Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman 9781838606381, 9780755642120, 9780755642113

Citation preview

Brezhnev

i

ii

Brezhnev The Making of a Statesman Susanne Schattenberg

Translated by John Heath

iii

I.B.TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Böhlau Verlag, Susanne Schattenberg: Leonid Breschnew, Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie, Cologne, 2019 The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). English Language Translation © John Heath Susanne Schattenberg has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Toby Way | tobyway.co.uk Cover image: Leader of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, 1974. (© Laski Diffusion/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-8386-0638-1 ePDF: 978-0-7556-4211-3 eBook: 978-0-7556-4210-6

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

That I still enjoy thinking about Brezhnev to this day may be due to the fact that he was the first Kremlin lord who made the transition from an uncanny factor of power to a person, experienced and calculable in his strengths and weaknesses. The man revealed a Russian soul, capable of great emotions and generous gestures – brutality too, certainly. Egon Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit History also consists of personal fates and lost opportunities. Egon Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit

v

vi

Contents List of illustrations Glossary and list of abbreviations Leonid Brezhnev: Chronology of life events Note on translation Introduction A man without a biography Archives and files Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ Brezhnev’s ‘diaries’ and his photographer 1

2

3

4

ix xii xvi xix 1 4 5 8 10

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man Striving for education and bourgeois prosperity Time out of joint: revolution and civil war, 1917–1920 Land manager in turbulent times, 1927–1930 Evening classes and activism, 1931–1935 Shock worker-engineer and director again, 1935/36

14

‘How the Steel was Tempered’, or a Career Amidst Terror and War Rise during the Great Terror The ‘Great Patriotic War’ In the Carpathians

44

In Stalin’s Shadow, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship I Patronage Zaporozh’ye Dnepropetrovsk In Moldavia Stalin’s extra in Moscow

73

Under Khrushchev, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship II Virgin lands under the plough Khrushchev’s right-hand man President of the Soviet Union Khrushchev ousted

15 19 28 36 40

44 53 61

73 76 84 92 114 118 120 142 153 163

vii

viii 5

6

7

8

9

Contents The Caring General Secretary, or Collective Leadership as Theatre Trust and care: Brezhnev’s scenario of power Familiarity in the Politburo, or Lënya, Kostya and Andryusha Male bonding Live and Let Live, or ‘Everyone should be able to live and work in peace’ Benefactor and carer The consumption course Brezhnev versus Kosygin and Gosplan ‘The cadres decide everything’ ‘Developed Socialism’, or Re-launching the Soviet Project? ‘Developed socialism’ Re-Stalinization? ‘We are heroes’: the cult of the Second World War The BAM – the last of the Mohicans Emotions and Pills in the Cold War, or How to Play the Western Statesman Concordia domi … or consensus in the East … … foris pax, or peace with the West The return to mistrust Faltering foreign policy Craving Glory and Physical Decline, or the Loneliness of the General Secretary The cult of personality Addiction Family and death

Epilogue Notes Sources and Bibliography Archives Memoirs and documents Author’s interviews Online sources Secondary literature Index

172 172 189 193

204 205 220 225 235 242 242 246 261 263

267 269 283 314 320

333 336 342 353 356 363 455 455 457 462 462 463 472

Illustrations 1

Self-portrait of Brezhnev during the war, taken with a German Rolleiflex camera. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

xx

Leonid Brezhnev with siblings Vera and Yakov as members of an amateur dramatics troupe in Kursk, 1924. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

13

Brezhnev family photograph: the mother standing, the father sitting with Brezhnev’s siblings Yakov and Vera, Leonid standing on the right in his grammar school uniform, 1915. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

16

Brezhnev, centre, fifth from the left in the light shirt, as a student at the college in Kursk, wearing a student’s uniform and cap, 1927. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

26

Brezhnev, sitting, first left, as a freshly graduated engineer in the company of his fellow students in Kamenskoye, 1935. Credit: Muzey Istorii Mista Kam’yans’ke

38

Viktoriya and Leonid Brezhnev as a married couple in Kamenskoye, 1935. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

39

Brezhnev during the war, with his favourite horse, Donchak. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

43

Brezhnev (r.) talking with Nikita Khrushchev (l.), 1 June 1942. Credit: Credit: Rossijskiy Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Kinofotodokumentov GAKFD 1-81597

43

Brigade Commissar Brezhnev, in the foreground, seated, addresses the troops, 1942. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

45

10 Major General Brezhnev (centre) at the Red Square victory parade under the banner of the ‘Fourth Ukrainian Front’, left General Colonel Kirill Moskalenko, right General Lieutenant Andrey Bondarëv, 24 June 1945. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

65

11 Brezhnev and his wartime love Tamara Levchenko, 1943. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

70

12 Brezhnev (first right) at a ceremony marking the re-firing of the first blast furnace at Zaporozhstal’ steelworks in Zaporozh’ye, 30 June 1947. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

72

2

3

4

5

6 7 8

9

ix

x

Illustrations

13 Brezhnev (second right) with a government commission at Zaporozhstal’, 1947. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

72

14 Brezhnev, 1945. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

74

15 Brezhnev as deputy party leader of Kazakhstan with a farmer on the ‘Taman Division’ sovkhoz in Bulayevskiy uyezd, Kazakhstan, 1954. Credit: Tsentral’nyy Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Kinofotodokumentov i Zvukozapisey Kazakhstana, photo no. 2-71805

117

16 Honours ceremony to mark the successful space mission by Yuriy Gagarin; from left to right: Brezhnev, Academy President Mstislav Keldysh, Nikita Khrushchev and Second Party Secretary Frol Kozlov, Moscow, 19 June 1961. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

117

17 Brezhnev presents Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva with a medal, 17 December 1960. Credit: GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 37b, l. 45

155

18 Brezhnev pins a medal to the lapel of the head of the Georgian party, Vasiliy Mzhavanadze; between them is Mikhail Georgadze, 22 September 1962. Credit: GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 37v, l. 8

155

19 Brezhnev, second left, surrounded by his aides at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, 1970. Credit: Fond Gorbacheva, photo no. Bo013

171

20 Brezhnev on the phone while on holiday in Crimea, 1982. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

190

21 Brezhnev with a stag at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, 1977. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

195

22 Standing, left to right: Brezhnev, First Secretary of the CP of Ukraine Vladimir Shcherbitskiy, Andrey Gromyko. Seated, right: Josip Broz Tito; Zales’ye hunting lodge near Kiev, 1976. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

196

23 Brezhnev visits the Pepsi Cola factory in Novorossiysk, 1974. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

203

24 Brezhnev visiting the BAM construction site in Skovorodino, 1978. The banner reads: ‘BAM – pride of the Lenin Komsomol’. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

241

25 Brezhnev and Willy Brandt on a boat trip off Crimea, 1971. Credit: © dpa-Bildarchiv, photographer: Alfred Hennig

266

26 Brezhnev and Alexander Dubček at the Bratislava Meeting, 3 August 1968. Credit: Archiv FSO 2-095-12-2

273

27 Brezhnev and Brandt on a boat trip off Crimea, 1971. Credit: picture alliance / akg-images

293

Illustrations

xi

28 Brezhnev and Brandt swimming in Crimea, 1971. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

295

29 Brezhnev on a Black Sea boat trip: ‘I look like Alain Delon’, 1971. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

296

30 Brezhnev and Georges Pompidou during a tête-à-tête at the Château de Rambouillet, 1971. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

297

31 Richard Nixon and Brezhnev between officers of the Black Sea Fleet, 1974. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

301

32 Brezhnev getting into the Mercedes he had just been given, on the Petersberg outside Bonn, 1973. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

305

33 Brezhnev behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental with Nixon in the passenger seat, Camp David 1973. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

307

34 Brezhnev walks a guard of honour held by the Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, 1978. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

332

35 Brezhnev in his marshal’s uniform in his office in the Kremlin, 1978. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

334

36 Brezhnev with a member of staff in Crimea, 1982. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

335

37 From left to right: Suslov (with his back to the camera), Brezhnev, Andropov, Ustinov and Chernenko in the Politburo lounge on Army Day, 23 February 1975. Credit: Vladimir Musael’yan

