Brezhnev and Beyond

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1979

Summary:  The Brezhnev era is clearly ending. This October he will mark his fifteenth year as the head of the Party, a span at least four years longer than Nikita Khrushchev's official term. In December, he will be 73 and next spring he will, if he holds on, pass Stalin as the oldest Soviet leader ever to hold the top Party position. He has already established the precedent of being both chief of state and Party leader; he has matched Stalin in being promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union. By almost any standard, the past 15 years have to be regarded as his "era." Now the advancing age and physical infirmities of the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party suggest that a presuccession period is under way and that the process of summing up the Brezhnev period can begin.

William G. Hyland is a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. He was a member of the National Security Council Staff from 1969 to 1977, serving as Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs, 1975-77.

Stalin is no longer in the mausoleum. His bust sits slightly to the left, a historical curiosity too prominent to be ignored, not commanding enough to reawaken the terror, but still a chilling reminder of what the system could produce.

If the limited rehabilitation of Stalin was a bitter blow to the Khrushchevites, a more definitive reversal was the systematic repression of dissent in the cultural and artistic community. It was Khrushchev who made Solzhenitsyn famous by permitting his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to be published in Novy Mir. The new regime indulged in no such quirks of experimentalism. It moved in the opposite direction: the arrest and trial of Andrei Sinyavskiy and Yuli Daniel in February 1966, a shocking and disturbing reminder that the state organs could and would still be used harshly and drastically.

The conservative-orthodox revival was also gradually extended to the Soviet economy. Khrushchev left a little-appreciated gift: a fine harvest (following, of course, a disastrous one in 1963). This created a short period of grace in which priorities could be sorted out. Almost immediately the claimants began to contend. The economic reformers argued for greater rationality and profitability; the agronomists for massive investments; the military-though disputing among themselves about the nature of war-united to demand a large share of the pie; the heavy industrialists invoked the hallowed priority of "Group A"; and there was the unarticulated demand to raise the standard of living-which in a period of gradual economic slowdown could only be at the expense of other sectors.

Brezhnev had his own priorities, though he was careful to press them gradually: heavy industry would have to be the foundation, then defense, agriculture, and finally the people's well-being. He laid out this scheme on the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, over which he presided for the first time, in November 1964. After much twisting and turning, this is about how matters came out. For a time the economic reformers made a bid for influence in their proposals of September 1965, and Kosygin seemed their champion, but Brezhnev's commitment was always hedged. The reforms withered away.

For a brief time it seemed that defense was to be an economic casualty. The first Kosygin-Brezhnev defense budget included a 500-million ruble reduction, because of the "easing of the international situation," Kosygin claimed. Even Marshal Sokolovsky spoke vaguely of more cuts in the size of the armed forces. But this trend was checked and then reversed. By July of 1965 Brezhnev was warning against any savings at the expense of defense and Kosygin was echoing him. The trend was indeed toward an enlarged defense. The professional soldiers began to reappear: Marshal Zakharov as Chief of Staff; General Shtemenko, the brains of Stalin's general staff, rehabilitated in time for the Czech invasion of August 1968. Scarcely concealed debate on a wide range of military issues broke out, but it was a debate among hawks.

Brezhnev, with his ties to the military before, during and after the war, became their champion. (He had risen to Major-General during the war as a political commissar; in 1953-54 he was Commissar of the Navy and was later associated with the missile industries.) But he was too wily an operator to rest his political base on the thin reed of professional officers. There is little doubt he sought military support and institutionalized a new role by promoting his old comrade Marshal Grechko to the Politburo in 1973; but after the Marshal's death, he bypassed the professionals to promote Dimitri Ustinov to Defense Minister.

Brezhnev understood that Khrushchev had not been undone by his rough handling of a few Marshals but, more basically, by the perennial nightmare of Soviet agriculture. Khrushchev's quick fix of exploiting the virgin lands in the mid-1950s was a stroke of genius that temporarily produced real grain, not imaginary quotas; his lieutenant in the virgin lands had been none other than Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev knew enough about agriculture to recognize that he could not keep tinkering with the system; his approach was direct-more investment in agriculture, in fact, much more investment. His plan was announced in March 1965. He succeeded in slowing the decline, but good weather was, as always in Russia, the real arbiter; over the years Brezhnev has enjoyed somewhat more than his share, though the current bad harvest is an ominous reminder of Khrushchev's fate.

By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution in November 1967, the transition had been made to the more prudent, orderly and consistent era of Khrushchev's successors. "Comrades," Brezhnev told the Party on that great occasion, "today our society combines the wisdom of maturity and the energy of youth." Maybe so. But clearly it was the wisdom of maturity that would be rewarded, not the energy of youth. The Party and its leadership were destined to grow old together. A decade later the top level of the political leadership was still largely intact, simply ten years older. The party's leading institutions had settled down, the turnover was embarrassingly small, and in 1979 over half of the "elite" was over 60 years old.

The price of stability was the threat of stagnation. In the 1950s the economy grew at five to six percent. In the 1960s, the growth rate dropped to the neighborhood of four to five percent. And in the 1970s the growth rate continued to slide to around four percent with ominous predictions of one to two percent in the 1980s.

Similarly, the leadership has not been revived with new blood. Brezhnev was 45 when Stalin appointed him as a candidate member of the Politburo in 1952. (He was immediately removed after Stalin's death and made commissar of the Soviet Navy.) With Brezhnev soon to be 73, his nominal successor, Andrei Kirilenko, is slightly older; Mikhail Suslov, the grey eminence, is already over 75; the indestructible Kosygin is only a year younger. Two recent promotions seem deliberately intended to avoid promotions of younger leaders. Nikolai Tikhonov is the only first deputy premier of the Soviet government; he was appointed at age 74. And a new entry in the succession contest, Brezhnev's former aide, the Party Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, is 67. Thus, the class of 1964 that threw out their comrade and mentor is coming to its end-living testimony, however, that orthodoxy and stability pay off in a system which has long since lost its revolutionary fervor.