The Penguin History of Modern Russia

March 1971. In a purple passage he declared: ‘Accounting for its work in this very important direction of activity, the Central Committee of the Party has every justification to say that the Soviet people, having worthily completed the Eighth Five-Year Plan, has taken a new great step forward in the creation of the material-technical base of communism, in the reinforcement of the country’s might and in the raising of the standard of living of the people.’¹¹

His report offered an agenda for step-by-step improvement; and as the concept was elaborated in later years, the Politburo acknowledged that developed socialism would constitute a ‘historically protracted period’. A tacit indication was being given that roughly the same kind of state order would prevail for the duration of the lives of Soviet citizens. In the course of the construction of a communist society as projected by Khrushchev there was no scheme for the party to become obsolete; the party was even more crucial to Brezhnevite developed socialism. Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which was introduced in 1977, announced: ‘The leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, its state organizations and public organizations is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s 1936 Constitution had mentioned the party’s authority only in relation to electoral arrangements. The USSR had always been a one-party state; but the new Article 6 gave the most formal validation to this reality to date.¹²

Not even Brezhnev entirely stopped calling for higher levels of participation by ordinary members of society in public life or talking about a future communist society. But his statements on such topics were ritualistic verbiage. He was much more serious when he stressed the need for hierarchy and planning. The party, under the Politburo’s leadership, would formulate the policies and give the guidance. Society’s main duty was to supply the orderly obedience.

A ‘scientific-technical revolution’ would be accomplished, and central state planning would prove its superior rationality. Official theorists stressed that already the USSR outmatched capitalism in bettering the human condition. The Soviet state guaranteed employment, health care, shelter, clothing and pensions; and citizens were brought up to respect the general interests of society and to avoid selfish individualism. Not that the USSR’s leaders wanted to be seen as complacent. There was a recognition that the Soviet economy had fallen behind the advanced capitalist countries in civilian technology. It was also admitted that much needed to be done to meet the material aspirations of ordinary consumers and that the political organs of the Soviet state, including the party, had to become more responsive to the people’s wishes. Indeed there had to be a perfecting of all mechanisms of governance and welfare. ‘Developed socialism’ had to be brought to its triumphant maturity.

No basic novelty in industrial and agricultural measures was contemplated. The options were limited by the Politburo’s diversion of massive resources to the state food-subsidy and to the nuclear arms race. But the very word reform caused most Soviet leaders to shudder. After the defeat of Kosygin’s endeavour to widen managerial freedom in 1965, no one tried to pick up his banner.

Although the 1970s were a lost decade for potential reformers, however, not everything was static. Not quite. The Ninth Five-Year Plan was the first to project a slightly higher rate of increase in the output of industrial consumer products than of industrial capital goods. Watches, furniture and radios were at last meant to be manufactured in abundance. Yet the Plan still left the predominant bulk of investment at the disposal of capital- goods production. And in practice the economic ministries and the rest of the party-police-military-industrial complex managed to prevent the Plan’s consumer-oriented investment projects from being fully realized.¹³ By 1975, for example, consumer goods had expanded at a rate nine per cent slower than capital goods.¹⁴ This thwarting of the Politburo’s policy continued throughout the decade despite Brezhnev’s reaffirmation of his commitment to the rapid shift of investment towards satisfying the needs of Soviet consumers at both the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in February 1976 and the Twenty-Sixth Congress in February 1981.

And so only the most minuscule steps were taken in the modification of policy. In 1973 a decree was issued to draw factories with complementary activities into ‘associations’ (ob’’edineniya). The idea was that enterprises would be enabled to serve each other’s needs without resort to permission from Gosplan and the ministries in Moscow. Associations were also expected to operate on a self-financing basis and recurrent deficits in their accounts were no longer to be tolerated. By 1980 there were 4,083 associations in the USSR, producing slightly over a half of total industrial output. Yet self-financing was never fully realized. An experiment along these lines had been started at the Shchekino Chemical Association as early as 1967; yet the reluctance of the central authorities to abandon control over decisions on investment, prices, wages and hiring and firing had condemned it to a fitful performance.