351

Glossary and list of abbreviations Bolsheviks Members of the Communist Party and its predecessor, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which split into the ‘Bolsheviks’ (the ‘majority’), following Lenin, and the ‘Mensheviks’ (the ‘minority’) in 1903. Cadre Soviet expression for personnel in the sense of specialist staff, but in the political context the term was also used for party functionaries as well as for people in general. Candidate (e.g. in the Politburo) Member of the party organization without voting rights; a status on the way to becoming a full member with voting rights. Central Committee (CC) Represented the party between the party congresses and implemented the guidelines determined at the latter. The CC was elected at the party congresses and in turn appointed the ð Politburo; under Brezhnev the CC usually convened twice a year in a plenum and comprised around four hundred members and candidates. Central Rada ‘Rada’ = Ukrainian for ð soviet or council, the title of the government of Ukraine (1917–1920) after its secession from the Russian Empire, in which it was supported by the German occupying forces. After the Germans withdrew, the Central Rada was outlawed by the Bolsheviks. Cheka Stands for the letters in Russian ‘ЧК’, which together are pronounced ‘cheka’; the abbreviation for the ‘Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution’; predecessor to the ð OGPU Collectivization Merger of all farmsteads to create collective farms (ð kolkhozes) as the state took ownership of the land, livestock and machines; implemented in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1933, initially on a voluntary basis, then by force and expropriation. After 1945, collectivization was enforced in the occupied countries of East-Central Europe, the Baltic and Moldavia. Cooperative Peasants’ economic community: the peasants voluntarily formed a collective to tend the fields and their livestock and sell their products; the land, livestock and machines remained the property of the respective peasants, however. CP Communist Party CPC Communist Party of Czechoslovakia CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1952–1991 CPU Communist Party of Ukraine CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Conference first assembled in Helsinki in 1973 and became renowned after the Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975. Originally the Soviet Union’s initiative for peaceful coexistence with and rapprochement with the West, it was renamed the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) in 1995. CSSR Czechoslovak Socialist Republic Dekulakization Officially, the dispossession and abolition of the ‘exploiting class’ of wealthy peasants (ð kulaks) in the years 1928–1933; in fact, the displacement, arrest and deportation of countless thousands of peasants who opposed Soviet power.

xii

Glossary and abbreviations

xiii

DneproGES Hydroelectric plant and dam, a prestige project located in the city of Zaporozh’ye (Ukrainian Zaporizhzhya) on the Dnieper, built in 1928–1932 and rebuilt after the war in the years 1944–1950, a symbol of the country’s electrification. Executive committee State, administrative or government organ that conducted the business of the ð soviets or their congresses when they did not convene. On the city level, executive committees roughly corresponded to the mayor’s office, while on the all-Union level they were the supreme law-making body until 1937; they were replaced by the ð Supreme Soviet in 1938. FSB Federal Security Service; the Russian successor organization to the Soviet ð KGB GDR German Democratic Republic; East Germany Glasnost Literally ‘transparency, openness’; the dissidents’ demand from the 1960s onwards, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s programme of allowing greater freedom of opinion and freedom of the press initiated in 1987. Gosplan Central state planning authority for creating and monitoring the yearly and five-year plans for the Soviet economy. KGB Committee for State Security: secret or state police for the observation and persecution of any form of dissenting behaviour or thinking; known under this acronym from 1954 onwards, successor organization of the ð MGB Kolkhoz Peasant collective farm: the land, livestock and machines belonged to the enterprise in which the peasants worked and had to meet set production quotas; the state paid set prices for the products; the peasants’ wages consisted only of what was left after the costs of production were deducted. Komsomol The Communist Party’s youth organization Kuban Cossacks Cossacks (mounted bands, renowned for their espirt de corps and notorious for their pogroms) who settled by the River Kuban. Kulak In Russia, originally particularly successful and respected peasants; under the ð Bolsheviks, the word became a term of abuse for landowners who ‘exploited’ and ran large-scale farms but also a designation with which to agitate against anyone who refused to cooperate with the Soviet Union. Machine tractor station (MTS) MTSs were set up to lend agricultural machinery such as tractors, combine harvesters etc. to kolkhozes that did not have their own. Magnitka Abbreviation for the metal plant in Magnitogorsk, like ð DneproGES a symbol of the country’s industrialization and the pride taken in it. It underwent its first phase of construction in the years 1929–1932. MGB Ministry for State Security, secret state police; the successor organization to the ð NKVD and the predecessor to the ð KGB Middle peasants In the Soviet typology, a group of farmers between the poor peasants (bednyaki) and the ð kulaks – neither exploiters nor the main clientele of the ð Bolsheviks. Middle peasants were peasants who were able to feed themselves comformably without hoarding great wealth or employing peons. NATO Double Track Decision Decision by the NATO states of 12 December 1979 to instal new (Pershing II) missiles in Western Europe while insisting on negotiations with the Soviet Union on limiting intermediate-range missiles. New Economic Policy (NEP) 1921–1927: abolition of the war communism of the Civil War (1918–1920) with its forced requisitioning of food and food rations that were then distributed to the people according to their ‘societal value’; trade was permitted; a monetary economy was reintroduced; licences were granted to private entrepreneurs and even to foreigners; normal business and food consumption returned.

xiv

Glossary and abbreviations

The New Man The Bolsheviks’ ð ideal of the new citizen they sought to create, a communist who would rise up from oppression and ignorance to become a universally educated person with the correct – Bolshevik – consciousness. NKVD People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, in fact secret and state police, in the years 1934–1941; successor to the ð OGPU, predecessor of the ð MGB Oblast The largest regional administrative unit within the republics of the USSR. The Russian Empire consisted of governorates, each comprising several uyezdy. The first Soviet regional administration reform, implemented in stages from 1923 onwards, created extremely large administrative regions by fusing several governorates to form single oblasti. For instance, in 1924 Ural’sklaya oblast was created from four governorates, which became known as okrugi. An ð okrug was further divided into several rayony. A ð rayon was the smallest, local-level administrative district. (Kursk Governorate, where Brezhnev was deployed in 1927, did not become an okrug until 1928, when it became part of Tsentral’no-Chernozemnaya oblast.) OGPU Joint State Political Directorate, in fact secret and state police; the successor to the ð Cheka, predecessor of the ð NKVD Okrug Mid-level administrative district, between the local-level ð rayon and the vast regional ð oblast. Party active The active and committed Bolsheviks from whose ranks cadres were selected for the many party offices and functions in all areas of the state, the party, the economy and culture. Party Presidium Name for the ð Politburo from 1952 to 1966; renamed by Stalin. Brezhnev reintroduced the old name. Perestroika Literally: ‘restructuring’; together with ð glasnost, part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s extensive reform programme from 1985 to 1991 aiming to open up Soviet society, make the economy more efficient and render the Soviet Union more attractive politically. Politburo De facto the highest organ of power, the panel of the ð party Central Committee tasked with running operations when the CC didn’t convene; the Politburo generally comprised around ten members. It was known under this name from 1919 to 1952 and from 1966 to 1991; in the interim period it was called the ð Party Presidium Political commissar A ð political worker in the army whose task was to take care of the troops and ensure that they displayed ð Bolshevist morale and were mentally and ideologically prepared for the next battle. Political work, political worker Agitation or the agitor whose task was to educate the population via propaganda work in line with the aims of the ð Bolshheviks Rayon The smallest, local-level administrative district in the USSR, beneath the mid-level ð okrug and the vast regional ð oblast Red Guards Volunteer army from 1917 to 1919; formed before the establishment of the Red Army in 1918 for the armed defence of the ð Bolshevik victory. RSFSR The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, for short the Russian Republic within the USSR. SALT Strategic Arms Limitation Talks – negotiations on the limitation of strategic armament between the USA and the USSR from 1969 to 1972 and 1972 to 1979; each set of negotiations resulted in a treaty on nuclear arms limitation: SALT I, signed by Brezhnev and Nixon in Moscow in 1972 and SALT II, signed by Brezhnev and Carter in Vienna in 1979. Soviet Russian for council; distinct from the party organizations in that the soviets were the state administrative organs on all levels, from the rayon to the Union level. Sovkhoz Peasants’ state farm; unlike a ð kolkhoz, the peasants were employed by the state and were entitled to a fixed salary.

Glossary and abbreviations

xv

Supreme Soviet From 1938 to 1991, the parliament elected by the people and formally the highest authority. It passed laws and appointed the government – de facto entirely following proposals by the ð CP ð Politburo VKP(b) All-Union Communist Party of ð Bolsheviks, the name of the ð CP from 1925 to 1952, before it was renamed the ð CPSU White Army, White Guards Collective term for all troops who fought against the ð Bolsheviks (the ‘Reds’) during the Civil War (1918–20), ranging from the democrats to the monarchists; the White Guards were bands of volunteers who joined the fight against the ð Bolsheviks.

Leonid Brezhnev Chronology of life events

1906, 19 Dec. 1915–1921

Born in Kamenskoye (Dneprodzerzhinsk from 1936 to 2016, as of 2016 Kam’yans’ke) Attended grammar school, after 1919 the First Workers’ School 1917 February and October Revolutions 1918–1920 Civil War 1921/22 Famine

1921–1926 1923–1927 1923 1927–1930

1928 1929

Porter at a cooking fat factory in Kursk Student at the Technical College of Land Management and Melioration in Kursk Joined the Komsomol Land manager in Grayvoronskiy uyezd (governorate of Kursk), Mikhaylovskiy rayon (Sverdlovskiy okrug), the town of Bisert’ (Sverdlovskiy okrug) and the city of Sverdlovsk (today’s Yekaterinburg) Married Viktoriya Petrovna Denisova Birth of daughter Galina 1928–1932 First five-year plan, beginning of forced heavy industrialization and the concurrent collectivization and dekulakization of agriculture 1932/33 Famine

1930, Sept.–Nov.

