1980s. De-Stalinization was an important source of pere-stroika. See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London: George Allen amp; Unwin. Linden, Carl A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership 1957-1964. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Tatu, Michel. (1968). Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin. New York: Viking Press. Van Goudoever, A. P. (1986). The Limits of Destaliniza-tion in the Soviet Union: Political Rehabilitations in the Soviet Union since Stalin. New York: St Martin’s Press.
GRAEME GILL
By d?tente (a French word for “release from tension”), historians refer to the period of gradually improved relations between the USSR and the West, during the 1960s and early 1970s.
The first signs of d?tente appeared shortly after Josef Stalin’s death, with the signature of the peace treaty granting Austrian independence in May 1955 and the Geneva summit in July that opened the way for dialogue between the USSR, the United States, Britain, and France. In March 1956, during the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, “peaceful co-existence” became the “baseline of Soviet Foreign policy.” Competition with the West was not over, but, for Nikita Khrushchev, this competition had to be ideological, economic, and technological rather than military. The USSR kept however improving its military potential (it fired its first inter-continental ballistic missile in August 1957 and launched the first Sputnik the following October) and, regarding the Third World, all means of influence were still contemplated. This new approach to international relations led Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin to visit Western countries (Britain in 1956, the United States. in 1959, and France in 1960) and to participate in the Paris summit meeting in 1960. However, d?tente did not go without tensions and crises, such as the first Berlin Crisis in 1958, the U-2 incident in May 1960, the second Berlin Crisis in August 1961 that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
The Cuban crisis was actually a turning point for d?tente: it led Washington and Moscow to establish a hotline, so as to prevent the risk of a nuclear war that could arise from a lack of communications, and in August 1963 the USSR signed with the United States and Great Britain the first Nuclear Test Ban treaty. Despite Khrushchev’s dismissal in October 1964 and the promotion of a new leadership with Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Pod- gorny, and Alexei Kosygin, d?tente was not only maintained but fostered, for the Soviets perceived it as the best way to achieve their two major objectives: obtaining the official recognition of the post-World War II European territorial status quo and improving the standard of living of the population, by devoting more resources to civil production than to the military-industrial complex and by importing Western advanced technologies and products.
And indeed, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, d?tente became a multilateral process as well as a bilateral one.
As a bilateral process between the USSR and the United States, d?tente focused primarily on strategic issues; it first led in July 1968 to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, in May 1972, to the SALT I treaty limiting strategic arms; however, d?tente dealt also with economic matters: During his historical trip to the Soviet Union, President Nixon signed several agreements on cooperation and trade, including grain exports to the Soviet State; one year later, new agreements were signed during Brezhnev’s visit of June 1973 to the United States. This Soviet-American d?tente was not limDEVELOPED SOCIALISM ited to domestic questions, as shown by the active cooperation displayed by the two super-powers in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
But d?tente started involving West-European governments as well. In 1966 the French President Charles de Gaulle visited the USSR to promote “d?-tente, entente, and cooperation” and give d?tente a broader content, extended to cultural and human questions. Three years later Chancellor Willy Brandt, previously mayor of West Berlin, engaged West Germany in the Ostpolitik, a policy of opening to the East which led to concrete achievements: in 1970, West Germany concluded two treaties, one with Poland and the other with the USSR, that recognized the current German frontiers, notably the Oder-Neisse border, gave up all claims to the lost lands, and implicitly recognized the existence of East Germany. In 1972, the USSR, the United States, Britain, and France signed an agreement on Berlin. These treaties paved the way to the official admission of the two Germanies to the United Nations in 1973.
D?tente was also a truly multilateral process: In November 1972, thirty-five European countries, the United States, and Canada opened the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). In August 1975, the Helsinki Final Act recognized the post-World War II borders and adopted declarations encouraging Western-Eastern trade and cultural exchanges as well as promoting human rights and freedom of movement.
Despite these successes, d?tente declined and faded in the second half of the seventies. The active support of the USSR to Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World, its repeated violations of the Helsinki Final Act, its intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, the euromissiles question, and the Polish crisis in 1980 all contributed to a revival of the Cold War. See also: ARMS CONTROL; BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; COLD WAR; CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Garthoff, Raymond L. (1994). D?tente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington DC: Brookings Institution. Petro, Nicolai N., and Rubinstein, Alvin Z. (1997). Russian Foreign Policy, From Empire to Nation-State. New York: Longman.
The concept of developed (“mature,” or “real”) socialism emerged in the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the late 1960s, soon after the establishment of Leonid Brezhnev’s regime, which reacted to the public ideology of Nikita Khrushchev’s regime. Almost immediately, it was accepted in all Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe as the leading doctrine. As a matter of fact, each new Soviet regime made considerable changes in the public ideology. With Brezhnev’s demise, the concept of developed socialism was almost immediately discarded. Already in the span of Yuri Andropov’s short regime skeptical attitudes toward the previous regime emerged. The new propaganda focused on social justice. Then, with the start of perestroika, this concept associated with Brezhnev’s stagnation was sent to the dustbin of history.
Khrushchev, the most eclectic Soviet leader, who tried to combine the goal of developing military might (his son Sergei Khrushchev aptly named a book about his father Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, 2000) with a naive belief in communist ideals, and also with serious liberalization of society. Khrushchev wanted to reach the standard of living associated with communism without deflecting any resources from the defense of the motherland, the sacred cow of all Soviet leaders. It was Khrushchev who in 1961, just a few years before the coup against him, in the new program of the Communist Party, promised that “the next generations of the Soviet people will live under communism.”
Khrushchev tried to implement this belief through his policy, which had some disastrous consequences. He castigated the personal ownership of cars and private country houses, as well as encouraged collective transportation and vacations. He initiated people’s teams for keeping order as an attempt to diminish the role of the professional police, an idea that goes back to Vladimir Lenin’s utopian vision of socialist society in “State and Revolution,” written before the October revolution. Moved by the same motivation, Khrushchev promoted amateur theaters with the same ridiculous fervor. More serious consequences rose from Khrushchev’s economic policy. He promised a radical jump forward in the production of food by the collective farms. However, he put a limit on the production of milk and meat from private plots. While Khrushchev’s program in collective agriculture failed, the curtailment of food production in
DEVELOPED SOCIALISM
the private sector led to big lines for food products in the state and even in the so-called free collective market.
The leadership who ousted Khrushchev as a demagogue and adventurist (or voluntarist as he was cautiously and indirectly named in the press) who endangered the system searched for more realistic mass propaganda. Preoccupied with military competition with the United States, Brezhnev and his colleagues did not want to spread
