Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia · CHAPTER 7 ·
Brezhnev and the Era of Stagnation
Chapter 7 of Remaking the State: Meiji Japan 1600–1912 and Post-Soviet Russia 1964–2000: “The Stagnant Superpower”
After removing Khrushchev in October 1964, Leonid Brezhnev offered Soviet citizens stability: secure jobs, subsidised housing and food, and officials no longer purged. But growth slowed as the planned economy ran out of new inputs, reform was shelved after Prague 1968, and in December 1979 Soviet forces went into Afghanistan.
Chapter 7 is included with every paid plan. WW2 is free in full, and chapter 1 of every atlas is free. A free account opens 3 more chapters a day. Starter, at $9 a month, opens all 21 with no daily limit — see the plans.
Free printable Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, January 1980 — Afghanistan invaded.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1980 · Europe in 1980.
Part of IB History: Meiji Japan and post-Soviet Russia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In October 1964 Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues removed Nikita Khrushchev. Party officials had grown weary of his disruptive campaigns and wanted stability. They governed a country that looked as solid as the Tokugawa order had in 1840: the Soviet Union was the largest country on earth and one of two superpowers. Its fifteen union republics had capitals and parliaments of their own, but the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled them all, shown in red on the map. Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, directed production, supplies and prices as the head office of an enormous company might direct its branches. The new leadership offered an unwritten social contract: secure jobs, cheap bread and cheap rent in exchange for political silence.
Stability became harder to afford. Growth had depended on adding workers, machines and raw materials, but these inputs grew harder to obtain. American intelligence estimated annual growth at about 5% in the late 1960s and under 2% in the early 1980s. Factories rewarded for meeting targets hoarded supplies and neglected quality and cost. West Siberian oil, including Samotlor, brought hard currency—dollars and other money usable on world markets—especially after prices rose in 1973 and 1979. It paid for imported grain while defence absorbed perhaps a sixth of output. The crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet-led armies in 1968 had shown leaders the dangers they associated with reform; oil gave them a way to postpone it. In December 1979 they sent troops into Afghanistan, hatched on the map. The windfall bought the system a decade while removing pressure to change when change might have been cheaper.
The full story
Brezhnev’s promise of stability had a particular appeal to the people who governed. The party controlled important appointments through the nomenklatura, a list of posts requiring its approval. Imagine one organisation appointing a country’s managers, editors and generals: that gives some idea of the party’s reach. “Stability of cadres” assured officials that they would no longer face continual reshuffles or purges. The result was a leadership that grew old together. By 1980 the Politburo, the party’s ruling committee and effectively its cabinet, averaged about seventy years of age.
Citizens received security of another kind: guaranteed work, subsidised food and housing, free healthcare and education, and a slow rise in living standards. Many found the exchange for obedience acceptable. Yet a leadership committed to stability had difficulty changing the system that supplied it. A 1965 reform associated with Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin gave factories more freedom. After Warsaw Pact armies crushed reform in Prague in 1968, the Soviet reforms were quietly dropped. The arrow into Czechoslovakia crosses the grey-tan Soviet bloc, Eastern Europe’s communist states tied to Moscow by that military alliance; the Union itself appears as one red block. The authorities preserved order, while leaving difficult decisions for later.
Earlier Soviet growth had come largely from adding labour, capital and land. Economists call this “extensive” growth. A farm can expand by ploughing more fields without learning to cultivate its existing land better; Soviet industry had likewise grown by putting more resources to work. By the 1970s labour was growing slowly, old factories were wearing out, and extracting oil and minerals from distant Siberia cost more. Simply adding inputs was becoming a less effective way to grow.
The planning system gave enterprises weak incentives to use what they had carefully. A nail factory judged by output in tonnes could satisfy its target with heavy nails, regardless of whether customers needed them. The state rescued loss-making firms. Agriculture, meanwhile, was so weak that the Union regularly bought Western grain after 1972, importing about 55 million tonnes in 1984–85. Huge projects continued: the BAM, a second Siberian railway, absorbed vast resources, and cotton irrigation drained the Aral Sea. Mobilising resources on a grand scale was a Soviet strength; improving their everyday use was a different problem.