Student at the Kalinin Institute for Agricultural Machinery in Moscow 1930/31, Nov.–Feb. Fitter at the Communard engineering plant in Zaporozh’ye 1931 Joined the party 1931–1935 Evening classes at the Arsenichev Institute of Metallurgy at the Faculty of Thermal Power 1931/32 Worker at the Dzerzhinskiy metal plant in Kamenskoye 1933 Birth of son Yuriy 1933–1935 Director of the Workers’ Faculty in Kamenskoye 1935, Jan. Graduated in thermal engineering 1935 Engineer at the Dzerzhinskiy metal plant in Kamenskoye 1936 Military service in Chita, Far East, in a tank division 1936/37 Director of the Dneprodzerzhinsk Technical College of Metallurgy 1937/38 The Great Terror

xvi

Chronology of life events 1937, May 1937, Aug. 1937, Nov. 1938, May 1939, Feb. 1940, Sept. 1941, March

xvii

Elected to the city party committee of Dneprodzerzhinsk Deputy chairman of the city soviet (deputy mayor) of Dneprodzerzhinsk Elected to the organizing bureau of the city party committee of Dneprodzerzhinsk Head of the department of trade of the oblast party committee of Dnepropetrovsk Propaganda secretary of the oblast party committee of Dnepropetrovsk Third secretary of the oblast party committee of Dnepropetrovsk Armament secretary of oblast party committee of Dnepropetrovsk oblast 1941, 22 June German invasion of the Soviet Union

1941, June 1941, Sept. 1942, Aug. 1943, April 1945, May 1945, Aug. 1946, Sept. 1947, Nov. 1950, April 1950, July 1952, Oct.

Head of a special group of the Military Council of the Southern Front Deputy leader of the political administration of the Southern Front Deputy leader of the political administration of the North Caucasian Front, reorganized in the September as the Black Sea Group Leader of the political administration of the Eighteenth Army Leader of the political administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front Leader of the political administration of the Carpathian Military District First secretary of the oblast and city committee of Zaporozh’ye First secretary of the oblast and city committee of Dnepropetrovsk Inspector of the CC VKP(b) in Moscow First secretary of the Soviet Republic of Moldavia Elected as a candidate to the Party Presidium and CC secretary at the Nineteenth Party Congress of the VKP(b). Remit: monitoring the army and navy political administration 1953, 5 March Death of Stalin

1953, March

Released from post as secretary and expelled from the Party Presidium; deputy leader of the political administration in the Ministry of Defence 1953, Sept. Khrushchev becomes first secretary of the CPSU 1954 Launch of the Virgin Lands campaign in Kazakhstan

1954, Feb. 1955, Aug. 1956, Feb. 1957, June

1958, March 1960, May 1963, June 1964, July 1964, 14 Oct.

Second secretary of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan First secretary of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan Elected as a candidate to the Party Presidium and as CC secretary at the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU Thwarts the attempted putsch against Khrushchev; elected a member of the Party Presidium (known once again as the Politburo from 1966 onwards) CC secretary, remit: armament, heavy industry and construction Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (president of the USSR) CC secretary again Removed from the post of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (president of the USSR) Khrushchev ousted; Brezhnev elected as first secretary (known as general secretary again after 1966) of the CPSU

xviii 1965, March 1965, Sept.

Chronology of life events Extensive agricultural reform passed at the March Plenum Extensive economic reforms, known as the Kosygin reforms, passed at the September Plenum 1966, March Twenty-Third Party Congress 1966–1970 Eighth five-year plan

1968, Aug.

Sanctions the suppression of the Prague Spring 1970, 12 Aug. Moscow Treaty signed 1971, March–April Twenty-Fourth Party Congress 1971–1975 Ninth five-year plan

1971, Sept. 1971, Oct. 1972, May 1973 1974 1975, 1 Aug. 1975, Oct.

Receives Brandt in Crimea Travels to Paris Signs SALT I with Nixon in Moscow Receives Pompidou near Minsk, travels to Bonn, Washington and Paris Receives Pompidou in Pitsunda, Nixon in Crimea, Schmidt in Moscow and Ford in Vladivostok and travels to Paris to visit Giscard d’Estaing Signs the Helsinki Accords Receives Giscard d’Estaing in Moscow 1976, Feb.–March Twenty-Fifth Party Congress 1976–1980 Tenth five-year plan

1976, April 1977, May

1977, June 1978, May 1979, April 1979, June

Awarded the rank of marshal, launch of celebrations for his seventieth birthday on 19 December 1976 New constitution passed; elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (president of the USSR) while retaining the post of general secretary Travels to Paris Travels to Bonn and Hamburg Receives Giscard d’Estaing in Moscow Signs SALT II with Carter in Vienna 1979, 12 Dec. NATO Double Track Agreement 1979, 25 Dec. Invasion of Afghanistan

1980, May 1980, June

Meets Giscard d’Estaing in Warsaw Receives Schmidt in Moscow 1981, Feb.–March Twenty-Sixth Party Congress 1981–1985 Eleventh five-year plan

1981, Nov. 1982, 10 Nov.

Travels to Bonn Dies in Moscow, buried in the Kremlin Necropolis

Note on translation Care has been taken to retain the style of cited source materials wherever possible; many of the minutes and other archive materials thus reflect the unwieldy, awkward and painfully repetitive formulations of speeches to the plenum, peppered with the colloquial phrasing for which Brezhnev was known. As a rule, Soviet administrative units are not rendered using English equivalents, given the feudal connotations of many of the latter. Instead, the Soviet terms (oblast, okrug etc.) have been used in anglicized form. While Soviet positions of office have been translated, here too, English equivalents have been avoided, unless the author did something similar in the German – in some cases, elegance has been sacrificed in the interests of ensuring historical accuracy and conveying a sense of the Soviet political discourse. The Cyrillic spelling of Russian and Ukrainian names has been transliterated using the BGN system, with the exception of names already more familiar to English-speaking readers in their anglicized versions, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Leon Trotsky or the Bolshoi Theatre. For readers unfamiliar with Russian: ë (as in Pëtr) is pronounced ‘yo’; an apostrophe softens the preceding consonant (as in Natal’ya). In the interests of consistency and reflecting the official usage of the time, the author uses Russian variants for Ukrainian, Moldavian/Moldovan and Kazakh people and places where they feature in the Soviet context.

xix

Figure 1 Self-portrait of Brezhnev during the war, taken with a German Rolleiflex camera.

xx

Introduction

For nine months, the social democrat has adhered to the principle of appearing modest, as if that is what Berlin has been waiting for: invited to a citizen’s forum, he spent an hour listening to people’s concerns. Then he introduced himself as ‘Michael Müller from Tempelhof ’. He also said, ‘My friends are tradesmen or in the police.’ There was applause. […] Friends within the party are happy because he has close connections to the SDP, who felt disdained by Wowereit. Müller also embraces the opposition. When the city was outraged because hundreds of destitute refugees were camped outside the Regional Office for Health and Social Affairs, Müller, the carer, picked up the phone to summon aid, and then summoned the parliamentary leaders. It is hard to imagine Wowereit doing the same.1

What has Berlin’s governing mayor Klaus Wowereit’s handing over office to his successor Michael Müller in 2014 got to do with Nikita Khrushchev’s ousting by Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964? The members of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU also had ‘a need for someone who doesn’t open his trap quite as much’.2 Just as the Berlin politicians were ultimately repelled by the ‘brashness’ with which Wowereit responded to criticism, the Soviets had had enough of a party leader who had developed a mischievous enjoyment of teasing, humiliating and degrading them. Just as Wowereit’s ‘glamour’ had worn thin, the old enthusiasm for the charismatic Khrushchev and his visions had turned to resignation. Moreover, the members of the Party Presidium feared his temper and no longer dared to openly disagree with him. Brezhnev, on the other hand, seemed like Müller in 2014: ‘Currently, it is even to his benefit that he doesn’t act as if he never makes mistakes either’.3 Like Müller, Brezhnev was the modest listener and carer who remained in touch with the basis and involved the opposition – in his case, his rivals. To avoid misunderstandings, this is by no means to imply similarities between Khrushchev and Wowereit or Brezhnev and Müller. It is about understanding the logic of the situation, the fact that without the exalted presence of Brezhnev’s predecessor it would be hard to explain why his Soviet entourage then elected a modest leader. ‘After the Brioni Chancellor [Gerhard Schröder] there was a yearning for the unpretentious Mrs Merkel.’4 But this is not just to describe a clearly universal dialectics of political change; it is also to emphasize that Brezhnev’s appointment as first secretary of the CPSU on 14 October 1964 was certainly not intended as a change of course or as re-Stalinization. The sole intention of the CC was to replace an arrogant style of leadership with a more ‘democratic’ 1

