Soviet Union and the Brezhnev Years

On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and as president of the Soviet Union. Half an hour later, the red flag over the Kremlin was lowered. The Soviet Union was no more and a new history was about to be written. But first, let’s go back in time a bit to get a better understanding of this event.

The individual republics comprising the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics declared their independence, and one of history’s largest empires disintegrated into the darkness of the winter evening in 1991.

What had happened since Gorbachev came to power just six years earlier? Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin offers us a clue. He says that Gorbachev tried to make the Communist Party both the instrument and the object of his reforms. And this proved untenable.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Gorbachev was a devout communist believer—and idealistic reformer—who was among the most accidental revolutionaries in history. He’d wanted to reform communism in order to save it. And yet he unintentionally dismantled the Soviet Union, in the process.

In many ways, Gorbachev’s idealism was sandwiched between the authoritarian tendencies that both preceded and followed him: the neo-Stalinism of his most significant contemporary predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev; and the neo-tsarist era of his most significant successor, Vladimir Putin.

But to understand this, we need to go further back in history, to a time when Leonid Brezhnev pushed his one-time patron, Nikita Khrushchev, from power in a 1964 party coup.

This article comes directly from content in the video series Understanding Russia: A Cultural History. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Brezhnev had been just a boy when Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik revolution that initiated the Soviet period in 1917. Brezhnev became a full member of the Communist Party in his 20s. For a time, he worked as an engineer, before devoting himself to politics. His standing in party circles rose— thanks to the support of Khrushchev—after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. 

Brezhnev repaid Khrushchev by supporting his benefactor, when the so-called anti-party group tried to push Khrushchev from office in 1957. But the next time, it was be Brezhnev who led the coup.

The Brezhnev Years

The Brezhnev years in the Soviet Union, from 1964 to 1982, are usually described as a period of stagnation. But it was one of the most stable eras in USSR history.

More Soviet citizens than ever before enjoyed better access to household items like refrigerators, telephones, and televisions, and the number of people living in communal apartments dropped. The problem was that Soviet citizens’ expectations had also grown.  Khrushchev had vowed that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States economically by 1970. 

But Brezhnev inherited a declining economy. And throughout his tenure, the growth rate trudged along at roughly 1 percent a year.  A large military budget, and the high costs associated with maintaining Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, put a damper on the aging revolution. At the same time, corruption and patronage benefited some actors in the state economy at the expense of others. And the black market flourished like never before.

One growth area during the Brezhnev years—a period known as advanced socialism—was in alcohol consumption. People drank out of desperation, and alcoholism became a national scourge.

Surviving in the Failing Economy

The Soviet people didn’t always know the details of their country’s economic problems, but they felt them. Empty store shelves belied the positive assessments appearing in Soviet newspapers like Pravda (meaning Truth) and Izvestiia (translated as News).

This gave rise to the Soviet joke that there was no truth in Pravda, and no news in Izvestiia.

The vast majority of Soviet citizens weren’t dissidents. But they weren’t naïve stooges of the communist government, either. And so, one way that everyday Soviets gave voice to the absurdity of the situation was through jokes—called anekdoty, in the Russian language.

Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, defines anekdoty as ‘short, formulaic’ jokes that constituted a popular ‘genre of irony’ during the Brezhnev years. These witticisms poked fun at Soviet leaders, at the Soviet system, and at people’s complicity in keeping socialism afloat. 

A famous one is about a man on Moscow’s Red Square shouting, “Brezhnev is an idiot!” Immediately, he is seized by security forces, and sentenced to 15 years: five years for insulting the Soviet leader, and 10 years for betraying a state secret.

Olympic Games and Politics

The Soviets might laugh at their leaders, but they still found cause for pride in their nation, particularly every four years when the Olympic games got under way. The Soviet state had always emphasized the importance of physical fitness for its people. 

During the Cold War, Olympian competitions between Western and Soviet-bloc athletes achieved importance on par with state diplomacy. The Soviet hockey team suffered an unlikely setback at the hands of amateur American ice hockey players at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. But once it did, the Soviets plotted their redemption at the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. Unfortunately for sports fans, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 resulted in a boycott of the Moscow Olympics by 66 countries, including the United States.

The Soviets intervened to prop up a leftist regime in Afghanistan. And this dragged on for a decade—at a cost of 15,000 Soviet lives and a tremendous amount of money. Brezhnev never saw fit to disengage. He and his fellow aging members of the Politburo ruled complacently, even as the economic growth rate fell to zero.

Common Questions about Leonid Brezhnev and the History of the Soviet Union

The Brezhnev years in the Soviet Union, from 1964 to 1982, are usually described as a period of stagnation. But it was one of the most stable eras in USSR history. More Soviet citizens than ever before enjoyed better access to household items like refrigerators, telephones, and televisions, and the number of people living in communal apartments dropped.

Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, defines anekdoty as ‘short, formulaic’ jokes that constituted a popular ‘genre of irony’ during the Brezhnev years. These witticisms poked fun at Soviet leaders, at the Soviet system, and at people’s complicity in keeping socialism afloat. 

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 resulted in a boycott of the Moscow Olympics by 66 countries, including the United States.

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