Brezhnev and the End of the Thaw
Fedor Burlatskii, Reflections on the Nature of Political Leadership. September 14, 1988
Burlatskii’s essay is an early post-Brezhnev autopsy of “stagnation,” arguing that the USSR squandered the possibilities opened after Stalin. He links the end of the Thaw to a political style that rewarded caution, hierarchy, and conformity, stifling technological innovation and suppressing independent, creative initiative. With unusual directness, he criticizes the economic drag of massive military spending and faults Brezhnev’s leadership for worsening relations with the United States. Burlatsky also reflects on how hard democratization would be in a political culture with little tolerance for pluralism, making the piece a sign of glasnost-era political analysis.
Original Source: Literaturnaia gazeta, 14 September 1988.
Above all else, what we perhaps particularly need at present is a clear and accurate evaluation of the age of stagnation. We should, we must understand what happened in nearly two decades of Leonid Brezhnev's leadership of the country, with his entourage and the whole administrative apparat. We must understand not, of course, in order to forgive, nor in order to curse. We must understand in order to evaluate the experience of the past for the sake of a better future. Because, as has often been said, peoples are at least partially rewarded for their great trials by the great lessons they learn from them.
The concept of stagnation itself requires further study. It can hardly be doubted that in some spheres (first and foremost the economy) a trend toward stagnation did indeed come increasingly to the fore, while in other spheres, such as those of politics and morality, there was an actual regression in comparison with the ten-year period of the Khrushchev thaw. The abandonment of reforms (and in many respects the return to the command-and-administer system of the Stalinist era), the freeze of living standards, the general delay of absolutely self-evident decisions and the substitution of trite political verbiage in their place, the corruption and degeneration of power in which whole strata of the people became increasingly involved, the loss of moral values and the universal decline in morality-if that is stagnation, what is a crisis? Foreign policy in particular fully reflected the contradictory nature of Brezhnev's time, when every step forward along the path of detente was followed by two steps back. Only a few years separate two events of such disparate nature, the Final Act in Helsinki and the war in Afghanistan.
Out of all the multifaceted aspects of stagnation, I would like to touch on just one: How did it come about that in such a difficult period in the history of our motherland, and indeed in world history, the man at the helm of the country's government was the weakest of all the leaders who had held that position in Soviet times, and perhaps even in pre-revolutionary times? I am very anxious to avoid giving way to the temptation to ridicule this man who set up with almost childlike simplicity the accessories of his own cult: four times Hero of the Soviet Union, Hero of Socialist Labor, Marshal of the Soviet Union, International Lenin Prize, a bronze bust in his birthplace, the Lenin Prize for Literature, the Karl Marx Gold Medal. All that was lacking was the title of generalissimo: His life was cut short too soon. Ridicule is too easy a way; it is the way, moreover, that accords with what is probably the most persistent Russian tradition, alas. It was Vasilii Kliuchevskii, I think, who observed that each new Russian czar began his career by repudiating his predecessor. There is a saying in the West: Speak no ill of the dead. With us, it is the other way round: Make immoderate litanies in praise of the living and endless abuse of the dead. Clearly
this is a sublimation to make up for the lack of opportunity to criticize current leaders.
Out of all the leaders of the Soviet period, the only exception was Lenin. And how far was he an exception, given that Stalin repudiated Lenin's testament, in all his activity while preserving the hypocritical ritual of reverence toward Lenin personally? As for criticism of Stalin himself, only now is it developing into serious analysis of the political and ideological regime he established.
Is it not time to take this same reasonable step with regard to Brezhnev? Of course, detailed descriptions of the intimate secrets of his corrupt family tickle the sensibilities of some readers. Although it cannot be denied that their children have often been the bane of political leaders. It is probably more useful to reflect not so much on Brezhnev as on his regime, on Brezhnevism, on the style of political leadership that has, alas, not yet entirely died out, and here we need guarantees equally as strong as those we need against Stalinism. It was not for nothing that the radical reform of the political system outlined by the 19th Party Conference was necessary.