2

Brezhnev

manner. As the US political scientist Jerry Hough put it: Brezhnev was ‘Khrushchev without Khrushchev’.5 Of course, this contradicts the widespread clichés of Brezhnev as the hardliner who first rehabilitated Stalin and then began to persecute the dissidents, had the Prague Spring crushed in 1968 and marched into Afghanistan in 1979, the man after whom the West named the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, according to which the sovereign rights of a ‘brother state’ were limited to how they served the interests of the Warsaw Pact countries. Those who remember Brezhnev’s eighteen-year rule from 1964 to his death in 1982 see a grey, bloated apparatchik in a general’s uniform, his chest festooned with medals, his expressionless face staring into space. But it was only after 1975 that such images of an infirm Brezhnev, barely able to stand, first flickered over television screens the world over. As a younger man after the Second World War, aged a little under forty, or even when he took office in 1964, in his late fifties, the tall, slim character with bushy eyebrows was considered not just attractive, but the party’s great hope. He himself attached great importance to a well-groomed appearance and impeccable suits. He was not just a heart-throb for the ladies; his good looks were also important to his political career. Stalin is said to have only noticed the young Brezhnev due to his stately physique.6 His trademark was his dark, bushy eyebrows, which earned him the popular nickname brovenosets (‘brow cruiser’), in allusion to the almost identical Russian term for ‘battle cruiser’, bronenosets. But there is more to the perception of Brezhnev that is in need of correction: not only was he photogenic, he was also a talented performer who in his youth had wanted to become an actor. He loved to stand on a chair and cite his favourite poet Sergei Yesenin, and indeed generally enjoyed the conviviality of a large group. Even after 1964, he accompanied his comrades to football and hockey stadia, following his favourite football team, CSKA, the ‘Central Army Sports Club’, while most members of the Presidium were Spartak supporters. Brezhnev was a passionate hunter and loved fast cars, but also had a passion for breeding pigeons and liked to play dominoes with his employees. He regularly read the satirical magazine Krokodil, had his barber tell him the latest – anti-Soviet – jokes and could spend hours listening to the music of Leonid Utësov, who sang both jazz and Soviet romances.7 It is as this conflict between amateur dramatics and the Cold War, between comradeship and an unchallenged eighteen-year reign, between a soft spot for controversial jokes and the persecution of dissidents, between the virility of his early years and his physical decline after 1975 that Brezhnev’s life story must be told. This complexity is also mirrored by the photograph at the beginning of our introduction: Brezhnev took it himself during the Second World War, using a selftimer, presumably with a looted German Rolleiflex camera. Standing in front of a mirror, he adopted a typical pose of Stalin’s, in high-necked battle dress, his hair swept back and his hand holding a pipe, Stalin’s trademark. It is an irritating picture, since it leaves so much open to interpretation, indeed even to speculation that it was not so much homage to Stalin as mocking him – a very dangerous undertaking at the time. What is clear from his photograph is his penchant for acting and self-presentation. It goes without saying that he kept this picture under lock and key and that it was never

Introduction

3

published. It expresses his entire ambiguity, for in the mirror we see him as two people in the interplay of shadow and light. It reveals how he could nonchalantly pose before the camera even in hard times like the war, that he enjoyed uniforms, and that he grappled with the Stalin phenomenon – a conflict that would accompany him throughout his life. The aim of this biography is to capture the entire spectrum and contradictions of Brezhnev’s behaviour in all their complexity and to dismantle the image of the man that remains very much shaped by the Cold War. Brezhnev the politician and Brezhnev the man shall be historicized, that is, rendered understandable in the context of their time. The great historian and Résistance fighter Marc Bloch (1886–1944) wrote that history is the science of ‘men in time’.8 That not only means that people are the focal point and fulcrum of all historical research, but also implies that they can only be understood in their time or as a product of it. It is only in the totality of all influences that we can understand how people became what they were and why they acted as they did. But this answer too will only ever get so close and remain one of many possibilities of what could have been. Hence to come closer to the ‘historical cultural product’ that was Brezhnev, we must examine how he was shaped socially by his parental upbringing, his political environment, economic circumstances, religious influences, characteristic leisure pursuits, special experiences and so on. How did he grow up, how did he experience the revolutionary year of 1917 and the ensuing civil war? What path did he take during the collectivization of agriculture (1928–1933) and the industrialization of the 1930s? How did he experience the Great Terror of 1937/38 and the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (1941–1945)? We must also closely consider the phases of his career after the war as a party leader in Ukraine, Moldavia and Kazakhstan and after 1956 as an acolyte of Khrushchev in Moscow, constantly asking: what did Brezhnev learn at this time, what shaped him and made him the party leader who ousted Khrushchev in 1964 before remaining undisputed head of the party and the country for eighteen years? On the one hand, then, Brezhnev shall be presented as a ‘product’ of Soviet institutions and discourses: from the slogans of the Revolution to the Stalinist obsession with enemies, from the romanticism of building socialism to campaigns against traitors of the people. On the other hand, he is portrayed as a ‘producer’: we must examine how he gave meaning to events, which discourses he employed, how he responded to diatribes and the bustle of building socialism, what his personal experience taught him and why it was he whom the CC considered the only suitable alternative to Khrushchev in 1964. This is the shape our analysis of Brezhnev’s eighteen-year rule will take: as the interplay between existing structures, established discourses and sanctioned behaviour and his personal development of his role as leader. The intention, then, is neither to write a positivist ‘history of great men’ nor to lose the individual entirely behind structures and discourses. Rather, the aim is to show Brezhnev ‘in time’, as Marc Bloch put it with such splendid simplicity. The book is about the reciprocal conditioning, if not indeed the symbiotic interdependence, of the ‘man’ and his ‘time’.

4

Brezhnev

A man without a biography This book is the first scholarly biography on Brezhnev to be based on a wealth of wide-ranging archive material. In many cases, it is the first time these materials have been accessed. To date, there have been surprisingly few Brezhnev biographies, which upon closer inspection is hardly surprising: Stalin has always fascinated historians as a violent ruler, and Khrushchev has attracted many biographers because his departure from Stalinism is so appealing. Brezhnev offers neither fascination – neither violence nor a break with it. Also, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the archives holding files from his era were not opened, and the twenty to thirty years historians usually wait before they consider a subject ‘done’ and up for historical study have barely passed since his death in 1982. The very first biography on Brezhnev was published by the German-American journalist John Dornberg, in German in 1973 and in English in 1974.9 Given that the author had no access to files, it is a remarkably knowledgeable, well-researched book that even today barely requires any corrections, although much could be added, even if only to include the best part of a decade Brezhnev had ahead of him. In the West, a second biography followed in 1981, written by the US historian Paul Murphy. Murphy came in for strong criticism, since he made countless false claims, beginning with Brezhnev’s date of birth.10 Worse than the 123 proven errors, Murphy does not provide sources for many of his apparently knowledgeable depictions. What is remarkable and perhaps unique for historiography is that both Dornberg and Murphy base most of their portrayals of Brezhnev’s childhood on the testimony of the same single émigré who claimed to have gone to school with him. This shows just how difficult it was for Western scholars to obtain access to sources. No such difficulties beset the dissident Russian-speaking authors who published Brezhnev biographies either in exile or after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Here, the problem is of a different nature: they clearly had sources they did not wish to name and were able to access files – sometimes secretly – whose reference codes they subsequently could not cite. Both the military historian and proponent of glasnost Dmitriy Volkogonov and the expert on Soviet power structures Rudol’f Pikhoya had access to Brezhnev’s work diaries, for instance. But they cite them without providing references.11 A further problem with dissident Brezhnev biographies is that they are not motivated solely by a desire to inform; often, the focus is not so much on analysis as on indictment. This holds not only for the study by the émigré Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, published by a small West German exile press in 1979,12 but also for the much better-known biography by the dissident and historian Roy Medvedev in 1991. Medvedev writes that Brezhnev was such an average and mediocre politician that he made no lasting impression on history.13 This claim is hardly distinguishable from the theories of Western political scientists of the 1970s, who largely described Brezhnev as a ‘broker’ of interests, as a kind of ‘chairman’ who announced and executed decisions but made none of his own.14 In today’s Russia, where Brezhnev and his era are enjoying increasing popularity, and indeed almost nostalgic glorification, nobody would write such invective. This is

Introduction

5

also evident in the biographies that appeared marking the hundredth anniversary of his birth, in 2006. All of them are works of popular scholarship and some of them claim he was a nationalist and member of the conspiratorial, xenophobic ‘Russian Party’.15 In contrast, the 2008 biography by the journalist Leonid Mlechin is a factual and detailed account. He clearly visited every archive throughout the entire Soviet Union or received material from them – but does not provide any citation. The last Brezhnev biography to appear to date is by the journalist and Duma deputy Aleksandr Khinshteyn, revealingly entitled: ‘Why Brezhnev could not become Putin. A fairytale about the lost age’. He claims that Vladimir Putin has greater similarities to Brezhnev than to the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with whom he is usually compared. Brezhnev’s only mistake, he writes, is that he did not resign early enough and hence is not remembered fondly.16 However, what is interesting about this book is the collection of long excerpts reproduced from Brezhnev’s notebooks. Today, everyone agrees on Brezhnev’s immense importance for the Soviet Union. After all, he ruled and shaped the country for eighteen years – the second longest time at the helm after Stalin’s thirty years (1924–1953), while Khrushchev only clung to power for eleven (1953–1964). Neither of Brezhnev’s successors Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko lasted two years in office before their deaths; within six, Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union to its demise. Hence the authors of more recent studies are unanimous that Brezhnev was the most successful representative of the Soviet style of leadership.17