The oil boom made that problem easier to postpone. Samotlor and other West Siberian fields made the Union the world’s largest oil producer. The arrow westward shows exports to Eastern Europe and to Western buyers who paid hard currency, usable to buy goods on world markets. World prices quadrupled in 1973–74 and doubled again in 1979. With the proceeds leaders could buy grain and machinery and sustain the arms race, whose defence costs Western estimates put at perhaps 15–17% of national output. Oil paid bills that might otherwise have forced earlier choices about reform.
The same leadership could still act decisively abroad. In December 1979 a small group of ageing leaders sent the 40th Army into Afghanistan to replace a communist ruler they distrusted. The war lasted nine years and killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and between half a million and 2 million Afghans. Brezhnev died in 1982, followed within three years by two elderly successors. Their gerontocracy, or rule by old men, passed on a war and economic difficulties that had accumulated during two decades of postponement.
FULL EXPLANATION
Was the Brezhnev era really a stagnation?
The label “stagnation” (zastoi) came from Gorbachev’s supporters in the mid-1980s, when they were making the case for reform. It is therefore worth asking what it leaves out. Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, editors of Brezhnev Reconsidered, point to rising real incomes and millions of moves into new flats; later polls often found people remembering the period as the best of Soviet times. Such memories tell us something important about the security people enjoyed. The economy nevertheless slowed. CIA estimates prepared for Congress put average annual growth at about 5% in 1966–70, 3.4% in 1971–75, 2.3% in 1976–80 and under 2% in 1981–85. Soviet economist Grigory Khanin later considered even these figures too generous. Robert Allen explains much of the decline through investment in Siberian resources and old factories, and the diversion of scientists into defence. Comfort and slowdown can both belong in the account: the country was using reserves that a later generation would need.
How a planned economy fails quietly
János Kornai called socialist systems “economies of shortage”. His soft budget constraint helps explain how shortages could coexist with waste. A market firm that loses money long enough faces bankruptcy; a Soviet enterprise expected its ministry to cover the loss. Managers therefore had less reason to reduce costs, and good reason to hold extra workers and materials for future targets. They also bargained for plans that would be easier to meet. Moscow had to set hundreds of thousands of prices and targets without full information about local needs. The result could be queues for meat and shoes alongside warehouses of unwanted goods, with black-market trade and favours forming a “second economy”. Philip Hanson observes that shortage did not by itself cause collapse: such a system can persist for decades. Its difficulty was responding quickly when technology and prices changed, a growing disadvantage as the world economy moved around it.
The decision to invade Afghanistan
Documents released after 1991 show a decision that narrowed over the course of 1979. Afghanistan’s communists had seized power in April 1978; their radical land and social reforms provoked revolt. When rebels took Herat in March 1979, the Politburo refused Afghan requests for troops. Kosygin warned that Soviet soldiers would end up fighting the Afghan people. By December, however, Hafizullah Amin had murdered his rival Nur Muhammad Taraki, and Soviet leaders suspected Amin of American contacts. On 12 December a small circle including Brezhnev, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, defence minister Dmitry Ustinov and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko approved intervention; the full Politburo endorsed it afterwards. Rodric Braithwaite’s history of Soviet soldiers describes a war the army had itself advised against. The decision of four ageing men without real debate led to nine years of fighting, between about half a million and 2 million Afghan deaths, and about 5 million people driven into exile.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Khrushchev’s campaigns made stability attractive. Officials who removed Khrushchev in October 1964 had lived through a succession of upheavals. He had denounced Stalin, twice reorganised the party, launched the Virgin Lands campaign and brought the world to the brink over Cuba in 1962. His plan to rotate officials out of office threatened their own positions. His successors made predictability and security for officials central values of the next eighteen years.
Extensive growth ran out of inputs. Soviet industrialisation from the 1930s drew peasants into factories and concentrated investment in heavy industry. By the 1970s that supply of additional inputs was harder to maintain: birth rates had fallen in the Slavic republics, the cheapest resources in European Russia were exhausted, and new oil and gas lay thousands of kilometres east in harsh climates. Each extra rouble invested yielded less growth. A different source of productivity was needed to prevent a slowdown.
