The regime also had to suppress dissent at home. It had grounds for concern: the KGB reported that 1,292 authors in 1965 had composed and disseminated 9,697 ‘anti-Soviet’ documents (mostly posters and leaflets). It identified about two-thirds of the authors—a motley array that included workers (206), schoolchildren (189), university students (36), state employees (169), pensioners (95), collective farmers (61), and even party members (111). Protest also became public for the first time in decades, as some two hundred dissidents held a demonstration on Pushkin Square, with one demonstrator bearing the sign, ‘Respect the Constitution’.
Although most dissenters were dealt with ‘prophylactically’ (a KGB euphemism for intimidation), the Kremlin leadership decided to send a clear message to dissidents. In February 1966 it staged the famous show trial of two dissident writers, Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel, who had published satirical works abroad and, of course, without official permission. The court predictably found them guilty of ‘anti-Soviet’ activity and meted out harsh sentences (seven years of hard labour for Siniavskii, five for Daniel). The KGB boasted that the trial not only evoked an outpouring of popular demands that the ‘slanderers’ be severely punished, but also that it had intimidated the intelligentsia. Simultaneously, authorities launched an attack on Alexander Nekrich’s historical monograph, 22 June 1941, which blamed Stalin personally for the Nazis’ initial success in the war and thus contravened official plans to rehabilitate Stalin. In response, party functionaries campaigned against Nekrich’s study as allegedly based on ‘the military-historical sources of capitalist countries’.
The repression was harsh but ineffective. When, for example, the regime organized a public discussion of Nekrich’s work at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in February 1966, the audience openly supported Nekrich and subjected a ‘loyal’ party hack to humiliating insults and censure. Sixty-three Moscow writers signed an open letter of protest against the Siniavskii-Daniel trial, and another two hundred prominent intellectuals sent a letter to the Twenty-Third Party Congress demanding that the case be reviewed. Nor did the demonstrative repression intimidate the intelligentsia or even end public demonstrations: a few days after the invasion of Czechoslovakia dissidents staged a short demonstration on Red Square, carrying placards that read ‘Hands off the ČSSR’, ‘For Your and Our Freedom!’ and ‘Down with the Occupiers!’. Dissent was particularly animated among national minorities. For example, the Crimean Tatars—still denied repatriation and restitution—organized a demonstration in April 1968 that culminated in hundreds of arrests. The Muslim peoples of Central Asia also became increasingly restive; as the KGB reported (after a fierce mêlée at Semipalatinsk in June 1965), Kazakhs resented the fact that Russian was the official language and that ethnic Russians monopolized the best positions in the army, state, and administration.
Years of Stagnation
Amid all this turbulence, Brezhnev steadily consolidated his power. An associate observed that, in contrast to Khrushchev, ‘Brezhnev never read anything except Krokodil’, a lightweight satirical magazine that he even brought to meetings of the Politburo. As the years passed Brezhnev also grew increasingly vain, fond of medals and praise. He encouraged fawning and toadying, like that in a 1973 report by the KGB head, Iurii Andropov, claiming that people regarded Brezhnev’s recent speech as ‘a new creative contribution to the theory of Marxism-Leninism’, that it ‘brilliantly reveals the paths and prospects of communist construction in the USSR and inspires new heroic feats of labour in the name of strengthening our multinational state, the unity and solidarity of the Soviet people’. Three years later Brezhnev was awarded the rank of ‘marshal of the Soviet Union’, his fifth medal for the ‘Order of Lenin’, and his second medal as ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’. (Satirists later speculated that he died from a chest operation, undertaken to broaden his chest to hold more medals.) The same year he ‘won’ a Lenin Prize for his memoirs, with this explanation: ‘For their popularity and their educational influence on the mass of readers, the books of Leonid Ilich are unrivalled.’ Popular demand, however, was less than insatiable: after his death, a report on state bookshops disclosed a backlog of 2.7 million copies of unsold, let alone unread, books. After a new constitution in 1977 established the office of president as titular head of state, Brezhnev assumed that position as well. With good reason, A. N. Shelepin argues that ‘Brezhnev was a great, very great mistake’.
Brezhnev consolidated not only his own power but also that of the partocracy: article 6 of the new constitution formally established the CPSU as the leading force in Soviet society. The party also expanded its presence through sheer growth: although the rate of growth after 1964 was slower, the party none the less increased its ranks from 12.5 million (1966) to 17.5 million (1981), an increase of 40 per cent.
But the most significant accommodation was Brezhnev’s ‘trust in cadres’ and resolve to end ‘the unjustified reshuffling and frequent replacement of cadres’. In contrast to Khrushchev, who sought to rejuvenate the party through democratization and turnover, Brezhnev left most members in their position until death or incapacitation. As a result, the average age of Politburo members rose from 55 to 68 between 1966 and 1981; by then half were over the age of 70 and would die within the next few years. The pattern was true of the Central Committee: because of the high rate of return (rising from 54 per cent in 1961 to 89 per cent in 1976–81), 44 per cent of the membership of the Central Committee was unchanged between 1966 and 1981, with an inevitable rise in the average age from 56 to 63. Low turnover rates also characterized lower echelons of the party; thus the proportion of oblast secretaries retaining their positions rose from 33 per cent under Khrushchev to 78 per cent in the period 1964–76.
This partocracy ossified into gerontocracy, devoid of dynamic leadership. It was not only inimical to change but physically incapable; Brezhnev himself, ravaged by ailments and strokes, gradually deteriorated into a breathing mummy. His colleagues were likewise so infirm that, shortly after his death, the Politburo solemnly addressed the issue of age and ‘solved’ the problem by setting limits on the hours and days that its members should work. This ossified leadership invited rampant corruption and crime, not only in the outlying republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but also in core Russian oblasti like Krasnodar, Rostov, and Moscow itself. Although the party periodically purged the corrupt (nearly 650,000 lost party membership on these grounds between 1971 and 1981), it did little to stop the rot, especially at upper levels. That decay even touched Brezhnev’s own family, as police arrested close friends and associates of his daughter.
Economy and Society
Brezhnev’s stewardship also brought sharp economic decline. Whereas national income rose 5.9 per cent per capita in 1966–70, thereafter it fell sharply, bottoming out at 2.1 per cent in 1981–5. GNP followed a similar trajectory: 6 per cent in the 1950s, 5 per cent in the 1960s, 4 per cent from 1970–8, and 2 per cent in subsequent years. This corresponded, predictably, to a decrease in the rate of growth in investment capital (from 7.6 per cent in 1966–70 to 3.4 per cent in 1976–80, including a mere 0.6 per cent in 1979). The regime deftly juggled statistics to mask the malaise: by emphasizing not physical output but ‘rouble value’ (showing a 75 per cent increase in 1976–83), it took advantage of the hidden price inflation and concealed the modest increase in gross production (a mere 9 per cent in the same period).