Archives and files As already noted, scholarly study of Brezhnev has also been so late to take off because there was such limited access to files for so long; to an extent, this remains the case to this day. Apart from a dossier that the secret service compiled on him and that Khrushchev had burned when he summoned him to Moscow as his right-hand man in 1956,18 Brezhnev’s papers are held in the Presidential Archive. The archive is categorically closed to foreigners and only select Russian nationals have access. Nevertheless, in 2009 and 2010 the archive transferred copies of the Brezhnev holdings to the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI). There the files have been reordered and indexed in two finding aids, the first of which has been accessible since the summer of 2014. Since then, it has been possible to order files, provided access is not restricted. The second finding aid has yet to become accessible and much of what is listed in the first remains classified, for instance ‘Brezhnev’s notes to the members of the Politburo’, the ‘personnel file of the major general of the Brezhnev Reserve’ or his medical file. This is compensated by a veritable treasure trove, the online exhibition on Brezhnev granting free access to many restrictedaccess archive documents, including from the second finding aid, usually in full and with a citable shelf mark.19 Access to the holdings of the Politburo, also housed at the RGANI, has been granted only recently with the archive’s reopening after nearly two years of closure (2016–2018). The Politburo was the power hub and the nerve centre not only for the

6

Brezhnev

party, but for the entire country. Brezhnev himself explained its work to West German chancellor Willy Brandt thus: The Politburo regularly convenes every week on a Thursday (exceptions: special events, guests etc.) at 15:00. Duration of meeting unlimited. In practice usually from 15:00 to 19:00, fundamentally on the basis of written submissions. In the case of foreign policy issues, the corresponding submissions are produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sometimes in collaboration with the relevant CC department; in the case of economic issues, by the state planning committee or the relevant ministries. If I decide that a certain issue should be added to the agenda, I send the corresponding documents three days in advance so that the Politburo has the opportunity to familiarize itself with the material and to form an opinion on it. Setting the agenda is the privilege of the Secretary General. At every Politburo session I present a series of current issues orally; some are discussed and added to the agenda. I submit some issues to the comrades so that they can collect their thoughts on them. These issues are then discussed later.20

As the highest political authority, the Politburo, or the Party Presidium, as it was known from 1952 to 1966, developed and determined what the CC and the ministries were to decide and implement. Formally, the party congress, which under Brezhnev convened every five years, selected the political directives and determined the five-year plans, and included the roughly 350 members of the Central Committee nominated in advance in collaboration with the Politburo. They usually convened at a plenum twice a year in order to discuss the political tasks that lay ahead, determine the annual plan and elect the CC secretaries and the Politburo. What actually happened, however, was that the Politburo and the general secretary, known as the first secretary from 1952 to 1966, suggested the candidates the CC appointed. They also staffed the government offices in this fashion, presenting the CC plenum with a list of candidates they recommended for the ministries or the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the formal parliament. Just as the CC always confirmed every suggestion for the secretaries’ and the Politburo posts, the Supreme Soviet too always ‘selected’ the candidates suggested by the party. Although Brezhnev only had the party’s primacy over the government established in the constitution of 1977, it had existed de facto since 1917. However, Brezhnev’s aide Karen Brutents asserts that the really interesting and important matters are not to be found in the minutes of the Politburo, but in the ‘special folders’ – which of course still remain restricted.21 Instead, this study makes use of the unpublished minutes of the CC plenum from 1964 to 1982, also held by the RGANI. These transcripts show how openly grievances were discussed in the CC, and the many passages marked ‘not for print’ reveal that the controversial subjects were not even recorded in the minutes circulated internally. I spent many weeks at the RGANI between 2011 and 2016. I am unreservedly grateful to the ladies at the archive, who welcomed me like an old acquaintance. Their cordiality was some compensation for the fact that before 2019 laptops were not permitted at the RGANI and all notes had to be made by hand. I would like to preserve

Introduction

7

the memory of Lyudmila Stepanovich, who loved recounting her time in Berlin, where her father was stationed. She died in late 2015. It is still not easy to use the archive of the Russian state security service (formerly the KGB, today the FSB) and the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. The former is completely restricted, while the latter granted me access after several applications, but only sent press dossiers and files from the Protocol Department to the reading room. All political documents remained under lock and key. These restrictions were offset by the good access to files of the foreign ministries in Berlin, Paris and Washington. Lack of access to KGB files was partially offset by use of the Sakharov Archive. After 1991, Andrey Sakharov’s widow used her rights as a family member to make copies of all the files pertaining to her husband. I extend my thanks to the three archivists who shared with me not only the files, but also their lunch. Besides the Moscow archives, I also visited all the archives in the places where Brezhnev lived and worked: in Dneprodzerzhinsk in Ukraine, which returned to its pre-revolutionary name of Kamenskoye or Kam’yans’ke in 2016, where he was born and where he also studied and embarked on his political career in 1937, the curator of the History Museum, Natal’ya Bulanova, granted me access to her collection of documents, for which I must express my deepest gratitude. When I visited her in June 2014, she was both very glad and surprised that someone was interested in Brezhnev in ‘times like these’ – shortly after the annexation of Crimea and given the fighting in eastern Ukraine. She said that before the economic crisis set in, there had been many requests from people from China wishing to trace his footsteps. And so in Dneprodzerzhinsk they had begun to develop a historical tour of the city of his birth, but since the beginning of the conflict with Russia there had no longer been any demand from tourists. The staff were also very helpful and accommodating at the archives in Zaporozh’ye or Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine, where Brezhnev was party secretary after the war, and in Dnepropetrovsk, since 2016 Dnipro, also in Ukraine, where he was active both before and after the war. However, there are no holdings there on Brezhnev: upon his accession to office in 1964, he had all personal documents moved to Moscow. It is only possible to see and make notes on a personnel form from 1947; it may not be photographed. In Moldova and Kazakhstan, where Brezhnev served as party leader from 1950 to 1952 and from 1954 to 1956 respectively, it was the same story: there is no personnel file on Brezhnev, but minutes of CC plenums and the party bureau can be accessed. Special thanks are due to the former director of the Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Boris Dzhaparov, who has turned the archive, once a place of secrecy where the staff censored researchers’ notes, into a platform for exploration and freedom of information. He plans to allow digital access to all files via the internet. More than making up for what remains a difficult situation in the Russian archives and the lack of personal materials, there is the wealth of diaries, memoirs and interviews Brezhnev’s companions and contemporaries have left us: his colleagues in the CC apparatus; regional party leaders; comrades from the war; political allies and rivals; ousted members of the Politburo and the deposed head of the KGB; his interpreters and his photographer; his bodyguards and doctors; and not least the

8

Brezhnev

Western heads of state and government who had dealings with him. This is a rich fund of sources which, while not replacing the ‘special folders’, the release of which is still keenly awaited by historians, potentially provides greater insights into Brezhnev as a ‘person’ than official files might.

Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ There is a revealing contemporary joke about Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’: Brezhnev asks the CC secretary for ideological affairs, Mikhail Suslov, whether he has read his volume of memoirs, The Virgin Lands. ‘Of course, Leonid Il’ich, indeed twice, a wonderful book!’ he replies and turns to leave. Brezhnev stops him: ‘Woah, where are you going?’ ‘To read it a third time!’ Suslov leaves, and Brezhnev starts to think, ‘Hmm, maybe I should read it too.’22 It was no secret during his own lifetime that Brezhnev had not written a single line of his ‘memoirs’ himself. They first appeared in the magazine Novyy mir (New World) in three instalments in February, May and November 1978. Entitled ‘Little Land’, the first describes his experience in the war, ‘Rebirth’ deals with the reconstruction achievements in Ukraine after the devastation of the war, and ‘The Virgin Lands’ describes his time in Kazakhstan. This trilogy was soon published as thin booklets under a hundred pages in length; millions were produced and immediately declared compulsory reading in schools. In November 1981, there followed another instalment in Novyy mir entitled ‘Memoirs’, including the fourth and fifth parts: ‘Life by the Factory Whistle’ and ‘Love for One’s Country’, describing his early years before and after the Revolution. Chapters six to eight appeared posthumously in January 1983 – ‘Moldavian Spring’, ‘Cosmic October’ and ‘A Word on a Communist’ – which while relating some events from his time in Moldavia and as CC secretary for the armament industry, on the whole went into much less detail. ‘A Word on a Communist’ consisted almost entirely of propaganda clichés. And that is where the ‘memoirs’ end, before 1964 – that is, before his accession to power. Despite their eight parts, people still usually speak of a ‘trilogy’. As widely as the ‘memoirs’ were distributed and ridiculed, to this day little is known about who initiated them and for what exact purpose.23 It seems they were part or indeed the zenith of the cult of personality around Brezhnev, whose journey was thus irrevocably written into Soviet history – and to whom a crucial role was attributed in the country’s key developments. Brezhnev’s aide Georgiy Arbatov thinks that the sycophants among his colleagues persuaded him to write down all the details about his earlier life with which he enjoyed regaling them at convivial gatherings at the government dacha or the hunting lodge.24 The publicist Vladislav Vladimirov, on the other hand, claims that the memoirs were the sole work of Chernenko, who sought to put himself in the running as Brezhnev’s successor. Aleksandr Murzin, Brezhnev’s only ghostwriter to reveal himself as such, also says it was Chernenko and the director general of the Soviet press agency TASS, Leonid Zamyatin, who persuaded Brezhnev to write the memoirs while accompanying him on a train journey. Vladimirov relates that Chernenko pointed to the memoirs of Churchill, Giscard d’Estaing, de Gaulle

