The Politburo was still feeling its way towards settled policies. This was especially obvious in its handling of those countries in Eastern Europe where economic reforms were being implemented. Hungarian party leader János Kádár had introduced measures similar to those advocated by Kosygin in the USSR. He got away with this because he had moved stealthily while Khrushchëv was in power and because he had Kosygin’s protection after Khrushchëv’s retirement. By 1968 a New Economic Mechanism which included limited permission for the creation of retail markets had been introduced. In Poland a different approach was taken. Władisław Gomułka had failed to fulfil his promises of industrial and agricultural growth and was removed in favour of Eduard Gierek in 1970. The new Polish government raised huge Western loans to facilitate the rapid expansion of heavy industry. Financial support and technological transfer, Gierek argued, would unblock the country’s economic bottlenecks.
The Soviet communist leaders gave approval to both the Hungarian and the Polish experiments not least because the USSR could ill afford to maintain its massive subsidy of the East European countries in the form of cheap oil and gas exports. In any case the basic structures of the centrally-planned economy remained in place in both countries.
Less contentment was shown by the Soviet Politburo with the policies adopted by the communist leadership in Czechoslavakia. At first there had been little cause for concern. Czechoslovak party leader Antonin Novotný had become as unpopular as Gomułka in Poland, and Brezhnev on his visit to Prague in December 1967 refused to intervene in the factional dispute. Novotný resigned in January 1968 and was succeeded by Alexander Dubček. The consequence was the ‘Prague Spring’. Dubček and his colleagues allowed the emergence of independent pressure groups; they allowed the mass media to criticize the Czechoslovak official authorities, not excluding himself. The trade unions resumed the role of defence of workers’ interests, and market reforms of the Hungarian type were treated as a minimum short-term aim. Dubček, hoping to create a ‘socialism with a human face’, still thought of himself as a Leninist. But by introducing so many checks on the communist party dictatorship, he was unknowingly rejecting the main tenets of Lenin’s thought and practice.
His cardinal error lay in assuming that he could pull the Soviet Politburo along with him. In Moscow, the Czech reforms were seen as threatening the existence of one-party rule, the centrally-planned economy and the survival of Eastern Europe as an exclusively communist zone. Brezhnev sent his emissaries to Prague over the summer to pull him back into line. But Dubček ignored all the hints that his intransigence would incur a military penalty.
On the night of 20–21 August 1968 the tanks of the Warsaw Pact rolled into Czechoslovakia. The decision had been taken in the Soviet Politburo. Kosygin had wavered earlier in the summer, remembering the complications around the world that had followed the suppression of the Hungarian revolt.15 Brezhnev, too, had not always been enthusiastic. But the vote in the Politburo was unanimously in favour of invasion. Brezhnev was later to affirm that ‘if I hadn’t voted in the Politburo for military intervention, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here now’. In the meantime Hungarian leader Kádár had tried to dispel Dubček’s naïvety: ‘Don’t you understand what kind of people you are dealing with?’ Dubček rebuffed the warning; and when the tanks arrived in Prague, he was taken prisoner and flown to Russia, where he was injected with drugs and threatened with execution unless he complied with the USSR’s orders. Dubček succumbed, but with obvious heavy reluctance, and in spring 1969 the Soviet Politburo put the compliant Gustav Husak in power.
After a brief period as Czechoslovak ambassador to Turkey, Dubček was demoted to the job of local forest administrator. A bloodless purge of the participants in the Prague Spring was put in hand. No country of the Warsaw Pact was permitted to follow policies involving the slightest derogation from the premisses of the one-party state, Marxism-Leninism and Warsaw Pact membership. The Brezhnev Doctrine was imposed, whereby upon any threat to ‘socialism’ in any country of the Pact, the other member countries of the Pact had the right and duty to intervene militarily.
The invasion of Czechoslovakia had baleful consequences for the political and economic debates in the USSR. Ideological retrenchment was inevitable. This was appreciated by dissenters outside the party such as Pavel Litvinov, who led a small group of protesters on Red Square on 23 August. The participants were seized by police, put on trial in October and sentenced to three years in prison camps.16 Litvinov’s treatment could easily have been worse; but within the Politburo there was reluctance to resort to greater repression than was deemed completely necessary. The measures were anyway severe enough for the intelligentsia to lose any remaining illusions about Brezhnev. Khrushchëv, who spent his days at his dacha telling tales to visitors who came out to picnic in the woods, was becoming a figure of nostalgia among artists and scholars. A siege mentality gripped the regime: if a Gorbachëv had existed in the Kremlin in 1968, he would have been arrested.
The USA assured the USSR that the invasion of Czechoslovakia would not cause a world war and that Western political revulsion would not get in the way of negotiations between the superpowers. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1969 and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were begun in the same year. By 1970 the USSR had caught up with its rival in the number of its intercontinental ballistic missiles. But both Moscow and Washington were keen that competition in military preparedness should occur in a predictable, non-violent fashion.
