The Penguin History of Modern Russia

cereals, which had been started by Khrushchev, had become a regular phenomenon. When it became difficult to seal commercial deals with the USA in 1974, the USSR’s foreign-trade officials began to make hole-in-the-corner purchases in Argentina and elsewhere. This was necessary because Soviet domestic production was severely deficient in fodder crops. There were also problems in other important sectors; for instance, the sugar-beet harvest, far from rising, declined by two per cent in the decade prior to 1980.

Brezhnev’s attempted solution was to increase state investment. Reform-minded central party functionaries were cowed by the fate of Politburo member G. I. Voronov. For years Voronov had advocated the division of each farm work-force into ‘links’ or teams which would be entrusted with specific functions. A link might, for instance, run a farm’s dairy unit. Voronov’s argument was that work-forces were so vast that individual kolkhozniki felt little sense of responsibility for the work on the farm. Accordingly, the link system, accompanied by suitable material incentives, would introduce conscientiousness and lead to an expansion of output. This proposal had been put to Stalin unsuccessfully by A. A. Andreev in the 1940s and had been opposed by Khrushchev both before and after Stalin’s death. Voronov was equally ineffective in trying to convince Brezhnev about the need for such a reform. Indeed Brezhnev removed Voronov from the Politburo in April 1973.

Experimentation with agricultural links was not totally disallowed on a local basis (and among the party officials who tried them out was the young Stavropol Region Party Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev). Yet central policy was otherwise unimaginative and incompetent. In 1976 the Politburo issued a resolution ‘On the Further Development of Specialization and Concentration of Agricultural Production on the Basis of Inter-Farm Co-operation and Agro-Industrial Integration’. The resolution called for several kolkhozes in a given district to combine their efforts in production; it was therefore not a cure but a prescription for aggravated difficulties by virtue of adding yet another administrative layer to agricultural management. Meanwhile the state’s food-and-agriculture subsidy did not prevent many kolkhozes from operating at a loss; for although the prices paid for farming produce were raised, the costs charged for fuel and machinery also rose. Oil, for example, cost eighty-four per cent more in 1977 than in the late 1960s — and the price of certain types of seed-drills more than doubled.⁴

Agricultural policy was therefore very confused, and in such a situation Khrushchev would probably have made yet another assault on the private plots of kolkhozniki. Brezhnev was not so misguided, but instead in 1977 and 1981 issued two decrees to expand the maximum size of each plot to half a hectare. These measures removed a large obstacle to the expansion of agricultural output. Under Brezhnev the private plots yielded thirty per cent of total production while constituting only four per cent of the USSR’s cultivated area.

Both ideological tradition and political interests impeded Politburo members from recognizing this as proof that de-collectivization was essential to an expansion of agricultural production. They were so nervous about private plots that the 1977 decree was withheld from publication for a whole year.⁵ The underlying problems therefore lay unresolved: the shortage of skilled labour; the wrecked rural culture; the payment of farmworkers by quantity of work without regard to its quality; the roadless countryside; the central imposition of quotas for planting, harvesting and procurement; the technology and machinery too large for their functions on Soviet farms; the memory of the horrors of collectivization from the late 1920s. Apart from throwing money at the problems, Brezhnev could only propose grandiose schemes of land reclamation, irrigation and of river diversion. He listened to flattering advisers who deflected attention from any endeavour to address those underlying problems.

At the same time he eased his leading opponents out of high office. Not only Voronov but also Shelest were discarded in 1973. Shelepin at last went the same way in 1975. Each had had disagreements about policy with Brezhnev and eventually paid a personal price. The forced retirement of rivals continued. Membership of the Politburo was withdrawn from D. S. Polyanski in 1976, Nikolai Podgorny in 1977 and K. T. Mazurov in 1978. The long-serving Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, resigned because of ill-health in 1980. Meanwhile Brezhnev had been recruiting associates to fill the empty seats. Dinamukhammed Kunaev and Volodymyr Shcherbytskiy became full members of the Politburo in 1971, Konstantin Chernenko in 1978 and Nikolai Tikhonov in 1979 (and Tikhonov took over the Council of Ministers at Kosygin’s departure). Their claim to preference was the accident of having worked amicably with Brezhnev in Dnepropetrovsk, Moldavia and Kazakhstan between the 1930s and 1950s. The Politburo was being remade in the General Secretary’s image.