Introduction

9

and other great statesmen in order to win him over. But Brezhnev’s response was that Lenin had not written any. Chernenko countered that Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya had written them for him.25 A third view is offered by former ambassador to the GDR Pëtr Abrasimov and Brezhnev’s doctor, Evgeniy Chazov: chief ideologue Suslov and the KGB introduced the idea of memoirs and the necessary writing process to explain why he had withdrawn from public appearances for so long; it was a way of masking his losing battle with addiction to pills.26 As his bodyguard Vladimir Medvedev relates, presumably all the ‘party ideologues’ were involved in persuading Brezhnev to relent and abandon his stance that his story was ‘nothing special, life has just worked out that way’.27 He is reported to have announced, ‘My comrades have persuaded me to publish my memories of my experiences, my work, the war and the party. It is important for our people, for our youth, who are brought up by the example of their fathers.’28 Brezhnev clearly acquiesced on the condition that they would be written not by himself, but by a team. The project was supervised by the head of TASS, Zamyatin, and the editor-in-chief of Komsomol’skaya pravda, Vitaliy Ignatenko. In April 1977 they invited four of the country’s best writers to a secret meeting, where they revealed their plan. It seems the authors had relative freedom in deciding who would write which chapters.29 Anatoliy Agranovskiy, the best writer at Izvestiya, wrote the years in Ukraine, the writer Arkadiy Sakhnin chose the war and the two Pravda journalists Vladimir Gubarеv and Murzin covered space travel and his time in Kazakhstan, respectively.30 But the party went further than creating a special department in the CC and hiring the country’s best publicists; they also authorized the latter to conduct thorough research throughout the Soviet Union, comb through every archive and interview contemporary witnesses.31 The ‘ghostwriters’ thus travelled to important places in Brezhnev’s life, while Chernenko personally saw to it that the local party leaders looked after them well and granted them access to all documents.32 We should bear that in mind when assessing the quality of the ‘memoirs’; the authors did not allow their imaginations free rein, nor did they invent acts of heroism. This is confirmed by many of Brezhnev’s contemporaries; much of what he had told them himself they found later in the ‘memoirs’. However, the authors did not speak to Brezhnev himself, but received transcripts of his anecdotes.33 The problem has never been the source material, but its working into a heroic narrative glorifying insignificant actions as historical turning points, for instance during the war, at times attributing the acts of others to Brezhnev or interpreting the facts so freely that the truth is no longer recognizable. For the war years in particular, this can be demonstrated by comparing the ‘Little Land’ with officers’ memoirs. Hence the joke circulated among the people: ‘The motto for the volume of Brezhnev’s memoirs “Little Land”: “I remember everything I didn’t experience!” ’34 For his Kazakhstan days, there is at least one archive document that clearly served as the basis for an event in The Virgin Lands and shows how the author Murzin turned a tragedy into a tale of socialist heroism: Brezhnev ‘relates’ that in the spring of 1954 the tractor driver Daniil Nesterenko heroically tried to help his comrades move tractors across a frozen river but paid for his courage with his death when the ice

10

Brezhnev

broke and he drowned. Ghostwriter Murzin has Brezhnev report, ‘When his friends pulled him out they found in the dead man’s pocket a Hero of the Soviet Union’s card. Until then no one on the farm had known they had such a person working with them. […] And this made his death doubly sad.’35 According to the historical report, however, the opposite happened: his comrades had advised against crossing the wide river that had already thawed and burst its banks, preferring to search for a ford, but Nesterenko shouted them down: they were cowards, had they not crossed the Dnieper under heavy bombardment during the war? When the tractor then became stuck in the middle of the river and was flooded, not only Nesterenko, but also another driver drowned, the Komsomol member Ker.36 The falsification of this source by the ghostwriter is a prime example of how Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ must be treated with caution; the ‘raw material’ was used quite arbitrarily. Brezhnev’s ‘comments’ and ‘thoughts’ on such events can certainly be considered to have been fabricated, the only exception being citation of documents. It was possible to check some of these lines against the originals, and it appears the ghostwriters did not dare embellish these party texts. Of course, the materials the ghostwriters compiled would be valuable sources today. But they had to hand over all documents and notes, which were promptly destroyed.37 Yet the notion that Brezhnev did not read his ‘memoirs’, as the joke implied, does not seem to be true. For instance, his notebooks contain an entry for 26 August 1977: ‘Went for a walk on the beach. Then read the material – the first chapter “Life by the Factory Whistle” ’.38 His notes reveal that he read the text again when it appeared in November 1981.39 He also read the volume on Kazakhstan before publication as well as having it checked by the local party leader Dinmukhamed Kunayev.40 Mlechin states that Brezhnev’s secretary occasionally read his ‘memoirs’ to him in hospital, which seems plausible, since he generally preferred to be read to than read himself. As a rule, Mlechin relates, nothing was published without being checked by Brezhnev.41 However, according to journalist Georgiy Yakovlev, Brezhnev only altered two words in the entire manuscript.42 As a source, then, apart from the few instances in which they cite documents, the ‘memoirs’ are mainly useful as a demonstration of how an ideal biography was created. Upon receiving the Lenin Prize for Literature in March 1980, Brezhnev freely confessed they were primarily educational in intention: ‘The last thing I want is for the books “Little Land”, “Rebirth” and “The Virgin Lands” to be understood as memoirs.’ While working on the texts, he asserted, ‘I was thinking not about myself and indeed probably not so much about the past as about how my experience of the past can be useful for the people of today.’43

Brezhnev’s ‘diaries’ and his photographer A much more useful source is Brezhnev’s Dnevniki, usually misleadingly translated as ‘diaries’, but which in Brezhnev’s case are simply ‘notebooks’. For a long time, they were shrouded in rumour, since only a few people had seen them, including his biographers Volkogonov and Mlechin, who claimed they demonstrated ‘intellectual poverty’.

Introduction

11

Volkogonov mockingly remarked – and Mlechin echoes him – that Brezhnev was only interested in ‘how much he weighed, how long he swam for, whom he phoned, what there was to eat, which decoration or title he had received, his medical treatments, what he had killed hunting’.44 That is both true and untrue: first of all, as we have established, they were not diaries in which he wrote his most private thoughts and deepest reflections, but pocket calendars and notepads, in some cases loose sheets, on which he recorded daily events in keywords. Secondly, he certainly doesn’t merely note banal events in his everyday and private life, but also makes plenty of lists of the politicians he phoned or met with. These are rather logbooks or chronicles he kept for himself: ‘5 June 1979, Tuesday, spoke with Chernenko – Andropov is turning 65, Chazov is turning 50. Gorbachev – about the rainfall levels […].’45 Brezhnev seldom recorded longer thoughts or written arguments as he did in October 1964, when he was preparing an indictment of Khrushchev: ‘Why it all happened – because a Khrushchev cult developed with the most direct and active support by Khrushchev. N.[ikita] S.[ergeyevich Khrushchev ] – I get the strong impression – that that clouded your awareness and you decided you were allowed to – the poison of unlimited power spoilt you.’46 The notebook entries do not provide insights into Brezhnev’s emotions or mind, then, but serve as an index to his life, with whom he spoke and with which issues he grappled. He maintained the notebook in the wartime years of October and November 1944, when he began to install Soviet rule in the Carpathians. The entries then stop. They briefly return in the early 1950s, but systematic note-taking does not recommence until Khrushchev summoned him to Moscow in 1956. Apart from some shorter and longer interruptions, he kept these ‘to do lists’ until shortly before his death. Archive access remained restricted until 2018, but they were published in November 2016. They offer useful supplementary material where archive sources are inaccessible and speculation had previously been the only option. For instance, we can now establish what he was doing when the Politburo decided to invade Afghanistan in December 1979. This painstaking reconstruction is also aided by the notes of his reception secretaries at the Kremlin, published in a companion volume to his notebooks: they tell us whether Brezhnev was in his cabinet or at home, whether he left for his dacha or his hunting lodge and whom he received.47 Given the difficulties that remain in accessing the files in Russia, the present book also makes use of photographs. Indeed, each chapter opens with a picture of Brezhnev. Photographs from his childhood and early years reveal much for which there are no or only a few – restricted – sources. The photographs from later years show a vital, dynamic Brezhnev who liked to laugh – something that was soon forgotten, at the very latest after his death in 1982. The pictures thus fill in gaps and present the Brezhnev the written sources seldom do justice, since his physical presence and his ability to approach people are not apparent in texts. As his photographer Vladimir Musael’yan told me, Brezhnev was not only very photogenic, but also understood the power of images. He was the first Soviet party leader to have a personal photographer; from 1969 onwards, Musael’yan accompanied him everywhere and advised him on selecting the right photographs.48 I thank Vladimir Musael’yan for his permission to use his photographs for this book.

