Kremlin. A treaty was signed between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany in the following year giving formal recognition to the separate German Democratic Republic.
Elsewhere in the non-communist world the attempts to increase Soviet power and prestige were not quite so productive. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah was chased from power in 1966. His departure left the USSR without friends in Africa except for Egypt. Then Egypt, too, fell away. In 1967 Soviet influence in the Middle East was undermined when Israeli forces defeated an Arab military coalition in the Six-Day War. President Nasser of Egypt died in 1970 and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who saw no advantage in keeping close ties with the USSR. The Soviet-Egyptian alliance rapidly collapsed. Countries of the Third World were finding that the USSR might be able to supply them adequately with military equipment but could not sustain them economically. It was increasingly understood around the globe that occasional acts of munificence such as the financing of the Aswan Dam did not generate long-term industrial and agricultural development.
Yet the campaign to increase Moscow’s influence abroad was sustained. At home, furthermore, central political prerogatives were asserted. The Politburo abandoned the decentralizing experiments of Khrushchev. In 1966 its members scrapped the sovnarkhozes. Inside the party, the Bureau of the RSFSR in the Central Committee — established by Khrushchev — was abolished. Thus the largest republic by far in the USSR lost its co- ordinating party body. The other republics still had their own parties, central committees and first secretaries. The humbling of the RSFSR signified that no national political unit, not even the Russian, was immune to the Politburo’s supra-national demands.
Accordingly, the other republics were placed under tight discipline. Eighteen well-known Ukrainian nationalist and intellectual dissenters were brought to court in Kiev in August 1965 — a full month before the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavski in Moscow. They refused to disown their beliefs and received harsh prison sentences. Also in 1965 there was a large demonstration in Erevan, protesting about past and present injustices against the Armenian people. It was suppressed by armed force. The subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia horrified nationalist opinion, especially in the Baltic Soviet republics and Ukraine. A student was arrested in the Estonian city of Tartu for daubing a cinema wall with the declaration: ‘Czechs, we are your brothers.’ But disturbances also occurred independently of the Prague events. Riots broke out in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, in 1969. Several officials of Russian nationality were murdered before sufficient troops arrived to restore control.
In the Politburo there were lively discussions. It would seem that Alexander Shelepin and Dmitri Polyanski took the strongest line in advocating the eradication of national dissent among non-Russians. It was rumoured that Polyanski’s ideas were virtually those of a Russian nationalist. On the other side there was Petro Shelest, First Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, who believed that any further scouring of Ukrainian culture would open wounds that would turn the Ukrainian speakers of his republic into irretrievable opponents of a ‘Soviet Ukraine’. Shelest himself had a deep sympathy for the traditions of the Cossacks.
Brezhnev steered a middle course between them. In November 1967 he called for the ‘convergence’ of the Soviet Union’s peoples, but stressed that this would involve highly-sensitive decisions and that hastiness had to be avoided. Even so, neither Brezhnev nor even Shelest was diffident about quelling overt opposition whether it came in mass demonstrations or in poems, songs and booklets. This meant that the basic problems of a multinational state were suppressed rather than resolved. Russian nationalists resented the fact that their culture was not allowed to develop outside the distortive framework imposed by the Politburo. Among the non-Russians, nationalists resented what they perceived as the Politburo’s Russian chauvinism; their grievances were ably summarized in Ivan Dziuba’s lengthy memorandum to the Ukrainian party and government,
Ostensibly most republic-level communist party leaders endorsed the suppression of nationalism in the various Soviet republics. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was installed as Party First Secretary in Georgia in 1972, rhapsodized that ‘the true sun rose not in the East but in the North, in Russia — the sun of Leninist ideas’. Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party, eulogized the Russian people as ‘the elder brother and true friend’ of the Uzbeks.19
When at home in Uzbekistan, Rashidov was not so self-abasing; on the contrary, he was promoting his fellow clan members into high office and ensuring that they could benefit from the perks of office without Moscow’s interference. The same had been happening in Georgia under Shevardnadze’s predecessor V. P. Mzhavanadze — and Shevardnadze’s subsequent struggle against corruption had only limited success. Even Dinmukhammed Kunaev, First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party and boon companion of Brezhnev, covertly gave protection to emergent national aspirations. Rashidov, Mzhavanadze and Kunaev zealously locked up overt nationalist dissenters in their respective republics; but they increasingly themselves selected and organized the local elites on a national principle. Such phenomena were also on the rise in the RSFSR, whose internal autonomous republics were allowed much freedom to promote the interests of the local national majority.
The Politburo’s own commitment to ‘stability of cadres’ contributed to the difficulties of holding together the USSR as a multinational state. Brezhnev assured officials in the party and major governmental institutions that their jobs were secure so long as they did not infringe current official policies. He wanted to avoid the enmity incurred by Khrushchev’s endless sackings of personnel; he also contended that officials needed stable working conditions if the Politburo’s objectives were to be realized in the localities. Consequently Mzhavanadze’s replacement by Shevardnadze was a rare direct attempt to indicate to the official leaderships of the non-Russian republics that there were limits to the Kremlin’s indulgence.
A general lightness of touch was applied in the Russian provinces of the RSFSR. Leningrad Party Secretary V. S. Tolstikov was sacked in 1970. Tolstikov had drawn attention to himself as a communist arch-conservative, but the reason for his dismissal was not politics but his sexual escapades on a yacht in the Gulf of Finland.20 Brezhnev anyway punished him gently by sending him as Soviet ambassador to Beijing. Elsewhere in the RSFSR there was bureaucratic tranquillity. Typical province-level party secretaries were either left in post or else promoted to higher party and governmental offices. Cliental systems of personnel were fortified, and local officials built their ‘nests’ of interests so tightly that Central Committee emissaries could seldom unravel the local scams. Brezhnev sometimes talked about the need to ‘renew’ the cadres of party and government; but self- interest discouraged him from putting an end to the immobilism he detected. He did not want to risk alienating lower-level officialdom.
By the end of the 1960s Politburo members were united in their broad approach. They did not abandon Khrushchev’s basic policies; but they erased his eccentricities and pencilled in what they thought to be sound alternatives. Stalin had been too brutal, Khrushchev too erratic. They did not want to revert to the bloody fixities of the post-war years; they were glad that the unsettling reorganizations after 1953 had been terminated.
It was their assumption that such an approach would effect a successful stabilization of the Soviet order. They acted out of optimism, and still believed in the superiority of communism over its competitors. They could point to the military security and economic advance achieved since 1964. They were confident about having checked the rise of dissent and having brought the intelligentsia and the working class under control. They were not entirely hostile to experimentation in their measures at home and in Eastern Europe. But the scope for novelty was brusquely narrowed after the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. And already the Soviet leaders were becoming entangled in complications which they had not anticipated. They confronted deepening problems in politics, economics, society, culture, nationalism and international relations. Little did they know that the price of their attempt at stabilizing the Soviet order was about to be paid.
PART FOUR
