The Penguin History of Modern Russia

20

‘Developed Socialism’

(1970–1982)

The Soviet compound, as it emerged from the successive changes after the Second World War, had only a limited capacity for radical experimentation. Brezhnev and his fellow leaders understood and welcomed this. But the problems about the compound persisted. There was political frustration and resentment throughout the USSR, including its party, government and other public institutions. There were economic set-backs. There was social alienation and national, religious and cultural embitterment. Only when Brezhnev died was there a serious reconsideration of the compound’s problems. At first this was attempted cautiously. But Gorbachev, coming to power in 1985, overlooked the internal necessities of the compound. Always he assumed that experimentation could be open ended. In the end he developed an audacious programme of comprehensive reforms which led to the dissolution of the Soviet compound and to the emergence of new forms of state and society in Russia and the other former Soviet republics.

But back in 1970, despite its growing problems, the Soviet Union was still a stable entity and was treated by the rest of the world as a permanent feature of the international landscape. Statesmen, scholars and commentators took it for granted that Soviet armed strength and political militance were too great to be ignored. The USSR had nearly reached military parity with the United States, and the Soviet economy had the world’s second greatest industrial capacity and already produced more steel, oil, pig-iron, cement and even tractors than any other country.¹ British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had trembled at the possibility that Russia’s centrally-planned industry might succeed in outmatching advanced capitalist countries in other sectors of industry. The skills and equipment developed for the Soviet Army, he thought, might one day be diffused to the rest of the country’s factories. Not only he but still more sceptical observers of the Soviet economy warned against underestimating the USSR’s capacities.

Not everyone subscribed to this conventional wisdom. The NATO countries continued to refuse to recognize Stalin’s annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, and emigre groups of various nationalities continued to argue that the USSR was an illegitimate state. They exposed the repressive record from Lenin to Brezhnev. Some thought that the Soviet order would fall apart if only the Western powers would cease to make diplomatic and commercial compromises.

At any rate few people in the West had any affection for the USSR. Too much was known about the brutality and immobilism of Soviet communism for it to shine out as a beacon of political freedom and social justice. Even the Italian and Spanish communist parties abandoned their ideological fealty to Moscow and formulated doctrines hostile to dictatorship. Especially after the USSR-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the number of admirers of Lenin was getting smaller in states not subject to communist leaderships. Moreover, changes in the Third World were steadily diminishing the international appeal of the USSR because most of the world’s colonies had by then been given their independence. Meanwhile the grinding poverty widespread in several European countries, such as Spain, was being overcome: capitalism was found to be more adaptable to welfare economics than had previously been supposed possible.

Nevertheless some optimists contended that the Soviet political system could be softened and that a convergence between communism and capitalism might occur as capitalist states resorted increasingly to central economic planning and governmentally-provided welfare. This was rejected by others who asserted that basic reform was incompatible with the maintenance of the communist order. Supposedly no Politburo leader would attempt such a reform.

Certainly Brezhnev was not of a mind to undermine the party he served as General Secretary, and the development of the relationship between the USSR and the USA for several years appeared to justify his stance. As he took control of Soviet foreign policy he exchanged visits with American presidents. Richard Nixon went to Moscow in 1972 and 1974, Gerald Ford to Vladivostok in 1976. Brezhnev himself was received in New York in 1973. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks after protracted negotiations produced an Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in 1972. The trust between the two superpowers steadily increased. In order to stress that a warmer relationship than Khrushchev’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ had been attained, a new phrase was coined, ‘detente’ (in Russian, razryadka), which referred to the slackening of the tensions of the Cold War. Brezhnev confidently proposed to American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the two superpowers could maintain a global condominium if they had the sense to reinforce detente.

Moreover, not all events elsewhere in the world were unfavourable to Soviet interests. The Kremlin’s resolve was strengthened in 1970 when the coalition led by the communist Salvador Allende acceded to power in Chile. When Ethiopia, too, had a revolution in 1974, military equipment was supplied from Moscow; and the Portuguese Empire’s disintegration in Africa gave the USSR and its Cuban ally a further opportunity to intervene in civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. At successive Party Congresses Brezhnev asserted the USSR’s willingness to support struggles for national liberation in Asia, Africa and South America.

The USA meanwhile suffered from the demoralizing effects of its unsuccessful war in Vietnam, even after the withdrawal of its troops in 1973. In the same year the American economy was buffeted by the decision of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) to introduce a massive rise in the price of oil. All advanced capitalist economies suffered from this; but the USSR, despite not having influenced OPEC’s decision, gained enormous revenues from her energy exports outside Eastern Europe. Undoubtedly the USA’s rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s caused a tremor among Soviet policy-makers. Yet even this event had its positive aspect. Politburo members were able to see the Americans’ need for Chinese support as proof of the relative decline of the USA as a superpower. Soviet General Secretary and American President bargained as equals at their summits.

Nevertheless the USA extracted concessions from the USSR. Military and economic deals with Moscow were made dependent on the Politburo allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate if they so desired. Such would-be emigrants became known in the West as the refuseniks on account of their having been refused permission to emigrate on the grounds that they had had previous access to secret information vital to the state’s interests; a quarter of a million of them left the USSR under Brezhnev’s rule. The Western powers also sought to place limits on the regime’s oppression of Soviet citizens in general. In 1975 the Helsinki Final Act was signed as the culmination of several years of negotiations to settle Europe’s post-war territorial boundaries and to make provision for economic and scientific cooperation between West and East. The Final Act’s commitment to the free passage of information was to prove a valuable instrument for dissenters in the Soviet Union to embarrass the Politburo.

For the USA and the USSR, much as they wanted to eliminate the danger of nuclear war, remained rivals. Intensive development of weaponry continued in both countries. In 1977 the Soviet Union stationed its newly-tested SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, missiles which had a capacity to attack Western Europe. The USA reacted by setting up facilities for the basing of Cruise missiles in the United Kingdom and West Germany and for the introduction of Pershing missiles to West Germany. The danger and costliness of all this were evident to politicians in Moscow and Washington, who simultaneously aimed at achieving agreement in the second stage of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known by the acronym SALT 2. By 1979 it looked as though the negotiators had elaborated a draft that would be acceptable to both sides.

The expansion of the USSR’s global influence served to enhance Brezhnev’s personal authority in the Politburo. In agricultural policy he reinforced the conventional methods for organizing the collective farms. The central imposition of quotas of output was maintained, and instructions on what to sow and when came to the villages from Moscow. The policy of amalgamating farms was prolonged by Brezhnev, who shared with Khrushchev a belief that bigger kolkhozes would increase productivity. At the same time Brezhnev insisted that agriculture should have a massive increase in the government’s financial support. Collective farms in the 1970s received twenty-seven per cent of all state investment — and even this figure did not include the revenues being channelled into the production of tractors, chemical fertilizers and other farm equipment. In 1981 the budgetary allocation constituted the ‘highest food-and-agriculture subsidy known in human history’, amounting to 33,000 million dollars at the contemporary official exchange rate.²

Gross agricultural output by 1980 was twenty-one per cent higher than the average for 1966–70. Cereal crops in particular rose by eighteen per cent in the same period.³ This allowed Brezhnev to bask in the praise heaped upon him. On closer inspection, the improved results were not encouraging. The usual criterion for assessing the effectiveness of Soviet agriculture had been and still was the grain harvest. In fact the imports of