Power was thrust upon Brezhnev as a gift of fate. In order to turn the post of party Central Committee general secretary, at that time a modest post, into the office of "master" of our country, Stalin "had to" eliminate virtually every member of Lenin's Politbiuro (except himself, naturally) as well as a huge portion of the party aktiv, After Stalin's death Khrushchev was second in line and not first, as many people think, because Malenkov, was regarded as first at the time. Khrushchev won the struggle against mighty and influential rivals, including such people as Viacheslav Molotov, who had formed the basis of the state practically since Lenin's time. Perhaps that was why the Stalin and Khrushchev eras, each in its own way, were filled with dramatic changes, major reformations, disturbance, and instability.
Nothing of the kind happened with Brezhnev. He assumed power as smoothly as if someone had tried the crown of Monomakh on various heads well in advance and settled on this one. And this crown fitted him so well that he wore it for eighteen years without fears, cataclysms, or conflicts of any kind. And the people closest to him longed for only one thing: for this man to live forever, it would be so good for them. Brezhnev himself, at a meeting with people from his regiment, showing off his new marshal's uniform, said, "You see? Service rewarded at last." This phrase is also very appropriate to describe the process by which he succeeded to the "office" of party and state leader: "service rewarded."
Brezhnev embodied the exact opposite of Khrushchev's boldness, willingness to take risks, adventurous spirit, and hunger for novelty and change. If we knew Nikita Sergeevich less well, we might find it a mystery that Khrushchev so patronized a man of the opposite cast of mind and temperament. As an authoritarian personality not inclined to share power and influence with other people, he surrounded himself mainly with the kind of leaders who hung on his every word, said yes to everything, and willingly fulfilled his every instruction. He had no need for comrades in arms, and still less for captains. He had had enough of them after Stalin's death, when Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich tried to expel him from the political Olympus and perhaps let him rot in a faraway province.
It must be observed that Brezhnev did indeed owe his entire career to Khrushchev. He graduated from the land use surveyors' technical school in Kursk and only joined the party at the age of twenty-five. Then, after graduating from the institute, he began his political career. In May 1937 (!) Brezhnev became deputy chairman of Dneprodzerzhinsk municipality, and a year later he was working in the party obkom in Dnepropetrovsk. It is hard to say whether Khrushchev assisted Brezhnev in these first steps, but his entire subsequent career had the most active support of the then first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee, later secretary of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks), When Brezhnev was appointed to the post of first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party Central Committee, he took along many of his friends from Dnepropetrovsk, and there he also acquired as a close colleague the then chief of the republic's Communist Party Central Committee's Propaganda and Agitation Department, Konstantin Chernenko.
After the 19th Party Congress (1952) Brezhnev became a candidate member of the Central Committee Presidium and after Stalin's death he was at the Soviet Army and Navy Main Political Directorate. The stronger Khrushchev grew, the higher Brezhnev rose. By the October 1964 plenum he was second secretary of the Central Committee. Thus Khrushchev built his successor's pedestal with his own hands.
The most dramatic problem very soon became clear: Brezhnev was entirely unprepared for the role that unexpectedly fell upon him. He became first secretary of the party Central Committee as a result of a complex, multifaceted, and even bizarre symbiosis of forces. It involved a little of everything: dissatisfaction with Khrushchev's scornful attitude toward his colleagues; fear arising from the unrestrained extremes of his policy and the adventurist actions that played a part in the escalation of the Caribbean missile crisis; illusions about the "personality" basis of the conflict with China; and particularly the annoyance felt by the conservative section of the government apparat with the constant instability, jolts, changes, and reforms that were impossible to foresee. An important part was played by the struggle between different generations of leaders: the 1937 generation, to which Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Suslov, and Aleksei Kosygin belonged, and the postwar generation, including Aleksandr Shelepin, Gennadii Voronov, Dmitrii Polianskii, and Iurii Andropov. Brezhnev was in the center, at the intersection of all these roads. So in the initial stage he suited nearly everyone. Or, at any rate, no one protested. His very incompetence was a blessing: It offered the apparat workers plenty of opportunities. The only person made to look a fool was Shelepin, who thought he was the smartest. He did not advance a single step in his career, because not only Brezhnev but also Suslov and the other leaders detected his authoritarian ambitions.