Brezhnev was extolled as a dynamic leader and intellectual colossus. The removal of Podgorny enabled him to occupy the additional post of Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet and thereby become head of state. When Kosygin died in December 1980, Pravda postponed the reporting of the news until after the celebration of Brezhnev’s birthday. In May 1976 he had been made Marshal of the Soviet Union. In 1979 he published three volumes of ghost-written memoirs which treated minor battles near Novorossisk as the decisive military theatre of the Second World War; and his account of the virgin lands campaign of the 1950s barely mentioned Khrushchev.

The growing cult of Brezhnev was outrageously at variance with actuality. His physical condition was deteriorating. He was addicted to sleeping pills; he drank far too much of the Belorussian ‘Zubrovka’ spirit and smoked heavily; to his embarrassment, he was also greatly overweight.⁶ From 1973 his central nervous system underwent chronic deterioration, and he had several serious strokes.⁷ At the successive ceremonies to present him with Orders of Lenin, Brezhnev walked shakily and fumbled his words. Yevgeni Chazov, Minister of Health, had to keep doctors in the vicinity of the General Secretary at all times: Brezhnev was brought back from clinical death on several occasions. The man in the East whose finger was supposed to be on the nuclear-war button inside the Soviet black box was becoming a helpless geriatric case. He was frequently incapable of rudimentary consecutive thought even in those periods when he was not convalescing.

His cronies had cynically decided that it suited them to keep Brezhnev alive and in post. The careers of Chernenko, Tikhonov and others might suffer if Brezhnev were to pass away. Even several Politburo members who were not friends of his — Central Committee Secretary Suslov, Defence Minister Ustinov and Foreign Minister Gromyko — feared the uncertainties of any struggle to succeed him. Such figures also recognized that their unhappiness with the General Secretary’s policies impinged only on secondary matters. Brezhnev’s Lazarus-like returns from physical oblivion allowed them to hold in place the policies agreed in the second half of the previous decade.

The central political leadership had turned into a gerontocracy. By 1980 the average age of the Politburo was sixty-nine years.⁸ Each member, surrounded with toadying assistants, wanted an old age upholstered by material comfort and unimpeded power. The idea of preparing a younger generation of politicians to take over the state leadership was distasteful to them. Fifty-year-old Konstantin Katushev was demoted from the Central Committee Secretariat in 1977 and his promising career was nipped in the bud. Grigori Romanov had become a full member of the Politburo at the age of fifty-three in 1976; Mikhail Gorbachev did the same when he was forty-nine in 1980. But these were exceptions to the norm. Brezhnev’s Politburo was composed mainly of Stalin’s ageing promotees. Their fundamental attitudes to politics and economics had been formed before 1953. They were proud of the Soviet order and present achievements. Change was anathema to them.

Already in 1969 there had been an attempt by Brezhnev and a majority of Politburo members to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation. They were not proposing a reversion to the terror of the 1930s and 1940s; but as they grew old in office, their unpleasant memory grew dimmer and they became nostalgic about their own contribution to the glorious past. It would seem that whereas Shelepin had hoped to use Stalin as a symbol for the robust restoration of order, Brezhnev and his friends wanted to use him more as the personification of the USSR’s achievements in industrialization in the early 1930s and in victory in the Second World War. Only strenuous representations to the Politburo by foreign communist parties brought about a last-minute reversal of the decision on Stalin’s rehabilitation.⁹

Nevertheless the Politburo still had to supply citizens with its analysis of the country’s current condition. The favoured terms were ‘really existing socialism’, ‘real socialism’, ‘mature socialism’ and ‘developed socialism’.¹⁰ Really existing socialism was too wordy. Real socialism invited an undesirable comparison with surrealist socialism; mature socialism sounded altogether too decrepit a note. And so from 1966 the propagandists increasingly claimed that the country had entered the stage of ‘developed socialism’. This term, while avoiding the over-optimism of Khrushchev’s Party Programme, highlighted achievements already made and objectives yet to be attained. The authorities looked back with pride on the October Revolution, the Five-Year Plans and the Second World War; they anticipated a future involving an incremental improvement of living standards, of technology and of social and political integration throughout the USSR.

Developed socialism was a term used in Brezhnev’s opening report to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in