Leonid Brezhnev held the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from October 1964 until his death on the 10th of November 1982 — the second-longest tenure of any Soviet leader after Stalin's. The era named after him is, in conventional terminology, the period of "stagnation" (zastoy) — a label that was first applied by Mikhail Gorbachev at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986 and has stuck. The label is not entirely accurate. The Brezhnev period saw real material improvements in the everyday lives of most Soviet citizens, the diplomatic recognition of post-war borders by the West, the achievement of approximate strategic parity with the United States, and the cultural products that most Soviets remember with affection (the cinema of Gaidai, Ryazanov, and Mikhalkov; the songs of Vysotsky; the late Soviet literary tradition). It was also the period in which the underlying institutional and demographic problems of the Soviet system accumulated to the point that subsequent leaders found them unmanageable.
The Brezhnev settlement
The Brezhnev leadership's implicit political bargain — sometimes called the "Soviet social contract" by post-Soviet commentators — was the substitution of material stability and political safety for the high-tension political programme of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods. The arbitrary repression that had characterised earlier decades was effectively ended for the great majority of the population (the dissident movement, which is treated below, was the exception). Living standards, housing, and consumer-goods availability all improved substantially through the late 1960s and 1970s. Most Soviet families acquired, for the first time, their own apartment (often the prefabricated "Khrushchyovka" or its later Brezhnev-era successor), a television set, a refrigerator, and (more rarely) a private car. Soviet life expectancy increased to about seventy years by 1970 — although it would then begin a long, anomalous decline through the late 1970s that has been the subject of substantial demographic literature.
The price of the social contract was that the political and economic institutions of the country were not reformed. The party was, by the early 1980s, an institution of about eighteen million members (about one in seven adult Soviet citizens), and its senior cadres were collectively known as the nomenklatura — the list of senior positions filled by central-committee patronage. The nomenklatura's average age increased throughout the period; by 1982, the average age of the Politburo was sixty-eight. The party's official ideology continued to be Marxism-Leninism, but the gap between official ideology and everyday practice was widely recognised by Soviet citizens, who developed a sophisticated and ironic apparatus of private speech and humour to deal with it. The anthropologist Aleksei Yurchak's 2005 study Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is the standard analysis of late Soviet political life on these grounds.
The economy
Soviet economic growth slowed steadily through the period. Official Soviet figures (which were extensively manipulated and are not directly comparable to Western measures) showed growth at about five percent per year through the 1960s, falling to about three percent through the 1970s, and falling further to about one and a half percent in the early 1980s. CIA estimates were systematically lower; revisionist post-1991 reconstructions have generally been lower again. The principal causes of the slowdown were the exhaustion of the extensive-growth model (the Soviet economy had achieved rapid growth in the 1950s and 1960s by mobilising additional labour and capital, but by the 1970s could no longer increase inputs without diminishing returns) and the failure of the central planning system to produce comparable productivity gains through technological innovation.
The shadow economy — the vtoraya ekonomika, the second economy, of unofficial labour exchanges, off-the-books production, and informal markets — became, by the 1970s, a substantial supplementary sector. It was not separable from the official economy; most second-economy activity used materials and labour drawn from official enterprises. The 1976 study by the Berkeley economists Gregory Grossman and Vladimir Treml estimated the second economy at perhaps twenty percent of measured Soviet GDP. The black market for foreign currency, foreign goods, and apartment exchanges was a substantial feature of urban life. The institutional complicity of the official apparatus in second-economy activity was extensive.
The dissident movement
The Soviet dissident movement (dissidenty, from the Russian word borrowed from Western political vocabulary) emerged in the mid-1960s and developed through the 1970s into a small but visible network of writers, scientists, religious believers, and national activists who, on various grounds, publicly objected to aspects of Soviet policy. The principal figures included the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (whose One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962 with Khrushchev's personal authorisation and whose The Gulag Archipelago was published abroad in 1973, leading to his deportation in 1974); the physicist Andrei Sakharov (the lead designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, who from 1968 onward became the principal scientific dissident, and was internally exiled to Gorky in 1980); the historian Roy Medvedev (whose Let History Judge of 1971 was the standard dissident history of Stalinism); the Crimean Tatar activists campaigning for the return to their ancestral homeland (from which Stalin had deported the entire population in 1944); the Jewish refusenik movement campaigning for the right to emigrate to Israel; and the Helsinki Watch groups founded after 1976 in response to the human-rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act.
The state response was a combination of judicial and psychiatric repression. Dissidents could be tried under articles 70 (anti-Soviet agitation) and 190-1 (spreading false information defamatory to the Soviet state) of the RSFSR criminal code, with terms of up to seven years in the camps and five years of internal exile. They could also be involuntarily committed to special psychiatric hospitals — a practice that became a subject of substantial international protest (the Soviet psychiatric profession was suspended from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983). The dissident movement was, in scale, small — at most a few thousand active participants — but its work in documenting and publicising Soviet conditions was a substantial factor in late-Soviet history.
Détente and Afghanistan
Soviet foreign policy in the Brezhnev period was dominated by the relationship with the United States and, after 1969, with China. The early 1970s saw the period of détente — a relative warming of US-Soviet relations marked by the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) of 1972, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and a substantial increase in cultural and trade exchange. Détente collapsed in the late 1970s under a combination of Soviet military buildup, the Soviet deployment of SS-20 medium-range missiles in Europe, the American Carter administration's response to those deployments, and — most decisively — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the 25th of December 1979.
The Afghan war ran for nine years (1979–1989), cost the Soviet army approximately fifteen thousand dead and many more wounded, drained substantial resources, and produced no political resolution. The war became, in Soviet domestic perception, the "Soviet Vietnam." It contributed substantially to the loss of regime legitimacy that would, under Brezhnev's successors, become impossible to recover. The war was the subject of considerable veteran resentment (the afgantsy formed substantial veteran organisations that would have political influence in the late 1980s and 1990s).
Brezhnev's death
Brezhnev's health was visibly deteriorating from the mid-1970s. He suffered several strokes from 1976 onward, lost much of his capacity for sustained work, and was, by 1980, largely a ceremonial figure attended by a circle of personal physicians and political handlers. The decoration of his lapel with successive military honours and party medals (he eventually accumulated 117 separate decorations, the largest collection in Soviet history) was an occasion of widespread private mockery. He died of a heart attack at his dacha on the 10th of November 1982, aged seventy-five. The state funeral on the 15th of November was attended by the leaders of the world's principal Communist states and a substantial Western diplomatic representation. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chairman, whose own brief tenure is the opening of the next chapter.
End of Chapter VII