Meanwhile, a fierce struggle broke out over the choice of the country's path of development. One person, as was mentioned above, unequivocally proposed a return to Stalinist methods. Another path was proposed to the leadership by Andropov, who submitted a detailed program based more consistently on the decisions of the anti-Stalinist 20th Party Congress than had been done in Khrushchev's time. It is not difficult to reconstruct these ideas today, because they were set forth in a more general form in an editorial article prepared at the time for Pravda ("State of the Entire Country," December 6, 1964). They are: (1) economic reform, (2) the transition to modern, scientific management, (3) the development of democracy and self-management, (4) the party's concentration on political leadership, (5) the ending of the nuclear missile race, which had become senseless, and (6) the USSR's entry into the world market with a goal of acquiring new technology.
Andropov expounded this program to Brezhnev and Kosygin during a trip to Poland in 1965. Some elements of it found support, but as a whole it did not meet with sympathy from either Brezhnev or Kosygin, although for
different reasons. Kosygin Supported economic transformations, but he insisted on the restoration of relations with China at the cost of conceding to China by renouncing the "extremes" of the 20th Party Congress.
As for Brezhnev, he was in no hurry to define his position, because he was keeping an eye on the correlation of forces inside the CPSU Central Committee Presidium and in the party Central Committee.
Thus Brezhnev's main feature as a political leader was immediately revealed. Being an extremely cautious man who had not taken a single rash step during his rise to power, being what is known as a "weathercock leader," Brezhnev adopted a centrist position from the beginning. He did not accept one extreme or the other, neither the program of reform in the spirit of the 20th Congress, nor neo-Stalinism. Incidentally, here he was following a tradition that became established after Lenin. Probably not everyone knows that Stalin also came to power as a centrist. He formed a bloc with Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev against the "leftist" Leon Trotsky, and later with Viacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoian, and others against the "rightist" Nikolai Bukharin. And only at the end of the 1920s, and then primarily with a view to strengthening his personal power, did he begin to implement the leftist program of "revolution from above" and terror. Khrushchev, who began by stripping himself of his own shirt in the secret report to the 20th Party Congress, also began to shift toward the center after the events in Hungary in 1956. Speaking at the Chinese embassy in Moscow, he called Stalin a "great Marxist-Leninist," then quarreled with representatives of the intelligentsia who ardently supported the criticism of the personality cult, and so forth. True, he was constantly getting carried away in the direction of extreme decisions. He, too, paid the full price for his inconsistency and thoughtless mistakes in October 1964.
Brezhnev was another matter. By his very nature, his type of education, and his career, he was a typical oblast-level apparatchik: not a bad executor of orders, but no leader. He therefore took a good deal from Stalin, but a little from Khrushchev, too.
At first after coming to power, Brezhnev began his working day in an unconventional way, devoting a minimum of two hours to telephone calls to other members of the top leadership and to many powerful secretaries of union republic Central Committees and obkoms. As a rule he always talked in the same way: "Look, Ivan Ivanovich, we are studying this matter. I wanted to consult you, to hear your opinion." You can imagine the sense of pride that filled Ivan Ivanovich's heart at that moment. That is how Brezhnev's prestige grew stronger. He created the impression of an impartial, calm, tactful leader who would not take a single step without consulting with other comrades and receiving the full approval of his colleagues.
When questions were discussed at sessions of the Central Committee Secretariat or the Presidium he almost never spoke first. He allowed everyone to have a say, listened attentively, and if there was no consensus he preferred to postpone the matter, do some more work, agree it with everyone, and submit it for examination again. It was under him that very complicated agreements flourished, requiring dozens of signatures on documents, bringing the decisions to be adopted to a standstill or entirely distorting their meaning.
As for the Brezhnev style, this was perhaps precisely of what it consisted. People with that style are not very competent at resolving substantive questions of the economy, culture, or policy. But they do understand very well whom to appoint to what post, whom to reward, when, and how. Leonid Il'ich worked hard to install in leadership posts (in the party organizations and in the economy, science, and culture) exponents of this style, "little Brezhnevs" who were not hasty, not incisive, not outstanding, and not particularly concerned about their jobs, but well able to handle valuables.
The people of the 20th Party Congress or those who were simply bold innovators were not shot, as they might have been in the 1930s. They were quietly pushed aside, pushed out, hampered, suppressed. More and more "mediocrities" triumphed everywhere, people who were not exactly stupid or entirely incompetent, but who were patently untalented, who lacked fighting qualities and principles. They gradually filled posts in the party and state apparat, in the leadership of the economy, and even in science and culture. Everything grew dull and went into a decline. The underlings increasingly resembled the boss.
