Meanwhile, Leonid Brezhnev soon emerged as the top Soviet leader and remained so until 1982. For Gorbachev and his partisans, Brezhnev became the scapegoat for everything wrong in the Soviet Union. They ridiculed his poor health, expensive tastes, personal vanity, and political weakness. Brezhnev became the symbol of stagnation and corruption. Though this view of Brezhnev lacked balance, it did have a basis. According to the Soviet historian, Dmitri Volkogonov, Brezhnev wanted above all else “peace and quiet, serenity and an absence of conflict.” Brezhnev was “terrified of reform.” Replacing Khrushchev’s office rotation policy with a “stability of cadre” policy, Brezhnev even resisted changes in personnel. At each of the four Party congresses at which he presided, Brezhnev acknowledged shortages, but he resisted bold solutions. Moreover, many in his leadership suffered from advanced age and disability. No one manifested these weaknesses more than Brezhnev himself, who after 1970 was debilitated by ill health. In 1976, he suffered a serious stroke, and between then and his death in 1982, he had several heart attacks and more strokes. In the last five years of his life, he was so sick and enfeebled that he played no active part in state or Party life. In the last years, Brezhnev could not speak without a written text in front of him and without slurring his words.91
Though much of the criticism made of Brezhnev was deserved, it obscured the simple truth that most of the problems the Soviet Union experienced under Brezhnev had their origins under Khrushchev. Moreover, though Brezhnev did little to reverse Stalin’s mistreatment of certain nationalities or to denounce earlier violations of socialist legality, he did reverse some of the more extreme of Khrushchev’s policies. Centralized planning returned. “Cadre stability” replaced term limits. A unitary party organization replaced the division into industrial and agricultural forms. Stricter Party admission standards replaced mass recruitment. The “state of all the people” and the “party of all the people” remained but acquired a different meaning. Pravda explained that these terms did not mean that the CPSU “loses it class character….[Rather,] the CPSU has been and remains a party of the working class.”92 Furthermore, Brezhnev’s policies showed a firm commitment to international solidarity. He achieved military parity with the U.S. and aided the socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Cuba, the revolutionary struggles in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Ideologically, Brezhnev wove along an intermediate path between the two traditional poles or tendencies of Soviet politics. The Soviet writer Fedor Burlatsky said that Brezhnev “borrowed” from Stalin and from Khrushchev.93 Stephen F. Cohen likewise places him in the middle of the contending trends in the Party:
At least three movements had formed inside the Communist party by the time Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964: an anti-Stalinist party calling for more far reaching relaxation of controls over society; a neo-Stalinist one charging that the Khrushchev policies had gravely weakened the state and demanding that it be rejuvenated, and a conservative party mainly devoted to preserving the existing post-Stalin status quo by opposing further major changes either forward or backward. During the next twenty years these multiparty conflicts were waged in various largely muted and subterranean ways. The conservative majority headed by Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union with some concessions to the neo-Stalinists for almost two decades. The reform movement barely survived, but in 1985 along with Gorbachev it came to power.94
In spite of Khrushchev’s erratic and failed policies and Brezhnev’s reluctance to tackle problems, the Soviet economy continued to show much vitality. In the 1950s the Soviet Union developed at twice the rate of most advanced countries. Between 1950 and 1975, the Soviet industrial production index increased 9.85 times (according to Soviet figures) or 6.77 times (according to CIA figures), while the U.S. industrial production index increased 2.62 times.95 The Soviet Union employed one fourth of the world’s scientists, and the launch of Sputnik symbolized its scientific accomplishments. Wages and living standards rose steadily. The workweek was set at forty hours a week for most jobs, and thirty-five hours for the heaviest work. A universal pension system was instituted. Consumer goods became increasingly available, and “the gap in the level of economic and social development between the Soviet Union and the USA was rapidly closing.” By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union produced 20 percent of the world’s industrial goods, up from 4 percent of a much smaller total at the time of the revolution. The Soviet Union led the world in the production of oil, gas, ferrous metals, minerals, tractors, reinforced concrete, wool goods, shoes, sugar beets, potatoes, milk, eggs, and other products. Its production of hydroelectricity, chemical products, machinery, cement and cotton was second only to the U.S.96 The annual rate of increase of industrial productivity went up from 4.7 percent in 1960-65, to 5.8 percent in 1965-70, to 6.0 percent in 1970-75.97
In large measure, the economic gains were made possible by the concentrated investments in natural resources and heavy industry initiated by Stalin. Unquestionably, this growth was also aided by the availability of vast amounts of cheap natural resources, particularly oil, gas, coal, and iron ore. In the 1970s, however, both objective and subjective problems eroded economic performance. Three objective problems stood out: first, the relative exhaustion of natural resources, which made the extraction of gas, oil, and coal more expensive; second, the demographic consequences of World War II that had dramatically reduced the size of the workforce; three, the challenge of adopting new computer technology, particularly in the face of defective computer chips deliberately sold to the Soviet Union by the U.S. Even more important than these objective problems were the subjective ones: the problems of policy, particularly the shift of investment from heavy industry to consumer goods; the wage leveling; and the lack of sufficient attention to problems of planning and incentives in the last years of Brezhnev. As a result, while the annual growth rate of industrial production remained positive between 1973 and 1985 (according to some, even stronger than that in the U.S., 4.6 percent compared to 2.3 percent),98 signs of trouble appeared. Between 1979-82, the production fell for 40 percent of all industrial goods. Agricultural output in this period did not reach the 1978 level. “Indicators of efficiency in social production slowed down.” In the 1976-85 period, oil extraction in the Volga fell, as did the extraction of coal in the Don Coal fields, timber from the Urals, and nickel from the Kola Peninsula. According to some, the standard of living stopped rising.99
Brezhnev’s attitude and policies toward the national question reflected his intermediate position. In some respects, Brezhnev evinced complacency akin to Khrushchev. Brezhnev praised the building up of the backward republics and the fostering of “Soviet patriotism.” “The Soviet nations,” he declared, “are now united more than ever.”100 The General Secretary took a decidedly non-struggle approach toward many republics, where he allowed corruption and nepotism to abound. In Uzbekistan, for example, the Party leader had fourteen relatives working in the Party apparat, and bribery, arbitrariness, injustice, and “heinous violations of the law” reportedly ran rampant.101