12

Brezhnev

Finally, a word on the genesis of this biography. In 2008 I joined the Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen as director and thus took on, among other things, leadership of an internationally unique archive holding 600 estates of both living and deceased Soviet dissidents and underground publications from Poland and the former CSSR. It was then that I began to conduct research on the Soviet Union’s last great party leader; it seemed a fitting subject. I wanted to know how Brezhnev launched the persecution of the dissidents, how the Politburo spoke about Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and others, how the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 came about. In short: I expected to be working on a Stalinist, a hardliner, an architect of domestic and foreign policies of repression. To my surprise, I quickly realized that this was too simplistic a picture. Brezhnev left the dissidents to the KGB chiefs, Dubček was his protégé, not his enemy, and even in the case of Poland he considered himself a patron and an advisor, not an executive power. Instead of a Cold Warrior, I was faced with a man who passionately fought for peace and ruined his health in the process. Instead of a dogmatic ideologue, a heart-throb who loved fast cars and liked to crack jokes. I will not escape accusations of being something of a Brezhnev apologist. At this juncture I must stress that it was certainly not my intention to exculpate Brezhnev for anything. He should simply be shown in all his facets as a ‘man in time’. I thank the University of Bremen for funding this research as part of its Excellence Initiative.

Figure 2 Leonid Brezhnev with siblings Vera and Yakov as members of an amateur dramatics troupe in Kursk, 1924.

13

1

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

Our photograph shows Leonid Brezhnev and his siblings Vera and Yakov lined up before a theatre curtain. Brezhnev, the eldest, aged eighteen, is on the far left, with visibly sunken cheeks. Two things make this photograph remarkable. Firstly, there are no other images of Brezhnev looking so thin and emaciated, and secondly, the three of them are shot as an amateur dramatics troupe; nothing about them is revolutionary, even though the picture was taken in 1924: neither their dress nor their pose are suggestive of Bolsheviks, the proletariat or their victory. On the contrary, Brezhnev is wearing a white shirt with a tie and a dark jacket, not a party shirt or soldier’s coat. His hair is worn smoothed down in a side parting and his posture is upright as he looks straight into the camera. Like his siblings, he appears severe and bourgeois; hence it is hardly surprising that although there are very few photographs of the young Brezhnev, this one did not find its way into any official works or albums depicting the general secretary. It shows a Brezhnev that officially never existed: a young, well-educated man with delicate facial features hollowed by the famine of 1921/22. And what it does not show would also be hushed up: a Brezhnev barely interested in politics who at the time the photograph was taken had only just joined the Komsomol, the Bolshevik youth organization, and who dreamed of becoming an actor. While the official biographies constructed his career as a linear path to the office of general secretary and his Western biographies also perceived him as an enthusiastic Stalinist who fulfilled the tasks he was given with distinction and Bolshevik enthusiasm, it appears Brezhnev was not remotely passionate about politics. If we tell his life story not in terms of its end point as general secretary but by comparing the young Brezhnev to his contemporaries in the 1910s and 1920s, he hardly appears predestined to become the most powerful man in the communist world. On the contrary, he appears almost apolitical, a young man trying to avoid contact with the new political organizations and transformations for as long as possible. If we try to view him without prejudice, then what we notice is not political enthusiasm, passion for the Bolsheviks or leadership qualities, but the struggle for sheer survival. Revolution, civil war and collectivization were not challenges Brezhnev sought, but events that disrupted and eventually destroyed his hitherto quiet, orderly life. His development was driven not so much by revolutionary fervour as by pure survival instinct: he took flight whenever circumstances became difficult or threatening. He first fled with his family to Kursk in 1921, to escape famine and unemployment in Ukraine; the second time was in 1930, when he moved to the city to escape the 14

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

15

civil-war-like situation in the Urals at the height of dekulakization and collectivization; the same year, he fled for a third time, leaving Moscow due to the accommodation crisis. Admittedly, given the paucity of sources, or the restricted access to them, it is also difficult to demonstrate that Brezhnev was a ‘quite ordinary Soviet man’ principally interested in his own life and survival with little enthusiasm for Bolshevism. There are merely indications, such as the photograph described above, pointing to Brezhnev the apolitical amateur thespian.

Striving for education and bourgeois prosperity Such an indication of Brezhnev’s apolitical stance is the absence in his ‘memoirs’ of effusive and specific enthusiasm for the October Revolution and subsequent events. In the Soviet Union, it was commonplace for the memoirs of convinced communists to depict the victory of the Soviet forces with greater ardour and to interweave the authors’ own personal development with the battles and Bolshevik victories: liberation from violent fathers or exploitative factory foremen; joining the Red Guard and fighting in the Civil War; working for the party or trade union in the 1920s to help develop the young state; considering the day they joined the party the happiest of their lives; being sent to study and beginning a career in the economy and in some cases in politics. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ include none of this, which is all the more astonishing given they were composed as an ‘ideal biography’: it seems Brezhnev’s life offered the ghostwriters so little to go on they settled on very general clichés ‘proving’ his enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks and his identifying with the proletariat lest the narrative become completely implausible. ‘I was lucky enough to be born, grow up and become toughened by labour in a worker’s family in a large working-class settlement. One of the earliest and strongest impressions of my childhood was the factory whistle. I remember that the dawn would just be breaking when my father was already in his overalls and mother was seeing him off at the door’, Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ ‘Life by the Factory Whistle’ begin.1 In order to be a legitimate party secretary it was of great importance to have a working-class background. But since Brezhnev’s birth certificate was removed from the district records, there is wide-ranging speculation as to his true provenance.2 The theories range from claims he was really a Pole who had been adopted to the assumption that his family was not working, but middle class. The curator of the history museum in Brezhnev’s home city of Kamenskoye, Natal’ya Bulanova, suspects the records were purged to hide the fact that Brezhnev had been baptized, which would have severely blemished a purely proletarian biography. This second rumour developed on the basis that from 1915 onwards, Brezhnev attended the local grammar school, which was reserved for the sons of factory owners, engineers and clerks. This is justified in his ‘memoirs’ by the explanation that only one in fifteen working-class children was selected and in his year there had been six other sons of workers. ‘They called us “State Scholarship holders”. This did not mean that we received a grant, but only that if we achieved spectacular successes they would let us off paying for instruction. The fee was excessive – 64 gold roubles. Even the most

16

Brezhnev

Figure 3 Brezhnev family photograph: the mother standing, the father sitting with Brezhnev’s siblings Yakov and Vera, Leonid standing on the right in his grammar school uniform, 1915.

highly qualified worker did not earn that much, and of course father, however much he wanted to, could not pay that amount.’3 It seems relatively certain that Brezhnev’s father was a member of the working intelligentsia.4 These workers did not primarily desire the collapse of the existing order, but sought to rise within that society in order to live a bourgeois life themselves;

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

17

the path was not revolution, but education. This would explain why Brezhnev’s parents presumably did everything they could to give their son the best possible schooling. There are two further pieces of evidence indicating his family belonged to the working intelligentsia: firstly, both his father and his mother could read, which was highly unusual for ordinary workers.5 Secondly, there is an early photograph of the Brezhnev family from 1915 in which Leonid is pictured wearing a grammar school uniform while his sister Vera is in a white dress, his younger brother Yakov in a white shirt. The two younger siblings are leaning on the father, who is seated, in a suit complete with waistcoat and a high-necked white shirt; the mother is behind them in a white blouse and dark skirt. Both the type of clothing and the taking of such a family photograph suggest that the Brezhnevs led a life in accordance with bourgeois values. Ordinary workers could not afford Sunday best or a visit to a photographer’s studio.

