The Penguin History of Modern Russia
Page 47
Not everyone subscribed to this conventional wisdom. The NATO countries continued to refuse to recognize Stalin’s annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, and émigré groups of various nationalities continued to argue that the USSR was an illegitimate state. They exposed the repressive record from Lenin to Brezhnev. Some thought that the Soviet order would fall apart if only the Western powers would cease to make diplomatic and commercial compromises.
At any rate few people in the West had any affection for the USSR. Too much was known about the brutality and immobilism of Soviet communism for it to shine out as a beacon of political freedom and social justice. Even the Italian and Spanish communist parties abandoned their ideological fealty to Moscow and formulated doctrines hostile to dictatorship. Especially after the USSR-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the number of admirers of Lenin was getting smaller in states not subject to communist leaderships. Moreover, changes in the Third World were steadily diminishing the international appeal of the USSR because most of the world’s colonies had by then been given their independence. Meanwhile the grinding poverty widespread in several European countries, such as Spain, was being overcome: capitalism was found to be more adaptable to welfare economics than had previously been supposed possible.
Nevertheless some optimists contended that the Soviet political system could be softened and that a convergence between communism and capitalism might occur as capitalist states resorted increasingly to central economic planning and governmentally-provided welfare. This was rejected by others who asserted that basic reform was incompatible with the maintenance of the communist order. Supposedly no Politburo leader would attempt such a reform.
Certainly Brezhnev was not of a mind to undermine the party he served as General Secretary, and the development of the relationship between the USSR and the USA for several years appeared to justify his stance. As he took control of Soviet foreign policy he exchanged visits with American presidents. Richard Nixon went to Moscow in 1972 and 1974, Gerald Ford to Vladivostok in 1976. Brezhnev himself was received in New York in 1973. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks after protracted negotiations produced an Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in 1972. The trust between the two superpowers steadily increased. In order to stress that a warmer relationship than Khrushchëv’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ had been attained, a new phrase was coined, ‘détente’ (in Russian, razryadka), which referred to the slackening of the tensions of the Cold War. Brezhnev confidently proposed to American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the two superpowers could maintain a global condominium if they had the sense to reinforce détente.
Moreover, not all events elsewhere in the world were unfavourable to Soviet interests. The Kremlin’s resolve was strengthened in 1970 when the coalition led by the communist Salvador Allende acceded to power in Chile. When Ethiopia, too, had a revolution in 1974, military equipment was supplied from Moscow; and the Portuguese Empire’s disintegration in Africa gave the USSR and its Cuban ally a further opportunity to intervene in civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. At successive Party Congresses Brezhnev asserted the USSR’s willingness to support struggles for national liberation in Asia, Africa and South America.
The USA meanwhile suffered from the demoralizing effects of its unsuccessful war in Vietnam, even after the withdrawal of its troops in 1973. In the same year the American economy was buffeted by the decision of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) to introduce a massive rise in the price of oil. All advanced capitalist economies suffered from this; but the USSR, despite not having influenced OPEC’s decision, gained enormous revenues from her energy exports outside Eastern Europe. Undoubtedly the USA’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s caused a tremor among Soviet policy-makers. Yet even this event had its positive aspect. Politburo members were able to see the Americans’ need for Chinese support as proof of the relative decline of the USA as a superpower. Soviet General Secretary and American President bargained as equals at their summits.
Nevertheless the USA extracted concessions from the USSR. Military and economic deals with Moscow were made dependent on the Politburo allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate if they so desired. Such would-be emigrants became known in the West as the refuseniks on account of their having been refused permission to emigrate on the grounds that they had had previous access to secret information vital to the state’s interests; a quarter of a million of them left the USSR under Brezhnev’s rule. The Western powers also sought to place limits on the regime’s oppression of Soviet citizens in general. In 1975 the Helsinki Final Act was signed as the culmination of several years of negotiations to settle Europe’s post-war territorial boundaries and to make provision for economic and scientific co-operation between West and East. The Final Act’s commitment to the free passage of information was to prove a valuable instrument for dissenters in the Soviet Union to embarrass the Politburo.
