The Soviet Union under Brezhnev

William J. Tompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317881711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Russie

The Soviet Union Under Brezhnev provides an accessible post-Soviet perspective on the history of the USSR from the mid-1960's to the mid-1980's. It challenges both the 'evil empire' image of the USSR that was widespread in the early 1980's and the 'stagnation' label attached to the period by Soviet reformers under Gorbachev.

The book makes use of a range of memoirs, interviews, archival documents and other sources not available before 1990 to place Brezhnev and his epoch in a broader historical context. The author:

examines high politics, foreign policy and policy making
explores broader social, cultural and demographic trends
presents a picture of Soviet society in the crucial decades prior to the upheavals and crises of the late 1980's

While stopping well short of a full-scale rehabilitation of Brezhnev, Tompson rejects the prevailing image of the Soviet leader as a colourless non-entity, drawing attention to Brezhnev's real political skills, as well as his faults, and to the systemic roots of many of the problems he faced.

Part One Introduction

Chapter One
The Soviet Union at the End of the Khrushchev Era

Late on 15 October 1964, Soviet news agencies issued a terse statement informing Soviet citizens and the world that Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) since 1953 and Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers since 1958, had been released from his duties in connection with his advancing age and deteriorating health. After almost a dozen years in power, Khrushchev was pensioned off to live out the remainder of his life in obscurity. His name disappeared from the official media overnight: even the denunciations of his mistakes and defects of character that followed his removal did not mention him by name [Doc. 1]. The new party leader was Khrushchev's long-time protégé and colleague in the CPSU Secretariat, Leonid Brezhnev, while the post of head of government passed to the head of the USSR State Planning Committee (Gosplan), Aleksei Kosygin. Seen by many at the time as transitional figures, these two men would in fact lead the USSR for more than a decade and a half.

The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev

It was Khrushchev's distinction, and to some extent his achievement, to be the first – and until Gorbachev's resignation from the presidency of a collapsing state the only – Soviet leader to be removed from office before his death. That his removal was both bloodless and orderly, if not exactly democratic, was in no small measure a reflection of the changes he had wrought while in power. One reason for the smooth transfer of power was that Khrushchev's removal enjoyed the overwhelming support of the country's political elite (Tompson, 1991 and 1995). While some observers at the time saw him as the victim of an anti-Stalinist backlash, he was in fact over-thrown by a broad coalition bringing together the Stalinist and (relatively) liberal wings of the political elite. Leading representatives of all the key institutions of the regime, including the party, the state bureaucracy and the secret police took part in the plot; only the military remained on the sidelines, choosing to back neither Khrushchev nor his opponents.

By 1964, virtually every major elite constituency had significant grievances against Khrushchev. Senior party and state bureaucrats ('cadres', in Soviet parlance) were fed up with his endless and often ill-considered administrative reorganisations, his public bullying of subordinates and his frequent changes of course with respect to policy. Party officials, who constituted the largest share of the anti-Khrushchev coalition, were angered by his attempts to impose term limits on party officials and mandatory turnover requirements on leading party bodies. His 1962 decision to split the Communist Party's territorial apparatus into 'agricultural' and 'industrial' segments was an administrative disaster and a major blow to incumbent officials, who found half their authority transferred to newly appointed rivals. Conservatives, especially in the military and the security organs, were antagonised by his determination to control military expenditure, his pursuit of détente with the West and his increasingly aggressive pursuit of de-Stalinisation. More reform-minded members of the elite had come to see him as an unreliable patron for the causes of both de-Stalinisation and economic reform. A series of foreign setbacks, most notably over Berlin and Cuba, had damaged Khrushchev's authority, while his economic policies were failing to deliver the promised rates of growth. This last concern was made more acute by his incautious rhetoric about the pace of Soviet development, which risked arousing popular expectations that could not be met and thus endangering social stability.

Thus, while policy failures clearly undermined the First Secretary, it appears to have been Khrushchev's leadership style that really triggered his removal. He fell because the Soviet elite had come to regard him as unmanageable. His impulsive decision-making, arbitrary behaviour and highhanded treatment of senior officials alienated both his colleagues in the party Presidium and the wider elite. The other members of the Presidium believed that his personal dominance was undermining the oligarchic arrangements around which they had tried to fashion a stable political order since Stalin's death, while lower-level officials saw his endless re-shuffles – the so-called 'leapfrogging of cadres' – as a permanent threat to their job security. In denouncing Stalin's crimes against the elite in his 'secret speech' to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev had offered the country's political-administrative elite a promise of physical security: never again would a campaign of terror be directed against them. By 1964, however, they wanted more: they wanted the professional security that Khrushchev's perpetual reorganisations and personnel shake-ups denied them. The October Plenum was, above all else, an attempt by the political elite to replace an increasingly erratic and autocratic leader with a stable, predictable collective leadership. It was therefore natural that the oligarchs should turn to Brezhnev and Kosygin as Khrushchev's successors.

