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.

In one sense the succession has already begun, as Brezhnev probably limits his involvement in daily affairs. But the succession period proper is likely to be a prolonged one with at least two phases.

The first phase should be an interim settlement. The fact that the members of the top layer of the Politburo are of roughly the same age means that the decline and eventual disappearance of Brezhnev will leave the remaining members increasingly in charge as a kind of corporate board of elders. The current favorite to succeed Brezhnev is Andrei Kirilenko, a man whose career has been so routine as to defy political characterization. Other than the fact that he has survived and prospered under his old colleague Brezhnev, it is difficult to add much to Kirilenko's formal credentials: a Party man, rising out of the Ukrainian apparatus, blessed by a stroke of luck in being associated with Brezhnev in the Dnepropetrovsk Party machinery. For about a decade he is thought to have been the "second" secretary, filling in behind his boss, taking up the slack in administrative chores.

The point about Andrei Kirilenko is that, at age 73, he scarcely qualifies as the solution to the succession problem. Even if he is in fairly good health, it is difficult to visualize him as the leader for more than a few years. It is also difficult to conclude that Kirilenko could dominate a politburo that includes Kosygin, Suslov, Ustinov, Gromyko, and Andropov. It is simply not feasible for him to overawe or overpower this Politburo of senior officials. More likely would be a form of collective leadership, which is inherently unworkable in an authoritarian system with a strong tendency toward centralization. In any case, it is unlikely that this group will repudiate its own record and launch radically new policies.

A second succession is certain to take place, though it may be more of an evolution than an abrupt shift. As the aging Politburo gradually disappears, replacements will be made; at first the collective will make decisions on personnel, but second-echelon appointments will increasingly be made by the first or second secretary.

Before 1985 a new leader will probably emerge, still within the formal framework of the collective leadership, and probably someone who presently occupies a position in the Soviet elite-if only because the system works against rapidly rising dark horses. Who will it be? The general requirements would be an official serving in the center in Moscow, with experience mainly in the Party rather than the government, probably including service in the secretariat, and some experience in directing a major Soviet Republic, or at least a large oblast or subdivision therein. Possibilities among the current crop would be Gregory Romanov (56), the first secretary of the Leningrad Party; Vladimir Shcherbitskiy (62), the leader in the Ukraine; Peter Masherov (60), the leader of the Byelorussian Party; and two members of the current secretariat: Vladimir Dolgikh (54), who specializes in industry, and the youngest and newest member of the hierarchy, Mikhail Gorbachev (48), an agricultural specialist from Stavropol. While the Kremlinologist could make a few deductions about the policy preferences of this group, they are in reality largely unknown, especially compared to Brezhnev and Kosygin when they took over in 1964.

But does it matter who emerges? A cold-blooded analysis of Soviet history might conclude that "objective" factors determine the trends, but one cannot help but feel that individuals do matter. Suppose Stalin had been shot in 1934 and Kirov had lived. Or suppose Zhdanov had not died in 1948, but had survived Stalin. Suppose Frol Kozlov had not suffered a stroke in 1963, and, instead of Leonid Brezhnev, had been the coup leader against Khrushchev. Or one could speculate on what might have happened if Molotov and Malenkov had defeated Khrushchev in 1957. Personalities do have an impact, but our problem is that we cannot really divine the nature of that impact. Certainly Khrushchev was not a good candidate for leading a de-Stalinization drive. And some very important Kremlinologists dismissed Brezhnev in 1964.

Nevertheless, the "second" succession will be more than a shifting of Central Committee clones. In the 1980s we will finally arrive at what could be described as a generational change. The man who takes charge will certainly never have known pre-revolutionary Russia and probably not even the pre-Stalin Soviet Union. All of his education in secondary schools will have occurred during the Stalin period and his higher education after World War II. He might have been about 15 to 20 years old at the end of the war. Most of his adult political career will have been after Stalin's death, and his more significant Party or government assignments will have been in the post-Khrushchev period. The political characteristics of this generation can be the subject of extensive sociological speculation. But the central point is that two successions will create a tendency toward political turmoil as the new internal power balance is worked out. True, the succession will occur in circumstances of greater stability compared to the death of Stalin and the coup against Khrushchev-both of which created an atmosphere of crisis. But after a period of relative steadiness under Brezhnev, a period of change seems highly likely.

The economic situation will be basic. No analysis foresees a bright outlook. A slowdown in general economic growth in the 1980s seems virtually certain. The dispute among experts is really over the rate of slowdown, rather than the general trend. And the causes are fundamental: a declining labor force, declining productivity and diminishing and more expensive resources.

Basic solutions are therefore called for. One way out is the revival of economic reforms to decentralize decisions and create new incentives, which could have a major impact on the quality of Soviet output and on overall efficiency. This, of course, has been obvious for well over a decade. But it has been resisted on political grounds. Given a new leadership probably somewhat unsure of its mandate and its political base, the likelihood of a round of economic-political experiments seems quite remote. If so, the economic crisis could worsen.

Among the other options, cutting back on defense is the one most intriguing for outside observers. There are some misconceptions about the pressures created by high defense spending. In the current SALT II debate, the idea has become current that the Soviets are up against a threshold which will not allow much more defense spending. But we are dealing with fairly wide margins of possible error in U.S. estimates of Soviet defense expenditures. The United States officially estimates that about 11 to 13 percent of Soviet gross national product goes into national defense, but even this two-percent spread allows a margin of about 10 billion rubles. Moreover, strategic attack accounts for only about 10 percent of the defense budget. So an increase of five percent in the overall budget could be turned into an increase in spending for strategic attack of 50 percent! Thus the Soviets could make a substantial strategic impact with only a slight burst in spending. And given expenditures for research and development that exceeded the United States by $100 billion in the past decade, the U.S.S.R. has a solid base to draw on.