For the USA and the USSR, much as they wanted to eliminate the danger of nuclear war, remained rivals. Intensive development of weaponry continued in both countries. In 1977 the Soviet Union stationed its newly-tested SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, missiles which had a capacity to attack Western Europe. The USA reacted by setting up facilities for the basing of Cruise missiles in the United Kingdom and West Germany and for the introduction of Pershing missiles to West Germany. The danger and costliness of all this were evident to politicians in Moscow and Washington, who simultaneously aimed at achieving agreement in the second stage of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known by the acronym SALT 2. By 1979 it looked as though the negotiators had elaborated a draft that would be acceptable to both sides.
The expansion of the USSR’s global influence served to enhance Brezhnev’s personal authority in the Politburo. In agricultural policy he reinforced the conventional methods for organizing the collective farms. The central imposition of quotas of output was maintained, and instructions on what to sow and when came to the villages from Moscow. The policy of amalgamating farms was prolonged by Brezhnev, who shared with Khrushchëv a belief that bigger kolkhozes would increase productivity. At the same time Brezhnev insisted that agriculture should have a massive increase in the government’s financial support. Collective farms in the 1970s received twenty-seven per cent of all state investment – and even this figure did not include the revenues being channelled into the production of tractors, chemical fertilizers and other farm equipment. In 1981 the budgetary allocation constituted the ‘highest food-and-agriculture subsidy known in human history’, amounting to 33,000 million dollars at the contemporary official exchange rate.2
Gross agricultural output by 1980 was twenty-one per cent higher than the average for 1966–70. Cereal crops in particular rose by eighteen per cent in the same period.3 This allowed Brezhnev to bask in the praise heaped upon him. On closer inspection, the improved results were not encouraging. The usual criterion for assessing the effectiveness of Soviet agriculture had been and still was the grain harvest. In fact the imports of cereals, which had been started by Khrushchëv, had become a regular phenomenon. When it became difficult to seal commercial deals with the USA in 1974, the USSR’s foreign-trade officials began to make hole-in-the-corner purchases in Argentina and elsewhere. This was necessary because Soviet domestic production was severely deficient in fodder crops. There were also problems in other important sectors; for instance, the sugar-beet harvest, far from rising, declined by two per cent in the decade prior to 1980.
Brezhnev’s attempted solution was to increase state investment. Reform-minded central party functionaries were cowed by the fate of Politburo member G. I. Voronov. For years Voronov had advocated the division of each farm work-force into ‘links’ or teams which would be entrusted with specific functions. A link might, for instance, run a farm’s dairy unit. Voronov’s argument was that work-forces were so vast that individual kolkhozniks felt little sense of responsibility for the work on the farm. Accordingly, the link system, accompan
ied by suitable material incentives, would introduce conscientiousness and lead to an expansion of output. This proposal had been put to Stalin unsuccessfully by A. A. Andreev in the 1940s and had been opposed by Khrushchëv both before and after Stalin’s death. Voronov was equally ineffective in trying to convince Brezhnev about the need for such a reform. Indeed Brezhnev removed Voronov from the Politburo in April 1973.
