undistinguished. Each Presidium member expected to be able to guide the First Secretary in policy-making. They had underestimated him. Shelepin and Kosygin were steadily being worn down. Podgorny, who wanted Brezhnev kept in check, had no personal following in the Presidium; and Suslov apparently had no ambition to become the supreme leader, preferring to exercise influence behind the scenes.12 Brezhnev’s fellow leaders perceived that he was becoming more than
Brezhnev had helped to make his own luck. But he was also assisted by the trends of current economic data. Khrushchev had lost his political offices partly as a result of the poor grain harvest of 1963. He was sacked just before the encouraging news of the harvest of 1964 had become fully available. The improvement continued in the immediately following years. Between 1960 and 1970 Soviet agricultural output increased at an annual average of three per cent.13 Industry, too, enhanced its performance. At the end of the Eighth Five-Year Plan period of 1966–70 the output of factories and mines was 138 per cent greater than in 1960.14 At the same time the regime was effective in maintaining strict political control. There were several disparate strikes, but nothing remotely akin to the Novocherkassk uprising of 1962. The authorities had a tight grip on society, and Brezhnev’s prestige grew among members of the Soviet political elite.
The Twenty-Third Party Congress, which began on 29 March 1966, changed the name of the Presidium back to the Politburo and allocated eleven members to it. The post held by Brezhnev was redesignated as the General Secretaryship (as it had been known in the 1920s). This hint at continuity with the Stalin era was meant to emphasize that the disruptions of Khrushchev’s rule were at an end. Since Brezhnev wanted to avoid the Politburo turning on him as he and his colleagues had turned upon Khrushchev, very few sackings occurred in the central party leadership. For a while only the most dangerous opponents were removed. In particular, Shelepin’s ally Semichastny was replaced by Yuri Andropov as KGB chairman in May 1967; and Shelepin himself was moved out of the Committee of Party-State Control in June and out of the Party Secretariat in September.
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 Janos Kadar had introduced measures similar to those advocated by Kosygin in the USSR. He got away with this because he had moved stealthily while Khrushchev was in power and because he had Kosygin’s protection after Khrushchev’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. Wladislaw Gomulka 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 Novotny had become as unpopular as Gomulka in Poland, and Brezhnev on his visit to Prague in December 1967 refused to intervene in the factional dispute. Novotny resigned in January 1968 and was succeeded by Alexander Dubcek. The consequence was the ‘Prague Spring’. Dubcek 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. Dubcek, 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 Dubcek 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 Kadar had tried to dispel Dubcek’s naivety: ‘Don’t you understand what kind of people you are dealing with?’ Dubcek 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. Dubcek 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, Dubcek 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. Khrushchev, 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 Gorbachev 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 Khrushchev.
Not that everything in foreign affairs was problematical. Kosygin, Brezhnev and Podgorny followed Khrushchev’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
