9.1 Politics

The aftermath of the removal of Khrushchev in October 1964 bore distinct similarities to the power struggle that followed Stalin’s death. Once again the newly installed leaders insisted that they would avoid “the cult of personality” – a fault for which they blamed Khrushchev – and institute “collective leadership,” which they assured the peoples of the Soviet Union was the only appropriate form of government for a socialist country.

Leonid Brezhnev assumed the most important post, the first secretaryship of the central committee, and Alexei Kosygin became premier while remaining a member of the Politburo. Nikolai Podgornyi took the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet – in other words, he became the president of the republic. Gradually, Brezhnev emerged as the supreme leader, and in appearance at least the Soviet Union once again had a single leader. While in the mid-1960s it was the premier – i.e., Kosygin – who met with important foreign leaders, as time went on Brezhnev more and more often assumed this role. It was Kosygin, for example, who met with Lyndon Johnson in Glassboro, N.J.; but a few years later Brezhnev received Richard Nixon in Moscow.

Brezhnev gradually developed a modest personality cult: he had a city named after himself; collections of his boring, rambling speeches were published. His idealized pictures were plastered all over the enormous country, and schoolchildren learned about his “magnificent achievements” as leader at the time of the “great patriotic war.” In reality, however, he was only primus inter pares. Lenin, Stalin, and even Khrushchev had had far-reaching ambitions to refashion the society over which they ruled. This almost manic energy was missing in the Brezhnev era, and consequently the leadership style was different. The country was governed by consensus, and decisions were made by a remarkably stable oligarchy.

All the prominent figures – Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgornyi, and the chief guardian of ideology, Mikhail Suslov – were entirely products of the Soviet system who had made their careers in the party organization. None of them had experienced the 1917 revolution. They came from modest backgrounds, acquired some technical and political education in the 1920s, and made their careers in the 1930s at a time when there were many openings in the top leadership. In other words, they were the beneficiaries of the terror. These were people of the new Soviet middle class who shared the tastes and prejudices of this class.

The regime deteriorated into senescence. As time passed the leadership became increasingly conservative: turnover in important positions slowed down, and the incompetent were not removed. Brezhnev and his comrades saw in the process of liberalization above all a danger that change might lead to disintegration. During roughly the last five years of Brezhnev’s life there were constant rumors of his failing health. When he did appear in public, his speech was slurred, and he made a pathetic impression. He had to be supported by aides when he walked. Indeed, his condition was so bad that his last appearance at a party congress could not be televised. His comrades in the Politburo, almost all of them as old as he, were also tired, unimaginative people. The Soviet leadership became the butt of jokes at home and abroad.

Publicists of the Brezhnev era described the political and social system of their country as “real, existing socialism.” This phrase well described the difference between Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. The new leaders felt uncomfortable with a utopian ideology, unconsciously realizing that the promise of a just and affluent society in the distant future had outlived its usefulness: people were tired of waiting. The publicists simply declared that “socialism” had arrived. The implication was that constant experimentation, mass mobilization, and exhortation for new and ambitious campaigns would largely be abandoned. The era was one of complacency and conservatism.

The institutions of the regime had not changed since Stalin’s time. At the top of the formal hierarchy was the Supreme Soviet, a body “elected” by noncompetitive elections; it met twice a year and simply accepted all the resolutions proposed. Not even the most naive person believed that this body was in fact a policy-making one. Membership in this body carried no responsibility and certainly no power. One meaningless election followed another: aside from national elections, there were also republican and district elections, all taking place at different times. These elections were preceded by meaningless campaigns which served only to promote the current policies of the regime.

The Soviet Union was burdened by an enormous bureaucracy: ministries proliferated, not only on the union level but also in the republics. The governmental structure became so very large because aside from the tasks that any government had, it also controlled the entire economy of the nation. Each small branch of the economy had its own ministry, sometimes several ministries. In theory the party congress, which met every five years, elected a central committee and chose a Politburo of approximately fifteen people. Reality was otherwise. The system operated as a feudal hierarchy: when a new leader assumed office, he placed his own people in key positions, and they in turn selected their own subordinates. In the Brezhnev era the Politburo continued to evolve. The foreign minister, the head of the KGB, the minister of defense, and of course the premier, who stood at the top of the ministerial structure, were now all members of the Politburo. They were there, for all practical purposes, ex officio. It was on this level that conflicts were resolved and different interest groups fought for resources. The affairs of the nation were decided in secret, because although the Politburo met regularly and frequently, no protocols were published.

This was the golden age of the nomenklatura, an original Soviet concept. Its concrete meaning was a list of office holders who required approval by the relevant (national, republican, or provincial) party agencies. However, nomenklatura came to mean a political elite, which in this period included approximately half a million people. It was this group, rather than the vastly larger 19-million-member party, that ruled the country and enjoyed privileges. The elite had access to closed shops where goods unavailable anywhere else were found in abundance; and at a time of great housing shortage, they had not only comfortable apartments but also weekend houses (dachas) in restricted areas. The nomenklatura itself was highly stratified: the most privileged among them were even able to travel on occasion to the West, returning with foreign goods that greatly added to their prestige. They were also able to send their children to schools where admittance was difficult. They enjoyed their positions not only because of their abundant privileges but also because of a new sense of security. Now they did not have to worry about the uncertainties of the Khrushchev era, to say nothing of the bloody threats of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Members of the nomenklatura resented Khrushchev because of his populist attacks on their privileges, and disapproved of his constant changes and ill-thought-out experiments. They wanted to enjoy their privileges in peace. To achieve that goal, they got rid of their unpredictable boss, and in Brezhnev they got what they wanted; he was their man. The anti-Khrushchev coup of 1964 achieved its goal. Not surprisingly, the first moves of the new leadership were to do away with precisely those reforms of Khrushchev that went contrary to the interests of the elite: the compulsory rotation of party positions, the division of the party into agricultural and industrial wings, and the educational reforms. The industrial ministries, the centers of bureaucracy ensconced in Moscow, regained their original powers.

No political system is free of corruption. However the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era encouraged corruption to a fabulous extent. Political power could easily be turned into economic advantage, and the country was ruled by people who lacked a tradition of service. The members of the nomenklatura protected one another. Since these people had lost faith in the noble ideas of equality and freedom as essential features of the future communist society, there were no psychological obstacles to using their positions to achieve as much mundane personal gain as possible. But primarily corruption was widespread because the Soviet system did not tolerate openness, and journalists did not consider muckraking one of their tasks.

Corruption spread to the very highest levels, and very much involved Brezhnev’s family. Like other Communist bosses, such as Ceausescu in Romania and Kim Il Sung in North Korea, the first secretary of the party placed his relatives in positions of leadership. It was widely known in Moscow that Brezhnev’s daughter, Galina, with the help of her lover, a gypsy circus performer, had secreted large sums of money abroad. This was occurring at a time when her husband, General Iurii Churbanov, was first deputy minister of internal affairs, that is, the second most powerful person in the police. Corruption was particularly odious in the Central Asian and Caucasian republics. Some party chiefs became millionaires who kept their wealth in dollars. One of them, a man in Uzbekistan, maintained a harem and a torture chamber. Such behavior on the part of the powerful of course greatly contributed to the demoralization that characterized this twilight period. It was a society where cheating and bribe-taking were for all practical purposes universal.

In contrast to the utopian promises of the Khrushchev era, the publicists in this conservative period toned down their rhetoric: they stopped giving dates when the output of the Soviet economy would surpass that of the American. Since the Soviet regime collapsed shortly afterward, the era that preceded it is generally regarded as a period of missed opportunities and stagnation. In its own terms, however, the Brezhnev regime was not unsuccessful. The problem was, rather, that in view of the decline of ideological commitment and the inability of the economy to live up to oft-repeated promises, the source of legitimacy, the main measurement of success, came to be military strength.

Only in retrospect are the signs of the beginning of disintegration obvious. At the time, the Soviet Union epitomized stability and order, and almost everyone assumed that the regime would continue for several more generations. The very fact that the Soviet system had survived for so long conferred on it a degree of legitimacy. Although seemingly the Soviet Union was the most stable society, governed by a conservative leadership, inevitably changes occurred. As urbanization continued, as more engineers, doctors, and scientists were trained, for the first time in history a sizable middle class developed. These people desired bourgeois comforts and wanted to be treated with dignity.

The eighteen-year-long Brezhnev era was full of paradoxes. It was a time when the Soviet Union achieved its greatest international success: it became a world power, second to none. But it was also a time of wasted opportunities, a time when the country’s economic decline, now seemingly inevitable, commenced. It was a period of much-desired stability and tranquillity, certainly the quietest in the country’s troubled twentieth-century history. In light of subsequent developments Brezhnev’s era came to be described as a time of stagnation, yet most people of Russia today look back on it with nostalgia.

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