Here is a curious fact. After Nikolai Egorychev's removal from the post of secretary of the Moscow party organization, Leonid Il'ich called him and said something like this: "Forgive me, these things happen. Do you have any problems at all, family problems or anything else?" Egorychev, whose daughter had married not long before and was struggling with a husband and child without an apartment, was weak enough to tell Brezhnev about this. And guess what? A few days later the young family had an apartment. Brezhnev did not want anyone to bear a grudge. If he had been a connoisseur of art, he would probably have preferred diluted pastels, with no bright colors, whether white or red, green or orange. He often presented his entourage with apartments himself. How about that? Can you imagine a US president handing out apartments?
Brezhnev arrived without his own program for the country's development. This is a rare case in modern political history of a person taking power as such, with no specific plans. But it cannot be said, in Mao Tse-tung's expression, that he was a clean sheet of paper on which any characters could be written. A deeply traditional and conservative man by nature, he was most afraid of abrupt movements, sharp turns, major changes. Condemning Khrushchev for voluntarism and subjectivism, he was concerned most of all with erasing his radical initiatives and restoring what had been approved in Stalin's day. First of all, the regional economic councils and the division of party organs into industrial and agricultural bodies (a form of Khrushchev pluralism?) which had so annoyed the government apparat were abolished. Major leaders who had been sent off against their will to the periphery, near and far, returned to their old places in Moscow. The idea of cadre rotation was quietly and almost unnoticeably nullified. As a counterweight to it, the slogan of stability the cherished dream of every apparatchik-was put forward. Brezhnev did not return to the Stalinist repressions, but he dealt summarily with dissidents.
People in the apparat used to recount Brezhnev's words on the subject of Kosygin's report at the September plenum:
What is he thinking of? Reform, reform. Who needs it, and who can understand it? We need to work better, that is the only problem.
What I really cannot agree with is the concept of "two Brezhnevs" (before and after the mid-1970s), the assertion that at the beginning of his time in office he was a supporter of economic and other reforms. People cite a lengthy quotation from Brezhnev's speech at the September 1965 plenum that is supposedly particularly characteristic of his position. But even then it was known for sure that Brezhnev was an active opponent of the reform proposed by Kosygin and that it was first and foremost his fault that it had failed.
Brezhnev's rule was twenty years of wasted opportunities. The technological revolution that had begun in the rest of the world passed us by. We did not even notice it, but instead we continued to talk about the traditional sort of scientific and technical progress. During that time Japan became the world's second industrial power, South Korea was hot on the heels of Japan, Brazil joined the ranks of the new centers of industrial might. True, we achieved military parity with the biggest industrial power of the modern world. But at what cost? At the cost of an increasing technological laggardness in all other spheres of the economy, a further disruption of agriculture, a failure to create a modem service sphere, and a freezing of the people's living standard at a low level.
The situation was complicated by the fact that any endeavor to modernize the model of socialism itself was rejected. On the contrary, faith in organizational and bureaucratic decisions grew stronger. No sooner had a problem arisen than the country's leadership reacted with one voice: Whose responsibility is it? We must set up a new ministry or some analogous organ.
Agriculture and the food problem were still the Achilles' heel of our economy. But decisions were sought according to the traditional patterns, which had already demonstrated their ineffectiveness in the preceding era. The policy of converting collective farms into state farms, that is, further state control, continued.
The wide use of agricultural chemicals did not yield the expected results. Despite the fact that in the 1970s the USSR was ahead of the United States in fertilizer production, labor productivity in agriculture was several times lower. One fourth of the working population of the USSR was unable to feed the country, while 3 percent of the US population, the farmers, produced so much that they sold a significant portion of it abroad.
There was only one reason for the economic and technological laggardness: incomprehension and fear in the face of urgently needed structural reforms; that is, the transition to economic accountability in industry, cooperativization of the service sphere, and team and family contracts in the countryside. And the most dreadful thing of all, for the regime of those years, would have been to agree to democratization and the restriction of the power of Brezhnev's main power base-the bureaucracy.
All attempts to progress along the path of reform and show economic independence or independence of thought were mercilessly clamped down.