The New Leaders

In both the USSR and the West, it was long believed that Brezhnev had succeeded to the party leadership almost accidentally, either as a compromise candidate or as the figure chosen by the real king-makers (Suslov and/or Shelepin, depending on which account one accepts – see Tatu, 1969; Medvedev, 1982; Burlatsky, 1988 and 1990). In fact, Brezhnev's selection to succeed Khrushchev to the party leadership reflected both his own leading role in the plot – he was the prime mover behind Khrushchev's removal – and the extent to which he offered the elite exactly what it wanted in a new First Secretary: stability and predictability.

Born in 1906 to a working-class family in the Ukrainian city of Kamenskoe (later Dneprodzerzhinsk), Leonid Brezhnev worked in agriculture and industry in his youth and qualified as a surveyor in 1927. He worked as a fitter for a time, while studying part-time at the metallurgical institute in Dneprodzerzhinsk. After graduating from the institute in 1935, he became a shift leader in a factory, but he was soon called up for military service, which he completed as the political instructor of a tank company before returning to Dneprodzerzhinsk in 1936. Soon Brezhnev's career began to take off, launched (as were the careers of so many of his contemporaries) by the opportunities for rapid promotion that arose during the Great Terror of 1936-38. By February 1939, he had risen to the post of propaganda secretary for the Dnepropetrovsk Provincial Party Committee (Obkom). Brezhnev spent the war as a political officer, rising to the rank of major-general. Despite later attempts to establish his reputation as a war hero, his military record was not particularly distinguished. He did, however, make a good impression on Ukraine's Communist Party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, who was to act as Brezhnev's patron for almost two decades.

After the war, thanks to Khrushchev's favour, Brezhnev rose rapidly, heading the Zaporozhe Obkom and then that of the much larger Dnepropetrovsk. In 1950, shortly after Khrushchev's return to Moscow as a Central Committee Secretary, Brezhnev was summoned to the capital for a short stint in the Central Committee apparatus. Later that year, he was dispatched to Kishinev (Chisinau) as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Communist Party. Like a number of younger officials, Brezhnev suffered demotion in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death in 1953, but Khrushchev's patronage did not fail him, and he soon began his political recovery. Over the ensuing six years, he faithfully supported Khrushchev and was rewarded with appointments as second secretary (1954) and then first secretary (1955) of the Kazakh party organisation, before joining the Central Committee Secretariat in 1956. Brezhnev became a candidate member of the CPSU Presidium at the same time, attaining full membership in 1957 as a result of his support for Khrushchev against the so-called 'antiparty group'. In 1960, Brezhnev was 'kicked upstairs' from the Secretariat to the largely ceremonial post of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet – formally the country's head of state. However, the April 1963 stroke which ended the political career of Frol Kozlov, who had been widely seen as Khrushchev's most likely successor, triggered Brezhnev's return to the Secretariat, although he remained head of state.

By this time, Khrushchev's own political stock was falling. The First Secretary's frantic efforts to realise his aims were alienating almost every important elite constituency. From early 1964, therefore, his closest colleagues, led by Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgornyi, began to plot his removal. Brezhnev's role in this conspiracy has often been played down, at least partly as a reflection of his posthumous political reputation as a dim-witted, un-imaginative and colourless apparatchik. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that he was the chief conspirator, although some witnesses claim that he panicked in the autumn, when he learned that Khrushchev knew of the plot (Tompson, 1991). Panic or no, the coup succeeded, and the October 1964 Central Committee plenum relieved Khrushchev of all his duties, choosing Brezhnev and the long-serving technocrat Kosygin to take over the leadership of the party and government, respectively.