Prague 1968 made reform look dangerous. Alexander Dubček’s Czechoslovak reforms in 1968 relaxed censorship and promised “socialism with a human face”. Soviet leaders feared both the spread of reform and the possible loss of Czechoslovakia from the bloc. Warsaw Pact armies invaded in August, and Brezhnev claimed that socialist states could intervene where socialism was threatened. At home, the episode reinforced the fear that economic changes could open the way to political ones; the Kosygin reforms faded.
Oil windfalls postponed hard choices. West Siberian fields began producing as world oil prices soared in 1973–74 and again in 1979. The resulting rise in hard-currency earnings from oil and gas paid for grain, Western machinery and the arms race. Yegor Gaidar argued that the windfall allowed leaders to avoid reform for a decade. It also made state solvency depend on world prices that Moscow could not control.
THE TURNING POINT
Kabul, 27 December 1979. On 27 December 1979 Soviet forces stormed Amin’s palace in Kabul. The operation displayed the reach of a superpower: it could move an army across a border and replace a ruler in days. Yet a handful of elderly men had chosen intervention despite military warnings. The invasion ended détente with the West, brought an American grain embargo and Olympic boycott, and committed the Union to a war it could not win. Gorbachev’s description of Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound” in 1986 named a cost inherited by his reform government.
What it changed
A generation of reformers waited. Mikhail Gorbachev was among the younger officials who watched the Prague Spring crushed and later discussed change privately while rising through the party. He joined the Politburo in 1980 as its youngest member and served under Andropov, whose brief rule in 1982–84 attacked corruption and indiscipline. As the old leaders died in quick succession, this generation inherited the difficulties it had seen accumulate.
Dependence on oil set a trap. Oil and gas supplied most Soviet hard-currency earnings by the early 1980s. When world prices fell by more than half in 1985–86, that income fell away just as Gorbachev launched costly plans to accelerate growth. The revenue that had helped postpone reform now exposed the budget to a shock.
The bloc became a burden. Eastern Europe demanded resources as well as loyalty. Moscow sold its allies oil below world prices, sacrificing billions in hard currency that could buy goods on world markets. In Poland, the Solidarity trade union founded in 1980 demonstrated that workers could organise against a communist state; martial law, army rule with ordinary rights suspended, contained it in December 1981. By 1985 the bloc cost money Moscow could no longer spare, while its loyalty was uncertain. This made Gorbachev’s later choice not to defend it by force easier.
Afghanistan’s war outlived the decision. Afghanistan continued to cost the Union money and international standing, isolating it in the Muslim world and at the United Nations. About 15,000 Soviet soldiers died, army morale suffered, and veterans known as afgantsy returned to a society that preferred not to hear about the war. Withdrawal became one of Gorbachev’s first foreign-policy goals.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Soviet system in 1985 doomed, or could a different reform have saved it?
The evidence for an unavoidable crisis is substantial. By some estimates growth was near zero; the Union depended on oil prices and imported grain, while an expensive empire and ageing elite added to its difficulties. Yegor Gaidar argued that the oil-price collapse made crisis unavoidable. But a crisis need not end in collapse. Stephen Kotkin and others note that in 1985 the Union faced no revolt, no war it was losing on its own territory and no bankruptcy. North Korea shows that a poorly performing system can survive for decades. China after 1978 suggests another possible reform: opening agriculture and small business to markets while retaining the party’s monopoly of power. Soviet decline was real, but collapse required a trigger and choices, which the next chapters examine. Weak performance creates pressure for reform; the way leaders undertake it helps determine whether the system survives.
An interesting fact
In summer 1972 Soviet buyers quietly purchased roughly a quarter of the American wheat crop at subsidised prices before United States officials grasped the scale of the sales. American bread prices rose. The press called the episode the “Great Grain Robbery”, a name used as the title of a 1975 book. Before 1914 the Russian Empire had been one of the world’s largest grain exporters. Six decades later its Soviet successor, despite possessing some of the richest farmland on earth, depended on harvests from its Cold War rival.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Get the printable study guide for Remaking the State free. I’ll send you a few short letters, then one when a new atlas opens. That’s all. — Paul
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME