assumed that the 'linkage' between Soviet trade agreements and Soviet foreign policy would induce the Brezhnev 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 ofthis. 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 detente throughout the West.
Brezhnevism in decline, 1976-82
As the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress of the CPSU opened in Moscow in February 1976, Brezhnev thus faced serious challenges to his orthodox Leninist domestic and foreign-policy strategy. Despite the initial success of detente, the boom in Western investment and trade anticipated by the Soviet leadership 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 industrial enterprises. Declining labour productivity and worker alienation became a subject of serious and intense discussion among Soviet social scientists.[176]
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 priority of military and heavy industrial production, the importance of international support for 'countries of socialist orientation' such as Vietnam and Cuba, the need for new investments in agriculture and, above all, the imperative of rapid development of Siberian energy reserves.32 Notwithstanding the banality 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 Griskevicius, the first secretary 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'.33 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 ofincapacitation due to arteriosclerosis, and, in part to reduce the stress of his tense relationship with his family, he became dangerously addicted to sedatives.34 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.35 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.36
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 Committee 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. 11 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), p. 68.
36 Gorbachev, Zhizn' i reformy, p. 202; Aleksandrov-Agentov, OtKollontai do Gorbacheva, pp.
271-3.
The only major exception to this pattern was the selection of the forty- seven-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev to replace Fedor Kulakov as Central Committee Secretary with responsibilities for agriculture upon the latter's death in 1978.
The senescence of the CPSU leadership only symbolised the larger sclerosis 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 combined 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 corruption. 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 nationalist subculture that paradoxically resented the treatment of the Slavic population by what was ostensibly a Russia-dominated empire. In some of its manifestations, this new Russian nationalism shaded over into anti-Semitic
176
John Bushnell, 'Urban Leisure Culture in Post-Stalin Russia: Stability as a Social Problem?', in Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon (eds.),