With Brezhnev's emergence as party leader in 1964, power passed to the first generation to come of age under Soviet rule, whose promotions within the party and state apparatuses were a direct reward for their fidelity to this project and success in implementing it (including their willingness to arrest and kill millions of supposed 'enemies' of socialism).[157] Five decades after the Bolshevik revolution, however, the revolutionary dream of transforming the nature of modernity itself was increasingly giving way to complacency among the older generation - who had already proven their credentials as socialist heroes - and to cynicism on the part of many Soviet young people, for whom ideological rhetoric about perfecting socialism sounded increasingly irrelevant and embarrassing. Given the regime's professed goal of making modernity revolutionary, the Soviet 'way of life' began to lose coherence precisely when it had become successful enough to be ordinary.
The Brezhnev period can be best understood, then, as marking the routinisa- tion of Soviet revolutionary modernity. Such an interpretation helps to explain why those focusing on the Soviet regime's professed revolutionary aspirations (including Gorbachev) have tended to see Brezhnevism as a bankrupt and stagnant compromise, while those focusing on the USSR's efforts at modernisation could see genuine progress in Soviet administration during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, such an approach highlights a further paradox: namely, as maintaining 'revolutionary modernity' in a stable society proved to be increasingly oxymoronic in practice, 'neo-traditional' forms of political and economic organisation, based on personal networks and communal identities, emerged as the dominant principle governing everyday Soviet social life - simultaneously subverting the regime's aspirations to generate a new type of communist personality and its efforts to maintain bureaucratic rationality in order to catch up and overtake the capitalist West.[158]
In what follows, I will first trace the emergence of the Brezhnev leadership's 'orthodox Leninist' consensus from 1964 through the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. I will then examine the 'social contract' that emerged as the basis of social stability in the years of 'high Brezhnevism' from 1969 to 1976, noting the important role of detente in Brezhnev's political economy. Finally, I will discuss the decline of Brezhnevism from 1976 to 1982, both domestically and internationally.
The rejection of Khrushchevism
Brezhnev's brand of orthodox Leninism was a direct reaction to the perceived failures of his predecessor as General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev's strategy for building a socialist culture while rejecting Stalinist methods of coercion involved perpetual heroic campaigns designed to rekindle the revolutionary enthusiasm of ordinary Soviet citizens - the Virgin Lands campaign, the meat and milk campaign, the chemicals campaign and so on. But in each case, the initial promise of such campaigns had given way to declining production, extraordinary economic waste and exhausted human and natural resources. In international affairs, too, Khrushchev's style was impulsive and often reckless, as his nuclear brinkmanship during the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated. Even the 1956 'Secret Speech' to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin's cult of personality and terror launched a campaign of sorts - one that endeavoured to replace the charisma of Stalin with a new mythology of the 'heroism of the Soviet people'. In sum, Khrushchev appeared to take his famous promise to achieve full communism 'in the main' by 1980 quite literally, even if this meant adopting increasingly unrealistic domestic and foreign policies. By the early 1960s, resistance to Khrushchev's leadership had spread to every major Soviet institution, from the military-industrial complex to the party itself. Khrushchev's last-ditch attempts to maintain his power and programme - introducing the rotation of party cadres to new positions every five years, dividing the party apparatus into parallel hierarchies for agriculture and industry, and encouraging rank-and-file party members to criticise party officials - thus only hastened the bloodless coup against him in October 1964.
To a great extent, a common loathing of Khrushchev's chaotic style of rule was the key factor uniting the 'collective leadership' proclaimed by the inner core of the Brezhnev Politburo after 1964 (consisting of chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Aleksei Kosygin, chief CPSU ideologist Mikhail Suslov, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Nikolai Podgornyi, deputy chairman of the RSFSR Central Committee Andrei Kirilenko and of course Brezhnev himself). These five men had had remarkably similar life experiences: all were born between 1902 and 1906, all had been promoted rapidly as party and state officials during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, and all had reached positions of leadership in large part due to Stalin's Great Terror in the mid- 1930s, which eliminated the Old Bolsheviks previously making up the Soviet elite. Khrushchev was born in 1894 and was thus old enough to remember life under tsarism; he had still judged revolutionary success in terms of the transformational ethos ofthe Bolshevik revolution and civil war. The Brezhnev generation, by contrast, were barely teenagers in 1917, and their careers as mature revolutionaries were coterminous with, and essentially due to, the rise of Stalin. Khrushchev's struggles to reach pure communism must have struck them as quite irrelevant to the real issues facing the USSR: above all, the need for domestic and international consolidation of the Soviet system, which in their view had proven almost miraculously successful. For the Brezhnev generation, the post-Stalin USSR already represented a successful 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - after all, all of them had been Leninist proletarians in the 1920s, and now they ruled the second most powerful country in the world!
Thus the first two years of the Brezhnev era witnessed the rapid reversal of just about every institutional and cultural initiative undertaken during the preceding decade. The bifurcation of the party apparatus was repealed, plans for rotation in office were quietly dropped and a new policy of 'trust in cadres' was loudly proclaimed. In September 1965, Khrushchev's experiment with sovnarkhozy (regional economic councils), which had been designed to spur local economic initiative, was abandoned in favour of a return to hierarchical control over production by planning officials and state ministries. At the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, the 'Presidium' was renamed the Politburo, and the 'First Secretary' was renamed the General Secretary, restoring the standard terminology of the Stalin era.
These institutional measures were accompanied by a parallel rejection of Khrushchev's optimistic revolutionary timetable. References to the 'full-scale construction of Communism' and to the 'party' and 'state of the whole people' in the Soviet press became more and more infrequent; the USSR was instead now described as being at the stage of'developed socialism' - a formulation that focused attention on the successes of the past rather than the promise of the future. Khrushchev was no longer referred to by name, either; Khrushchevian policies were instead ritually dismissed as 'hare-brained scheming' and 'voluntarism', so that the history of the CPSU leadership now oddly appeared to skip directly from Lenin to Brezhnev.
157
Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939',