Era of Stagnation

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Gorbachev called the Era of Stagnation 'the lowest stage of socialism' once he had the power to say so. The phrase carried weight. It was a verdict on twenty years of Soviet governance, delivered by the man who inherited them. It covered the long rule of Leonid Brezhnev, from 1964 to 1982, and then the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Scholars have since disagreed about when the stagnation began, what caused it, and whether the verdict was fair. The Soviet Union in this period filled contradictory roles. It was a superpower with deep structural problems. Its officials, meanwhile, insisted everything was developing on schedule. Supporters of Gorbachev would later blame Brezhnev for being too conservative and failing to change with the times. Brezhnev's defenders could point to real achievements. Between those two assessments lies a more complicated picture.

• 2. The Official Version

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  The 24th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union met in 1971. It made something official: the Soviet Union had entered the 'period of developed socialism.' That declaration had a specific political purpose. In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev had promised publicly that the country would reach full communism within twenty years. As the 1960s progressed and that deadline became clearly unachievable, Soviet ideologues needed a substitute. Developed socialism offered an open-ended replacement. It held that the country had advanced to a sufficiently high stage of socialism. The transition to communism would follow naturally, at some unspecified future date. Nobody had to say when.

  The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial of 1966 convicted two writers of anti-Soviet agitation. Some historians mark that moment as the true end of the cultural openness of the Khrushchev years. Others point to 1968, when Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring. Neither event appeared in the official vocabulary of the era. 'Era of Stagnation' as a term did not exist during the Brezhnev years themselves. Gorbachev coined it in the 1980s to describe the economic difficulties that developed under Brezhnev's rule. When his supporters used the phrase, they were making an argument, not just a historical observation. Alexei Kosygin had already launched, in 1965, the first serious attempt to change what the official vocabulary refused to acknowledge.

• 3. What the Economy Actually Did

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  Robert Vincent Daniels, in his book Russia's Transformation, identified a 'great paradox' at the heart of the Brezhnev era. Coal production in the Soviet Union climbed from 85 million metric tons in 1964 to 149 million metric tons in 1981. In the United States over the same period, coal production grew from 100 to 130 million metric tons. The Soviet Union became the largest exporter of petroleum in the world. By the end of the Tenth Five-Year Plan, which ran from 1976 to 1981, Soviet GNP had reached about 60% of the American level. Robert Service, in his History of Modern Russia, placed Soviet industrial capacity second only to the United States. According to Service, the country produced more steel, oil, pig-iron, cement, and tractors than any other country on earth. The Soviet Union became the world's largest wheat producer. And yet it was unable to produce meat in sufficient quantities. Service concluded that Brezhnev's policy of stability was 'a recipe for political disaster.'

  Archie Brown, in The Rise and Fall of Communism, called the 'Era of Stagnation' label fitting for a period of declining growth. Brown noted, however, that the label was misleading outside the economic sphere. He pointed to the Eighth Five-Year Plan as evidence that the picture was not uniform. Soviet economic growth in the second half of the 1960s was stronger than it would ever be again. Philip Hanson, in his economic history of the USSR, agreed the label was not 'entirely unfair.' Per capita consumption grew by 1.9% during the 1970s, which Hanson called 'a highly respectable rate.' Compared to the repressions of Stalin and the instability of Khrushchev, Hanson described the era as 'a period of (comparative) plenty.' Mark Harrison argued that analysis of the Brezhnev era had not been objective. Assessments of the period, he claimed, often relied on lower economic estimates than the data warranted. The economy Gorbachev actually inherited, Harrison argued, was more dynamic than the standard account suggested.

  Gregory Grossman's research on what he termed the 'second economy of the Soviet Union' pointed to a further complication. By the 1970s and 1980s, unofficial markets had grown large enough to distort central planning. Gosplan, the state planning body, could not measure what it could not officially acknowledge. Some scholars argued this failure contributed directly to the eventual economic collapse. The 1973 oil crisis temporarily masked these structural problems by boosting Soviet hard currency earnings. But underneath that windfall, the country's technological position relative to the West was deteriorating in ways that no oil revenue could reverse.

• 4. The Computer Problem

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  Brezhnev's regime, confronted with a chaotic lack of standards in Soviet computing, made a drastic choice. It ordered an end to all independent computer development. From that point forward, all Soviet computer models were required to be based on the IBM/360, an American mainframe design. The reasoning was straightforward: adopt a proven platform rather than continuing to develop competing Soviet systems. The outcome was something else entirely. The Soviet Union was never able to build enough IBM/360-based platforms to meet demand. It was even less able to improve on the original design. As the gap widened, the country increasingly resorted to pirating Western technology rather than developing its own.

  Heavy industry and the arms sector absorbed the greatest share of Soviet investment throughout the 1970s. Consumer goods were systematically neglected as a result. The centralized planning system moved through procedures too cumbersome to permit the rapid innovation that computing required. Soviet industries could not respond to public demand the way Western counterparts could. This was especially acute in computing, where falling behind meant falling further behind with every passing year. Andrei Sakharov raised the military spending issue directly in a 1980 letter to Brezhnev. He argued that ever-increasing expenditure on the armed forces was actively stalling economic growth. Starting in the early 1970s, the consequences of these structural problems began to show up in a different category of data entirely.