In 1979 another general decree on industry was issued which emphasized the need for scientific planning and for the avoidance of deficits in annual factory accounts. But this yielded miserable results. Soviet economic trends became ever more depressing. The contemporary official statistics gave a different impression: industrial output was still said to have risen by 4.4 per cent per annum in 1976–80. Yet even these statistics indicated a steady decrease in the rate of expansion. The supposed annual rise in 1966–70 had been 8.5 per cent.

In fact the official statistics took no account of the inflation disguised by the trick of slightly altering products and then selling them at higher prices. The statistics also hid the plight of manufacturing industry in comparison with extractive industry. Unwittingly the oil-producing Arab states had rescued the Soviet budget in 1973 by increasing the world-market prices for oil. The USSR was a major exporter of oil, petrol and gas. The reality was that the country, so far from catching up with the advanced capitalist West, was as reliant upon the sales abroad of its natural resources as it had been before 1917; and, in contrast with the tsarist period, it could no longer find a grain surplus for shipment to the rest of Europe. There can as yet be no exact statement of the percentage of industrial growth achieved. The sceptics suggest that no growth at all occurred. Be that as it may, nobody denies that by the end of the 1970s chronic absolute decline was in prospect.

The Politburo’s modifications were still more pathetic in other sectors of the economy. No fresh thinking was applied to banking, insurance, transport, personal services, construction or foreign trade. Policy was so motionless that it was rarely a topic for glancing comment in Pravda or even in the scholarly economic journals. The claims that, by avoiding Khrushchev’s utopianism, the USSR could make steady economic advance were being tested and found wanting.

Only very dimly were Brezhnev and his colleagues aware that doing nothing was a recipe for political disaster. If they needed proof of the regime’s vulnerability, they had only to look to the country adjacent to the Soviet western border. Poland was seething with working-class opposition. Strikes and demonstrations occurred in the Gdansk shipyards in 1970 under the leadership of Lech Walesa. Repression worked only briefly: by 1976 the authority of the Polish government was again being challenged. Other countries in Eastern Europe were also restless. Yugoslavia and Romania recurrently criticized the Soviet communist leadership. Albania did the same and reaffirmed her support for the People’s Republic of China. But what could Brezhnev and his colleagues do about anti-Soviet developments in Eastern Europe? The Politburo had no principled objection to the project of a Warsaw Pact invasion, but the experience of Czechoslovakia since 1968 showed that military occupation was not a solution in itself.

Problems also persisted about the potential for working-class unrest in the USSR. Since the Novocherkassk rebellion of 1962 the Politburo had feared lest the ‘party of the workers’ should be challenged by the Russian working class. Central party leaders concluded that timely concessions, if necessary, should always be made; and Brezhnev, while not espousing egalitarianism in wages policy, sanctioned a narrowing of formal differentials. He also ensured that blue-collar workers were paid better than several professional groups. For example, a bus driver in the 1970s earned 230 roubles, a secondary schoolteacher 150 roubles.¹⁵

Brezhnev wanted workers to be materially comfortable; and although the investment in the industrial consumer-goods sector fell behind projections, the expansion in output was enough to improve the conditions of ordinary people. Refrigerators were owned by thirty-two per cent of households in 1970 and by eighty-six per cent in 1980. Ownership of televisions rose from fifty-one to seventy-four per cent in the same decade.¹⁶ Trade unions opened further holiday centres for their members on the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. Trusted workers could travel on officially-organized trips to Eastern Europe and, if they were extremely lucky, to the West. Prices in the shops for staple products such as bread, potatoes, meat and clothing, as well as apartment rents and gas were held low, indeed barely higher than they had been during the First Five-Year Plan. Workers had never known it so good. Nor had the kolkhozniki; for the state pension system had been extended to them in 1964 and they were given internal passports from 1975.¹⁷

The Politburo also had to appeal to the middling groups in society. A persistent source of their dissatisfaction