The first lesson of the Brezhnev era is the collapse of the command- administrative system that grew up under Stalin. The state not only failed to ensure progress, it acted increasingly as a brake on society's economic, cultural, and moral development. Brezhnev and his entourage accumulated, in one respect, experience that is not entirely useless, although unfortunately it took nearly twenty years. There is no going back! Even if Brezhnev had decided to shore up the decaying edifice by regressing into Stalinist repressions, he would have been unable to make that system effective. Because the technological revolution demands free labor, personal initiative and commitment, creativity, continuous endeavor, rivalry. Structural reforms and restructuring were the essential, logical way out of stagnation.
The second lesson is that it is time to put an end forever to a system whereby people become the country's leaders not as a result of the normal democratic procedure and public activity in the party and state, but by means of backstage deals or, worse, conspiracies and bloody purges. Experience has already shown sufficiently that in this situation those who come to power are by no means the most capable leaders, the most committed Leninists, or those who are most devoted to the people; instead, they are the most cunning Ulysses types, the masters of infighting, intrigues, and even common corruption.
The most important guarantee against a recurrence of Brezhnevism is socialist pluralism, which the party has hit upon and is now implementing. It has its model in the Lenin period. At the same time we have the potential to go considerably further. Exaggerated fears about the extremes of glasnost-and such extremes undoubtedly do accompany the generally healthy flow-do not reflect concern for socialism, they are generated by an authoritarian political culture.
Here what we are up against most of all is the conservative tradition. Russian political culture has not tolerated pluralism of opinions or freedom to criticize government activity. It was only after the 1905 revolution that a small breach was made. But even then it was basically impossible to criticize the czar, czarism, or the existing system.
Guarantees of minority rights are associated with our pluralism, and have we not seen from our own experience how important that is? The revolutionary restructuring, at least in its initial stage, was based on the ideas, views, and will not of the majority, but of a minority. This has nearly always been the case when it comes to a struggle between the new and the old. The most virginal and graceful of all democracies, that of Athens, decided through the mouth of the majority that Socrates must drink poison. Drink it, Socrates, drink it, because the majority demands it! And in our country, did Stalin not draw on the will of the majority in the 1930s? We will say nothing of his comrades in arms; of them no questions were asked. Even Khrushchev, the mighty destroyer of the personality cult, sincerely and selflessly took part in slaughter by the will of the majority. The majority thought Bukharin was wrong. Go then, Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin], don't look back, the bullet will find its hole.
And most recently, Brezhnev-surely he was not alone? The vast majority in the government apparat idolized him and received everything from him, titles, prizes, academy money, dacha buildings, bribes. He was also supported by those social strata that lived fearlessly, and still live now, on unearned income.
How can one provide guarantees for the minority, for its will, its interests, its views? The minority, which today is apparently wrong, but which tomorrow could become the main champion of progress? Only by means of personal rights in the party, in the state, and in other institutions of the political system: freedom to think, speak, write, seek the truth, and strive for its recognition-there is no other way.
In the sphere of science and culture guarantees of minority rights are commonplace, although even here we have suffered from considerable bureaucratic coercion. It has not yet been erased from our memory how the majority persecuted geneticists, anathematized the theory of relativity and cybernetics, rejected jazz and still more rock and roll, wiped out abstract art, and rejected sociology and political science. Now it seems to be accepted that he who murders thought is three times a murderer. But there are other spheres that touch more closely on power and politics, where it is hard to guarantee the autonomy of the minority in the name of alternative solutions. Here we need particularly fine and accurate work by the legislator's chisel, to carve out the balance between the views and interests of the majority and the minority, true socialist pluralism.
And finally, down with flatterers in political life! Doubtless all political leaders from all peoples like flattery. But in our own time Stalin and Brezhnev liked flattery of the most exaggerated variety, the cult variety. And not because they believed such praise, but because the humiliation of the flatterer, his trampled, flattened demeanor, pleased them. Some of our homegrown Fouches and Talleyrands have gone through all the political regimes as easily as a knife through butter, and are now bustling feverishly in the struggle for self-preservation.
Fortunately people who have a clear program for the country's development and regard radical political reform as paramount have come and are coming to power in our country. Let us hope that the formation of a new school of political leadership and a new democratic culture of the whole people has begun. This will be a guarantee against a recurrence of Stalinist and Brezhnev traditions.
Source: Isaac Tarasulo, ed., Gorbachev and Glasnost: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press (Wilmington: SR Books, 1989), pp. 50-62.