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 challenge 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.
Given the symbolic importance of'parity' with the United States to Brezhnev's conception of 'developed socialism', Reagan's triumphant patriotism constituted a particularly difficult ideological challenge. Reagan's straightforward declaration that the Soviet Union was 'evil', his absolute dismissal of the idea of detente 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 international 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 public 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 running 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 corruption 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.[180]
The death of staunch Brezhnev supporter Mikhail Suslov on 25 January, at the age of seventy-nine, marked the beginning of an open struggle for Soviet leadership succession, with the Andropov faction generally outmanoeuvring the status quo-oriented Chernenko circle. With both Andropov and Chernenko themselves now already quite unwell, the problem of generational 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 correct speech about Azerbaijan.42 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.
180
For Churbanov's view of events, see Yurii M. Churbanov,