Experimentation with agricultural links was not totally disallowed on a local basis (and among the party officials who tried them out was the young Stavropol Region Party Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachëv). Yet central policy was otherwise unimaginative and incompetent. In 1976 the Politburo issued a resolution ‘On the Further Development of Specialization and Concentration of Agricultural Production on the Basis of Inter-Farm Co-operation and Agro-Industrial Integration’. The resolution called for several kolkhozes in a given district to combine their efforts in production; it was therefore not a cure but a prescription for aggravated difficulties by virtue of adding yet another administrative layer to agricultural management. Meanwhile the state’s food-and-agriculture subsidy did not prevent many kolkhozes from operating at a loss; for although the prices paid for farming produce were raised, the costs charged for fuel and machinery also rose. Oil, for example, cost eighty-four per cent more in 1977 than in the late 1960s – and the price of certain types of seed-drills more than doubled.4
Agricultural policy was therefore very confused, and in such a situation Khrushchëv would probably have made yet another assault on the private plots of kolkhozniks. Brezhnev was not so misguided, but instead in 1977 and 1981 issued two decrees to expand the maximum size of each plot to half a hectare. These measures removed a large obstacle to the expansion of agricultural output. Under Brezhnev the private plots yielded thirty per cent of total production while constituting only four per cent of the USSR’s cultivated area.
Both ideological tradition and political interests impeded Politburo members from recognizing this as proof that de-collectivization was essential to an expansion of agricultural production. They were so nervous about private plots that the 1977 decree was withheld from publication for a whole year.5 The underlying problems therefore lay unresolved: the shortage of skilled labour; the wrecked rural culture; the payment of farmworkers by quantity of work without regard to its quality; the roadless countryside; the central imposition of quotas for planting, harvesting and procurement; the technology and machinery too large for their functions on Soviet farms; the memory of the horrors of collectivization from the late 1920s. Apart from throwing money at the problems, Brezhnev could only propose grandiose schemes of land reclamation, irrigation and of river diversion. He listened to flattering advisers who deflected attention from any endeavour to address those underlying problems.
At the same time he eased his leading opponents out of high office. Not only Voronov but also Shelest were discarded in 1973. Shelepin at last went the same way in 1975. Each had had disagreements about policy with Brezhnev and eventually paid a personal price. The forced retirement of rivals continued. Membership of the Politburo was withdrawn from D. S. Polyanski in 1976, Nikolai Podgorny in 1977 and K. T. Mazurov in 1978. The long-serving Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Alexei Kosygin, resigned because of ill-health in 1980. Meanwhile Brezhnev had been recruiting associates to fill the empty seats. Dinamukhammed Kunaev and Volodymyr Shcherbytskiy became full members of the Politburo in 1971, Konstantin Chernenko in 1978 and Nikolai Tikhonov in 1979 (and Tikhonov took over the Council of Ministers at Kosygin’s departure). Their claim to preference was the accident of having worked amicably with Brezhnev in Dnepropetrovsk, Moldavia and Kazakhstan between the 1930s and 1950s. The Politburo was being remade in the General Secretary’s image.
Brezhnev was extolled as a dynamic leader and intellectual colossus. The removal of Podgorny enabled him to occupy the additional post of Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet and thereby become head of state. When Kosygin died in December 1980, Pravda postponed the reporting of the news until after the celebration of Brezhnev’s birthday. In May 1976 he had been made Marshal of the Soviet Union. In 1979 he published three volumes of ghost-written memoirs which treated minor battles near Novorossisk as the decisive military theatre of the Second World War; and his account of the virgin lands campaign of the 1950s barely mentioned Khrushchëv.
The growing cult of Brezhnev was outrageously at variance with actuality. His physical condition was deteriorating. He was addicted to sleeping pills; he drank far too much of the Belorussian ‘Zubrovka’ spirit and smoked heavily; to his embarrassment, he was also greatly overweight.6 From 1973 his central nervous system underwent chronic deterioration, and he had several serious strokes.7 At the successive ceremonies to present him with Orders of Lenin, Brezhnev walked shakily and fumbled his words. Yevgeni Chazov, Minister of Health, had to keep doctors in the vicinity of the General Secretary at all times: Brezhnev was brought back from clinical death on several occasions. The man in the East whose finger was supposed to be on the nuclear-war button inside the Soviet black box was becoming a helpless geriatric case. He was frequently incapable of rudimentary consecutive thought even in those periods when he was not convalescing.
