Was the Soviet system in 1985 doomed or still reformable?

The short answer

• 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.

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.