In his address to the October plenum, Brezhnev affirmed his commitment to collective leadership and emphasised his determination to strengthen the role of party organs in all spheres of social and economic life. In light of the regime's subsequent development, it is noteworthy that Brezhnev stressed not the leading role of the party but the leading role of party organs. He promised more than once to 'stick up for cadres', beginning to develop the themes of 'trust in cadres' and 'stability of cadres' that would be the hallmarks of his rule. In any case, Brezhnev had no real rivals for the party leadership. He was already the de facto second secretary, he had long experience in senior party posts and he was a man whose work style was generally recognised as 'collegial'. He was expected to show greater respect for the norms of collective leadership than had the increasingly arbitrary and autocratic Khrushchev. He was perceived as a safe pair of hands, who could provide stability at the top, and he was generally regarded as a 'decent' character (Tompson, 1991: 1115). To be sure, Brezhnev was also a compromise figure. He was not strongly identified with any particular ideological tendency and was thus more or less acceptable to both right and left – the anti-Khrushchev conspiracy had brought together representatives of all strands of opinion within the elite. He was also acceptable both to older members of the elite, like Suslov, and rising younger men, like Shelepin, Semichastnyi and Voronov (Burlatsky, 1988: 214). In short, Brezhnev stood at the intersection of a number of cleavages involving both policy issues and generational splits.

Aleksei Kosygin's succession to the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers was the culmination of a career that had in many ways been even more remarkable than Brezhnev's. Born in 1904, Kosygin joined the Red Army during the Civil War. After being demobilised, he completed his secondary education in a tekhnikum (a specialised secondary school) in the field of trade and thereafter occupied a number of managerial posts in the consumers' cooperatives of Siberia. In 1931, he entered the Leningrad Textile Institute, graduating in 1935 and going to work first as a foreman and then as a shop head in a Leningrad textile factory. It was from there that his political career was launched. During the Great Terror, the young Kosygin received a dizzying succession of promotions to fill vacancies created by the arrests of numerous senior officials and the transfer of many more to fill their posts. By late 1938, he was chairman of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet. Kosygin was transferred to Moscow in 1939 as USSR People's Commissar for Light Industry – at the age of 35 and just four years after completing his course at the textile institute. In 1940, he was named Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars (effectively deputy prime minister), a post he retained throughout the rest of the Stalin period. Kosygin joined the Politburo as a candidate member in 1946 and was promoted to full member in 1948. Like Brezhnev, however, Kosygin was dropped from the Presidium after Stalin's death, returning as a candidate member only in 1957. Kosygin was neither a client nor a particularly close supporter of Khrushchev, but he was one of the most able Soviet administrators and also a man who knew how to avoid being drawn into factional intrigues. Khrushchev thus came to appreciate both his ability and his reliability, and in 1959 Kosygin returned to the front rank of Soviet politicians as chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), regaining his full membership of the Presidium the following year. His elevation to the premiership, too, reflected above all the widespread recognition of his administrative talents. It was certainly no reward for his role in Khrushchev's removal. While Kosygin clearly knew of the plot and supported it, there is no evidence to suggest that he played a key role in the conspiracy.

Brezhnev and Kosygin were, in many ways, an odd couple, and that may be why the elite chose them. In Brezhnev, the party apparatus had a safe, reliable leader who could be counted on to advance its interests and to eschew the abrupt and often arbitrary changes in policy that had characterised Khrushchev, as well as his often high-handed treatment of senior officials. In Kosygin, they chose an able administrator whose technocratic bent and failure to manifest any real leadership ambitions of his own minimised the risk of rivalry with Brezhnev. Moreover, Kosygin's more reformist inclinations would counterbalance Brezhnev's cautious conservatism and reassure those who hoped that Khrushchev's removal would not bring an end to reforms but would rather allow them to continue without the zigzags associated with Khrushchev. The first of these calculations with respect to Kosygin turned out to be largely justified. While his relations with Brezhnev were never close and cooled markedly in the 1970s, he remained in post until shortly before his death in 1980 without ever challenging Brezhnev's position. The second calculation, however, proved unwarranted. Kosygin's modest reformism marked him out from Brezhnev throughout the ensuing decade and a half, but his major economic reform drive came to nothing by 1970, and further attempts at reform went nowhere.

Soviet Society a Decade after Stalin’s Death

The country that Khrushchev's successors inherited was a very different one from that which Stalin had bequeathed to Khrushchev and his heirs. It was, to begin with, a predominantly urban society: during the dozen years since Stalin's death, the rural population had declined slightly, while the urban population had risen by just under 22%, This raised the urban population from 43% to 53% of the total Soviet population, a development that made Soviet society easier to mobilise but arguably more difficult to manage, not least because its social structure and occupational profile were far more complex. It was also a better educated and very much wealthier society. Even relatively conservative Western estimates – which were far lower than the official data – pointed to growth rates for the economy as a whole averaging around 5.8% per year during the Khrushchev era. Industry grew even faster, at rates of perhaps 6.2% on Western estimates (Gros & Steinherr, 1995: 66). This performance, coupled with such obvious and high-profile technical successes as Soviet achievements in space exploration, suggested to most observers within the country and without that the Soviet system was fundamentally sound and that its performance posed a major challenge to the capitalist West.

This growth performance was reflected in popular living standards to an extent unknown in the Stalin era. According to official Soviet data, per capita consumption of meat had risen by more than 57%, and that of fish, vegetables and fruit by 80, 41 and 155% respectively. At the same time, consumption of grain products and potatoes, which had long formed the basis for most Soviet citizens' diets, actually declined, by about 9.3% in the case of grain and a staggering 41.9% in the case of potatoes. Khrushchev's housing construction drive had dramatically reduced the proportion of the population living in communal apartments and dormitories, and many consumer durables were becoming ever more widely available. The Khrushchev era saw dramatic increases in production of radios, refrigerators, washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Many of these goods remained relatively hard to come by - the huge percentage increases were often from very low bases - but a large and rapidly growing minority did indeed possess them. In 1953, television sets had been virtually unknown in the Soviet Union; by 1965, around one-quarter of Soviet households owned them (TsSU, 1966: 595-9).

Politically, too, the country was much changed, although the institutional architecture of the system was, on the whole, that inherited from Stalin. The CPSU retained the monopoly on political and economic power it had claimed in the years following the Civil War, and its organs monitored and directed every social, economic or political institution of any significance, from the government of the USSR down to the shop floor of the smallest factory in the most remote provincial town. The party tolerated no opposition and maintained a tight grip on the media and the arts. While Khrushchev had tinkered extensively with the organisation of economic management, the basic principles and priorities of the command economy created by Stalin – state ownership of the means of production, central planning of virtually all economic activity of any significance and the priority development of heavy industry – remained intact. Yet this institutional continuity did not prevent dramatic changes in the political atmosphere in the decade or so to 1964.

The most important change was the abandonment of the use of terror against members of the elite. Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin's crimes against the leading party and state officials, along with his treatment of defeated rivals, who were removed from office rather than arrested and shot, signalled to the wider Soviet elite that the days of arbitrary terror against them were over. Ironically, this very fact reduced the risks faced by would-be plotters and doubtless contributed to the political upheavals of the Khrushchev era - including his removal. The wider society, too, felt the lessening of police controls. While de-Stalinisation proceeded in fits and starts, with partial retreats following each new advance, the trend was towards greater freedom, not least in the arts. Even the crackdown on abstract artists and heterodox writers launched in late 1962 was relatively mild by comparison with what had gone before. In short, Khrushchev bequeathed his successors a society that was both wealthier than it had ever been before and freer than it had been for a generation or more. However, as his successors would learn, these developments, though clearly positive, did not necessarily make it easier to govern successfully.

The Soviet Union and the World in 1964

The new leaders were aware that Khrushchev's legacy in foreign affairs was, at best, mixed. On the positive side, he had done much to break down the Soviet Union's isolation after 1953. The sense that the USSR and its European allies constituted a besieged camp gave way to a new sense of confidence and activism world-wide. The USSR was to challenge American imperialism throughout the world. This transformation owed much to Khrushchev's doctrinal innovations. Khrushchev had rejected as outmoded Leninist theses concerning the inevitability of war between capitalism and socialism and the role of war as the 'midwife of the revolution'. Instead, he affirmed the possibility of long-term peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems.

These innovations opened up new opportunities for Soviet diplomacy, particularly in the post-colonial world, where Khrushchev had demonstrated the potential benefits for the USSR of close links to national liberation movements, even where these were not communist in orientation. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev took a keen interest in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia, and spent much time and energy building closer ties to them. Recognising that most of the new states of the developing world would not move rapidly to Soviet-style socialism, Khrushchev accepted the need for a relatively non-ideological approach, extending aid to noncommunist governments that adopted a suitably 'anti-imperialist' stance and largely side-lining Third World communist parties. His successors thus inherited close ties to such states as India and Indonesia. Khrushchev's postcolonial involvements were not by any means risk-free, and he did suffer reverses as Soviet-backed leaders fell from power in a number of black African and Arab countries. These setbacks ...