• 5. What Bodies Revealed

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  Elizabeth Brainerd's research documented a measurable change in the physical condition of Soviet citizens. From 1940 to 1969, the average height and weight of newborns and adults in the Soviet Union consistently improved. Infant mortality rates fell over the same period. These anthropometric measures track closely with nutrition during infancy, childhood, and early adulthood, making them reliable proxies for standard of living. After 1970, the trend reversed. Child height appeared to halt, and possibly regressed slightly in the early 1970s. Birth weights similarly declined after 1970. There were no significant gains in average adult height during this period.

  In 1965, female life expectancy in the Soviet Union nearly equaled that of women in the United States. Male life expectancy fell below that of American men by only 2.5 years. By 1980, both gaps had grown dramatically. Russian men in that year had a life expectancy nearly 8.5 years shorter than their American counterparts. For women, the gap had grown to 4.3 years. Starting in the 1970s, infant mortality rates began to increase statistically. Some researchers attributed the rise to improved reporting rather than actual worsening conditions. Brainerd addressed that debate by pointing to the increase in developed regions where reporting was already complete. The rise, she argued, was real. The widening health gap between Soviet and American citizens was, by 1980, a measurable consequence of choices made at the highest levels of government. Those choices were not made without opposition from within the Soviet leadership itself.

• 6. Reform and Its Limits

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  Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev entered the Brezhnev era with different visions of economic policy. Kosygin, as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, wanted to increase investment in consumer goods and light industry. Brezhnev preferred heavy industry, agriculture, and defence. In 1965, Kosygin introduced a reform aimed at improving the planned economy within a socialist framework. It borrowed elements from Western practice, including the concept of profit-making. Brezhnev agreed to it because the Soviet economy was already entering a period of low growth. During the Eighth Five-Year Plan, from 1966 to 1970, the reform produced large-scale land reclamation programmes and new irrigation infrastructure. Historians have judged the overall reform a failure. They describe any link between it and the period's high growth rates as 'tenuous.'

  Kosygin's second reform attempt came in the early 1970s and was more modest than the first. His more ambitious proposals had been halted in 1971. By the 1970s, Brezhnev had consolidated enough power to stop what he considered radical change. A 1979 reform sought to increase the central government's economic involvement rather than reduce it. Kosygin died in 1980. His successor, Nikolai Tikhonov, took a conservative approach to economics. Very little of the 1979 reform was actually carried out. Scholars link the era's political stagnation to what they called gerontocracy. The Soviet leadership had grown old. Sakwa, in The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, put it directly: without strong leadership, 'Soviet socialism had a tendency to relapse into stagnation.'

  Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in November 1982 and introduced modest reforms. He died little more than a year later, in February 1984. Konstantin Chernenko continued many of Andropov's policies. Mark Harrison argued that the reforms under these two leaders had actually improved the economic situation. The economy Gorbachev inherited, Harrison claimed, had low internal and external debts and more momentum than is generally recognized. When Gorbachev took power, he launched Uskoreniye, a programme of accelerated investment in heavy industry. When that approach fell short, the Communist Party introduced perestroika, restructuring the Soviet economy through quasi-capitalist reforms. Those official changes arrived after decades of a very different kind of response. It came not from committees or plans, but from Soviet citizens who had not waited for official permission to make their views known.

• 7. Dissent and Its Costs

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  Eight protesters gathered in Red Square in Moscow to demonstrate against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. They were subsequently imprisoned. Across the country, others who protested were dismissed from their jobs, beaten, or arrested. Homes of suspected dissidents were searched. Supporters of these demonstrations argued that no law had been broken. They cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. They also cited the final act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, concluded in 1975. Both documents, they argued, protected the right to obtain and distribute information. A group of Moscow lawyers built a specialized practice defending people charged with anti-Soviet activity. The demand for their services was steady.

  Viktor Astafyev and Oles Honchar were writers who criticized the social and moral dimensions of the era without directly confronting political authority. Playwright Grigory Gorin and directors Eldar Ryazanov and Mark Zakharov followed a similar approach. Artists who worked in full compliance with Soviet values, within the framework of socialist realism, occupied a different position entirely. They constituted a well-paid, elite group that enjoyed an easy life and high social status. Andrei Sakharov, a prominent nuclear physicist, and Soviet Army General Pyotr Grigorenko became well-known representatives of the dissident movement. Both chose open confrontation with the political authorities.

  Under Gorbachev's glasnost policies, the details of how the Brezhnev government had suppressed political speech came to light. Many writers claimed at the time that they had been unaware of how widespread the suppression was. Glasnost also brought into view a record of arrests, job dismissals, and house searches that had been effectively invisible during the Brezhnev years. The democratization that Gorbachev introduced, through reforms he called demokratizatsiya, arrived too late for many of those who had paid for it. But glasnost gave their cause something it had never received during the Stagnation: official acknowledgment that it was real.