Yet the Czechoslovak invasion damaged the USSR irreparably inside the global communist movement. Hopes for a reconciliation with China had been slim since 1966, when Mao Zedong had castigated Moscow as a ‘centre of modern revisionism’ that had betrayed the principles of Marx, Engels and Lenin. After 1968 the number of critics grew. Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia condemned the Brezhnev doctrine; and when seventy-five communist parties met in Moscow in June 1969, the polemics were incessant. Only sixty-one parties agreed to sign the main document at the conference. World communism had definitively become polycentric. Indeed border skirmishes broke out along the Siberian border with the People’s Republic of China. All-out war was a possibility until Moscow and Beijing each concluded that a diplomatic settlement was in its interest. The Politburo was finding relations with China as intractable as at any time under Khrushchëv.
Not that everything in foreign affairs was problematical. Kosygin, Brezhnev and Podgorny followed Khrushchëv’s precedent by visiting several foreign countries. In 1966 the USSR had brought India and Pakistan together under Kosygin’s chairmanship in Tashkent to settle their recurrent conflicts. The Soviet-Indian relationship was especially warm.17 Furthermore, Cuba remained defiantly pro-Soviet despite an American diplomatic and economic embargo, and in 1970 the Marxist coalition leader Salvador Allende came to power in Chile. In Asia, North Vietnam, fighting with Soviet military equipment, was wearing down the American-supported regime in South Vietnam. In Europe, the USSR had its successes even after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. As soon as Willy Brandt was elected German Chancellor in Bonn in 1969, he made overtures to the Kremlin. A treaty was signed between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany in the following year giving formal recognition to the separate German Democratic Republic.
Elsewhere in the non-communist world the attempts to increase Soviet power and prestige were not quite so productive. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah was chased from power in 1966. His departure left the USSR without friends in Africa except for Egypt. Then Egypt, too, fell away. In 1967 Soviet influence in the Middle East was undermined when Israeli forces defeated an Arab military coalition in the Six-Day War. President Nasser of Egypt died in 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who saw no advantage in keeping close ties with the USSR. The Soviet-Egyptian alliance rapidly collapsed. Countries of the Third World were finding that the USSR might be able to supply them adequately with military equipment but could not sustain them economically. It was increasingly understood
around the globe that occasional acts of munificence such as the financing of the Aswan Dam did not generate long-term industrial and agricultural development.
Yet the campaign to increase Moscow’s influence abroad was sustained. At home, furthermore, central political prerogatives were asserted. The Politburo abandoned the decentralizing experiments of Khrushchëv. In 1966 its members scrapped the sovnarkhozes. Inside the party, the Bureau of the RSFSR in the Central Committee – established by Khrushchëv – was abolished. Thus the largest republic by far in the USSR lost its co-ordinating party body. The other republics still had their own parties, central committees and first secretaries. The humbling of the RSFSR signified that no national political unit, not even the Russian, was immune to the Politburo’s supra-national demands.
Accordingly, the other republics were placed under tight discipline. Eighteen well-known Ukrainian nationalist and intellectual dissenters were brought to court in Kiev in August 1965 – a full month before the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavski in Moscow. They refused to disown their beliefs and received harsh prison sentences. Also in 1965 there was a large demonstration in Erevan, protesting about past and present injustices against the Armenian people. It was suppressed by armed force. The subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia horrified nationalist opinion, especially in the Baltic Soviet republics and Ukraine. A student was arrested in the Estonian city of Tartu for daubing a cinema wall with the declaration: ‘Czechs, we are your brothers.’ But disturbances also occurred independently of the Prague events. Riots broke out in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, in 1969. Several officials of Russian nationality were murdered before sufficient troops arrived to restore control.
In the Politburo there were lively discussions. It would seem that Alexander Shelepin and Dmitri Polyanski took the strongest line in advocating the eradication of national dissent among non-Russians. It was rumoured that Polyanski’s ideas were virtually those of a Russian nationalist. On the other side there was Petro Shelest, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, who believed that any further scouring of Ukrainian culture would open wounds that would turn the Ukrainian speakers of his republic into irretrievable opponents of a ‘Soviet Ukraine’. Shelest himself had a deep sympathy for the traditions of the Cossacks.
Brezhnev steered a middle course between them. In November 1967 he called for the ‘convergence’ of the Soviet Union’s peoples, but stressed that this would involve highly-sensitive decisions and that hastiness had to be avoided. Even so, neither Brezhnev nor even Shelest was diffident about quelling overt opposition whether it came in mass demonstrations or in poems, songs and booklets. This meant that the basic problems of a multinational state were suppressed rather than resolved. Russian nationalists resented the fact that their culture was not allowed to develop outside the distortive framework imposed by the Politburo. Among the non-Russians, nationalists resented what they perceived as the Politburo’s Russian chauvinism; their grievances were ably summarized in Ivan Dziuba’s lengthy memorandum to the Ukrainian party and government, Internationalism or Russification?18
Ostensibly most republic-level communist party leaders endorsed the suppression of nationalism in the various Soviet republics. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was installed as Party First Secretary in Georgia in 1972, rhapsodized that ‘the true sun rose not in the East but in the North, in Russia – the sun of Leninist ideas’. Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party, eulogized the Russian people as ‘the elder brother and true friend’ of the Uzbeks.19
When at home in Uzbekistan, Rashidov was not so self-abasing; on the contrary, he was promoting his fellow clan members into high office and ensuring that they could benefit from the perks of office without Moscow’s interference. The same had been happening in Georgia under Shevardnadze’s predecessor V. P. Mzhavanadze – and Shevardnadze’s subsequent struggle against corruption had only limited success. Even Dinmukhammed Kunaev, First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party and boon companion of Brezhnev, covertly gave protection to emergent national aspirations. Rashidov, Mzhavanadze and Kunaev zealously locked up overt nationalist dissenters in their respective republics; but they increasingly themselves selected and organized the local élites on a national principle. Such phenomena were also on the rise in the RSFSR, whose internal autonomous republics were allowed much freedom to promote the interests of the local national majority.
