He quietly went about enhancing his own authority, ringing up provincial party secretaries for their opinion at each stage. He often spent a couple of hours each day on such conversations. His modesty seemed impressive. On the Kremlin Wall he was indistinguishable from the other late middle-aged men in staid suits and staider hats. At the March 1965 Central Committee plenum he displayed his preferences in policy by getting a larger share of the budget for agriculture (which was another sign that Kosygin’s industrial proposals were not going to be allowed to work). Brezhnev regarded chemical fertilizers and advanced mechanical equipment as the main solution to the grain shortage. He had concluded that budgetary redistribution rather than Khrushchevian rhetoric and reorganization was the most effective instrument of progress. His primary objective was to make the existing system work better and work harder.
Brezhnev’s stabilization of politics and administration after the upsets of Khrushchev also led him to clamp down on cultural freedom. As Khrushchev had become more illiberal, many intellectuals had taken to meeting in little groups and circulating typescripts of poems, novels and manifestos that were certain to be refused publication. This method of communication was known as
The participants in such groupings grew in number as access to official publication narrowed. Roy Medvedev’s book on the Great Terror, which itemized previously-unknown details of Stalin’s activity, was banned from the press. The same fate befell Viktor Danilov’s opus on agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote two lengthy novels,
And a chilly winter was imminent. In September 1965 the KGB arrested two writers, Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel, who had circulated some satirical tales in samizdat about the Soviet state. They were put on trial in the following February and charged under Article No. 70 of the Criminal Code with spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. Sinyavski and Daniel were unyielding, and sympathizers demonstrated on their behalf outside the Moscow court building. Yet they were found guilty and sentenced to forced labour in the Gulag.7
The principal embarrassment to the Presidium was that the trial had lasted so long. New articles were therefore added to the Code so as to expedite matters in the future. The result was that dissenters could quickly be branded as common criminals, parasites or even traitors. The dissenters referred to themselves as ‘other-thinkers’ (
Starting in 1968, the samizdat journal
By the mid-1970s there were reckoned to be about 10,000 political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union. They were held in grievous conditions, most of them being given less than the intake of calories and proteins sufficient to prevent malnutrition. Punishments for disobedience in the camps were severe and the guards were both venal and brutal. But labour camps were not the sole methods used by the KGB. Punitive psychiatry, which had been used under Khrushchev, was extended after 1964. Medicine became an arm of coercive state control as doctors were instructed to expect an influx of cases of ‘paranoiac schizophrenia’ shortly before public festivals; and many persistent dissenters were confined for years in mental asylums. Meanwhile the KGB maintained a vast network of informers and
Yet Brezhnev and his colleagues refrained from all-out violent suppression. They had not forgotten how the Great Terror had affected party leaders such as they had now become. Furthermore, they did not want to incur greater hostility from the intelligentsia than was absolutely necessary; they continually stressed that they would treat the opinions of professional experts seriously. Consequently dissent was not eliminated, but was held at a low level of intensity.
Brezhnev himself had a kindly reputation among political colleagues and in his family; and he can hardly have been consistently anti-Semitic since his wife Viktoria was Jewish.8 But first and foremost he was an
No one who had held this succession of posts could have been over-endowed with moral sensitivity. Collusion in repression was a job specification. So, too, was an ability to trim to the changing winds of official policy; and most functionaries of the pre-war generation were more like Brezhnev than Khrushchev: they had learned to avoid being seen to have independent opinions. Brezhnev’s guiding aim was to avoid getting himself into trouble with higher authority.
He therefore stamped ruthlessly upon the ‘bourgeois nationalism’ of Romanian speakers when appointed as the Moldavian Communist Party First Secretary in 1950. He was put on the Presidium by Stalin in 1952 as a member of the younger generation of Soviet leaders. Losing this status on Stalin’s death, he rejoined the Presidium after the Twentieth Party Congress. By then he had played a major part in the virgin lands campaign, and photographs of him by Khrushchev’s side became frequent in
And yet it would have been a brightness of style, not of substance; and the style, too, would have been dulled by Brezhnev’s defects as a public speaker. He had no oral panache. He was also very limited intellectually, and acknowledged this in private: ‘I can’t grasp all this. On the whole, to be frank, this isn’t my field. My strong point is organization and psychology.’9 This comment hit the mark. For indeed Brezhnev was masterly at planning an agenda so as to maximize consensus. Always he strove to circumvent direct conflict with colleagues. Even when he decided to get rid of someone, he carried out the task with charm.
Such qualities were embarrassingly narrow for the leader of one of the world’s superpowers. And Brezhnev’s vanity was extraordinary. For instance, he shunted the Moscow City Party Secretary N. G. Yegorychev into an obscure ambassadorship for refusing to sing his praises.10 Moreover, he was indifferent to problems of corruption. ‘Nobody,’ he casually opined, ‘lives just on his wages.’11 He permitted his family to set a grotesque example. His daughter Galina was a promiscuous alcoholic who took up with a circus director running a gold-bullion fraud gang. Brezhnev himself outdid Khrushchev in the nepotism for which he had criticized him. Nor did he forget to be generous to himself. His passion was to add to his fleet of foreign limousines donated to him by the leaders of states abroad. He drove them on the roads between his dacha and the Kremlin with flagrant disregard for public safety.
Yet it was initially a distinct point of attraction for his central party colleagues that Brezhnev was so