His cronies had cynically decided that it suited them to keep Brezhnev alive and in post. The careers of Chernenko, Tikhonov and others might suffer if Brezhnev were to pass away. Even several Politburo members who were not friends of his – Central Committee Secretary Suslov, Defence Minister Ustinov and Foreign Minister Gromyko – feared the uncertainties of any struggle to succeed him. Such figures also recognized that their unhappiness with the General Secretary’s policies impinged only on secondary matters. Brezhnev’s Lazarus-like returns from physical oblivion allowed them to hold in place the policies agreed in the second half of the previous decade.
The central political leadership had turned into a gerontocracy. By 1980 the average age of the Politburo was sixty-nine years.8 Each member, surrounded with toadying assistants, wanted an old age upholstered by material comfort and unimpeded power. The idea of preparing a younger generation of politicians to take over the state leadership was distasteful to them. Fifty-year-old Konstantin Katushev was demoted from the Central Committee Secretariat in 1977 and his promising career was nipped in the bud. Grigori Romanov had become a full member of the Politburo at the age of fifty-three in 1976; Mikhail Gorbachëv did the same when he was forty-nine in 1980. But these were exceptions to the norm. Brezhnev’s Politburo was composed mainly of Stalin’s ageing promotees. Their fundamental attitudes to politics and economics had been formed before 1953. They were proud of the Soviet order and present achievements. Change was anathema to them.
Already in 1969 there had been an attempt by Brezhnev and a majority of Politburo members to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation. They were not proposing a reversion to the terror of the 1930s and 1940s; but as they grew old in office, their unpleasant memory grew dimmer and they became nostalgic about their own contribution to the glorious past. It would seem that whereas Shelepin had hoped to use Stalin as a symbol for the robust restoration of order, Brezhnev and his friends wanted to use him more as the personification of the USSR’s achievements in industrialization in the early 1930s and in victory in the Second World War. Only strenuous representations to the Politburo by foreign communist parties brought about a last-minute reversal of the decision on Stalin’s rehabilitation.9
Nevertheless the Politburo still had to supply citizens with its analysis of the country’s current condition. The favoured terms were ‘really existing socialism’, ‘real socialism’, ‘mature socialism’ and ‘developed socialism’.10 Really existing socialism was too wordy. Real socialism invited an undesirable comparison with surrealist socialism; mature socialism sounded altogether too decrepit a note. And so from 1966 the propagandists increasingly claimed that the country had entered the stage of ‘developed socialism’. This term, while avoiding the over-optimism of Khrushchëv’s Party Programme, highlighte
d achievements already made and objectives yet to be attained. The authorities looked back with pride on the October Revolution, the Five-Year Plans and the Second World War; they anticipated a future involving an incremental improvement of living standards, of technology and of social and political integration throughout the USSR.
Developed socialism was a term used in Brezhnev’s opening report to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in March 1971. In a purple passage he declared: ‘Accounting for its work in this very important direction of activity, the Central Committee of the Party has every justification to say that the Soviet people, having worthily completed the Eighth Five-Year Plan, has taken a new great step forward in the creation of the material-technical base of communism, in the reinforcement of the country’s might and in the raising of the standard of living of the people.’11
His report offered an agenda for step-by-step improvement; and as the concept was elaborated in later years, the Politburo acknowledged that developed socialism would constitute a ‘historically protracted period’. A tacit indication was being given that roughly the same kind of state order would prevail for the duration of the lives of Soviet citizens. In the course of the construction of a communist society as projected by Khrushchëv there was no scheme for the party to become obsolete; the party was even more crucial to Brezhnevite developed socialism. Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which was introduced in 1977, announced: ‘The leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, its state organizations and public organizations is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s 1936 Constitution had mentioned the party’s authority only in relation to electoral arrangements. The USSR had always been a one-party state; but the new Article 6 gave the most formal validation to this reality to date.12