The Politburo’s own commitment to ‘stability of cadres’ contributed to the difficulties of holding together the USSR as a multinational state. Brezhnev assured officials in the party and governmental institutions that their jobs were secure so long as they did not infringe current official policies. He wanted to avoid the enmity incurred by Khrushchëv’s endless sackings of personnel; he also contended that officials needed stable working conditions if the Politburo’s objectives were to be realized in the localities. Consequently Mzhavanadze’s replacement by Shevardnadze was a rare direct attempt to indicate to the official leaderships of the non-Russian republics that there were limits to the Kremlin’s indulgence.
A general lightness of touch was applied in the Russian provinces. Leningrad Party Secretary V. S. Tolstikov was sacked in 1970. Tolstikov had drawn attention to himself as a communist arch-conservative, but the reason for his dismissal was not politics but his sexual escapades on a yacht in the Gulf of Finland.20 Brezhnev anyway punished him gently by sending him as Soviet ambassador to Beijing. Elsewhere in the RSFSR there was bureaucratic tranquillity. Typical province-level party secretaries were either left in post or else promoted to higher party and governmental offices. Cliental systems of personnel were fortified, and local officials built their ‘nests’ of interests so tightly that Central Committee emissaries could seldom unravel the local scams. Brezhnev sometimes talked about the need to ‘renew’ the cadres of party and government; but self-interest discouraged him from putting an end to the immobilism he detected. He did not want to risk alienating lower-level officialdom.
By the end of the 1960s Politburo members were united in their broad approach. They did not abandon Khrushchëv’s basic policies; but they erased his eccentricities and pencilled in what they thought to be sound alternatives. Stalin had been too brutal, Khrushchëv too erratic. They did not want to revert to the bloody fixities of the post-war years; they were glad that the unsettling reorganizations after 1953 had been terminated.
It was their assumption that such an approach would effect a successful stabilization of the Soviet order. They acted out of optimism, and still believed in the superiority of communism over its competitors. They could point to the military security and economic advance achieved since 1964. They were confident about having checked the rise of dissent and having brought the intelligentsia and the working class under control. They were not entirely hostile to experimentation in their measures at home and in Eastern Europe. But the scope for novelty was brusquely narrowed after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. And already the Soviet leaders were becoming entangled in complications which they had not anticipated. They confronted deepening problems in politics, economics, society, culture, nationalism and international relations. Little did they know that the price of their attempt at stabilizing the Soviet order was about to be paid.
Part Four
* * *
A. Umyarov in Krokodil sees Gorbachëv as a tailor trying to stitch together the torn cloth of the USSR.
20
‘Developed Socialism’ (1970–1982)
The Soviet compound, as it emerged from the successive changes after the Second World War, had only a limited capacity for radical experimentation. Brezhnev and his fellow leaders understood and welcomed this. But the problems about the compound persisted. There was political frustration and resentment throughout the USSR, including its party, government and other public institutions. There were economic set-backs. There was social alienation and national, religious and cultural embitterment. Only when Brezhnev died was there a serious reconsi
deration of the compound’s problems. At first this was attempted cautiously. But Gorbachëv, coming to power in 1985, overlooked the internal necessities of the compound. Always he assumed that experimentation could be open ended. In the end he developed an audacious programme of comprehensive reforms which led to the dissolution of the Soviet compound and to the emergence of new forms of state and society in Russia and the other former Soviet republics.
But back in 1970, despite its growing problems, the Soviet Union was still a stable entity and was treated by the rest of the world as a permanent feature of the international landscape. Statesmen, scholars and commentators took it for granted that Soviet armed strength and political militance were too great to be ignored. The USSR had nearly reached military parity with the United States, and the Soviet economy had the world’s second greatest industrial capacity and already produced more steel, oil, pig-iron, cement and even tractors than any other country.1 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had trembled at the possibility that Russia’s centrally-planned industry might succeed in outmatching advanced capitalist countries in other sectors of industry. The skills and equipment developed for the Soviet Army, he thought, might one day be diffused to the rest of the country’s factories. Not only he but still more sceptical observers of the Soviet economy warned against underestimating the USSR’s capacities.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 46