Childhood in Kamenskoye, 1906–1917 Brezhnev’s father Il’ya Yakovlevich Brezhnev (1880–1937) and the parents of his mother Natal’ya Denisovna Mazolova (1886–1975) left Russia for Ukraine around the turn of the century, in search of work. Kamenskoye was a small, tranquil settlement on the Dnieper until 1878, when engineers from Warsaw founded an ironworks and railway track factory. In 1886 the factory became part of the South Russia Company, under Belgian, Polish, German and French management. In 1887, the first two blast furnaces were built, becoming operational in 1889.6 The settlement then quickly shot up around the factory, which also grew, primarily producing railway tracks. In 1897, Kamenskoye had a population of around 26,000; by 1917 it had grown to 100,000.7 This was the heyday of industrialization in Russia and it was quite typical for investors to be from abroad. In 1892, the factory employed around 3,000 workers, most of whom had migrated from the north-western governorates of the Russian Empire; their Russian became mixed with the Ukrainian of the local peasants and the Polish and French of the engineers and factory management.8 Along with churches – two Orthodox, one Catholic and one Protestant – there sprung up a works hospital, an entertainment hall for the common people, which hosted concerts and exhibitions, a library, an engineers’ club, a yacht club, which was also open to workers, a works school with two classes for the children of workers, and a brass band that played in the park in the evenings.9 Contrary to the Bolshevist narrative of exploitative factories, to a certain extent the management of the South Russia Company sought to ensure the welfare of its workers, albeit if only to avoid strikes.10 Nevertheless, there were clear social hierarchies and misery: the works management, engineers, higher employees, shopkeepers, priests and academics resided in the ‘Upper Colony’, a quarter consisting of villas and mansions uphill from the factory, free from the smoke of the chimneys. The clerks and foremen lived in the ‘Lower Colony’, in smaller stone and wooden houses with their own gardens, all of which were supplied with electricity and running water,11 while barracks were built for the workers, sixteen to twenty people living there without plumbing. In the winter the barracks were so damp that water dripped from the walls and the workers called their

18

Brezhnev

abode the ‘transit prison’. Moreover, there were also workers who vegetated in mud and turf huts due to a lack of alternatives.12 The factory was confined and dirty, as an inspector complained in 1892. Accidents were an everyday occurrence: around twenty per cent of workers sustained injuries. They had to work a twelve-hour day, and there was no canteen; family members came into the factory to bring the men their food.13 That is how Brezhnev’s father met his wife. He had arrived in Kamenskoye from Kursk Governorate in 1894; from 1900 on he worked as a mate at the rolling mill, where the young Natal’ya Denisovna brought lunch for her father Denis Mazolov, who had migrated from Enokiyevo.14 They married a year later. Their first daughter, Feoktista, died immediately after birth in 1905;15 in 1906 Leonid was born, followed by Vera in 1910 and Yakov in 1912.16 Speculation as to Brezhnev’s social background can be tamed by examining the career path of his father. The fact is that Il’ya Brezhnev began as an untrained mate but in 1917, when the factory introduced the eight-hour day and a threeshift system, he advanced to shift supervisor and was thus considered a qualified worker.17 This was his status when he died of cancer relatively young, in his mid-fifties, in 1937.18 Regarding their housing, Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ indeed state that he was born on the Lower Colony, at number 5 Aksënov Lane.19 However, his parents only rented a single room sublet by a furnace master, where they lived together with his grandparents.20 Hence at this point they by no means belonged to the privileged in the residential hierarchy; they had merely found somewhere to stay. It was not until 1910 that the young family rented their own flat in the cul-de-sac Tupoy pereulok, later to be renamed ulitsa Pivovarov, where they remained until 1921. In the 1930s, the Brezhnevs lived in a new, works-owned house at number 40 ulitsa Pelina, where his mother Natal’ya Denisovna remained until 1966, when she followed her son to Moscow.21 But this two-room groundfloor flat in a two-storey house, today adorned by a commemorative plaque, was also very modest, particularly as one of the two rooms was occupied by his uncle’s family.22 The truth, then, is to be found, as it so often is, somewhere in between: Brezhnev was neither from a simple working-class family, as his ‘memoirs’ repeatedly claim, nor was he the ‘petit bourgeois’ polemicists make him out to have been. His grandparents and parents had arrived in Kamenskoye to earn money and climb the social ladder, something they clearly achieved: they did not live in the barracks, they could read and write, they wore Sunday best and visited a photographer’s studio, they sent their eldest son to the grammar school, and his mother’s dream was that he would become an engineer.23 While on the one hand his ‘memoirs’ suggest that conditions on the Lower Colony were horrific in comparison to the Upper Colony (‘It was as if they were another breed of people – well-fed, well-groomed and arrogant’24), at other junctures he describes a presumably carefree childhood: ‘Childhood is childhood. Here by the Dnieper everything was a joy to us: we would run down the steep bank, bathe, and swim over to the island.’25 Biographer John Dornberg assumes that he probably enjoyed football so much because it was a sport that a worker could afford, and that the one car in the town, belonging to the notary, must have made a deep impression on the young Leonid, who would later become such a car buff.26 While Leonid’s father worked in the factory during the day, his mother did everything for the family and the household. His father does not seem to have been involved in the underground activities of the Bolsheviks or the 1905 revolution in

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

19

Kamenskoye. While Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ suggest that Kamenskoye was a hotbed of Bolshevism, they also confess that his father had nothing to do with the movement: ‘My father, for instance, was not a member of the Party or to be more exact of any parties, but from the first years of the Revolution he actively supported the Bolsheviks.’27 Not only did his parents have no contact with the revolutionaries, but they were also Christians, had their children baptized, as was common at the time, and hung various icons around the home.28 We do not know exactly what preparation Leonid had for grammar school: whether he attended the works school, had a private tutor – which the Brezhnevs presumably could not afford – or was guided by his mother. His niece Lyubov’ Brezhneva writes that he attended the parish school from 1913 onwards.29 In order to be admitted to the grammar school, boys had to demonstrate reading, writing and arithmetic, pass a dictation and recite a poem. The grammar school curriculum was demanding: Latin, German, French, Russian literature and grammar, ancient, modern and Russian history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, geography and art.30 Being a very good pupil with an insatiable thirst for knowledge was part of the myth of the general secretary – and indeed every communist. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ casually state: ‘I studied well […]’.31 On the other hand, his former teacher Iosif Zakharovich Shtokalo wrote a veritable eulogy in 1980, not only praising him as the best pupil, but also claiming that he helped develop the curriculum and reading lists, that they reintroduced the grade ‘With Distinction’ specially for him, and that as a pupil he had predicted his teacher’s career as a scientist.32 The claims of the Jewish émigré Natan Kruglyak are more credible. Kruglyak reports that Leonid was not a good pupil and found learning difficult. He only seemed to have some flair for mathematics, while he especially struggled with foreign languages. He was also a quiet boy who kept his thoughts to himself.33 He did not join in with the usual harassment of Jewish pupils, but did nothing to defend them either.34 Concerning Brezhnev’s father, on the other hand, the Jew Abram Grigor’yevich Chernyak relates that during the Civil War he granted him and his three brothers shelter during pogroms.35 This seems to have been one of Il’ya Brezhnev’s more political actions. He is also believed to have taken part in the works strikes for higher wages in July 1915 and January and March 1916.36 It would appear, then, that in both cases he acted more out of a sense of justice or Christian charity than revolutionary fervour. What we know, then, is that Leonid Brezhnev grew up in a modest working-class household shaped by the loving care of his mother and the notion that social advancement could be achieved via education. His parents clearly brought him up to be an obedient, Christian subject who would attain a bourgeois existence. Brezhnev would probably have become an average, entirely apolitical engineer, and would perhaps have managed to secure for himself a small villa in the Upper Colony. But in 1917 this selfcontained striving for education and bourgeois status came to an abrupt end.

Time out of joint: revolution and civil war, 1917–1920 The narrative of a committed Bolshevist requires that the October Revolution of 1917 be portrayed not only as a historical watershed, but also as a decisive turning point in

20

Brezhnev

one’s life: an escape from misery, exploitation and violence to struggle, liberation and a bright future. These decisive moments are conspicuously absent from Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’: his narrator’s voice offers merely the generalizing observation: ‘But here I would like to emphasise again: our town was a workers’ one, the greater part of the population was working class, and so we always thought of the proletarian revolution as ours, the Bolshevik party as ours, and the power of the Soviets as ours!’37 These lines read as if they were intended to dispel doubts; it usually goes without saying that proletarians welcomed the Bolsheviks. Nor do the ‘memoirs’ make any mention of what Leonid Brezhnev got up to himself in 1917. While that might be explained by the fact that in October 1917 he was approaching his eleventh birthday and was too young for revolutionary activities, on the other hand there are enough reports of youths his age leaving home to join the Bolsheviks and fight alongside them in the Civil War. Brezhnev did not do that and clearly never had any intention of joining them, or his biographers would certainly have let us know about it. Indeed, there is every indication that not only was he not an enthusiastic Bolshevik, but their victory meant the destruction of his small, relatively cosy world and confrontation with poverty, violence, hunger and disease. This new situation was more likely to promise an early death than the chance to emerge as a Bolshevik victoriously fighting for the new order. The period from 1917 until 1923, when he became a student at the Agricultural Technical College in Kursk, seems rather to have been a traumatic phase that reached its nadir in 1921, when the entire Brezhnev family seem to have recognized that they no longer had a livelihood in Kamenskoye and left the town for father Il’ya’s homeland. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ certainly suggest that the Civil War period from 1918 to 1920 and the famine that followed in its wake were hard times. But the misery can only be admitted to the extent to which the blame can be put on enemies from outside and within: Things were not easy then for the people of the Dnieper region. The German forces took over power of the Central Soviet, then Petliura appeared on the scene, but in January 1919 the Red Army Cavalry sent him packing from Kamenskoye. Six months later the Whites came and with them the Makhnovtsy and Grigorevtsy. All sorts of riff-raff floated up to the surface […].38

In fact, the Bolsheviks’ Red Guards were responsible for no less terror and violence than the oppositional ‘White’ troops and the peasant leaders and their gangs. The inhabitants of Kamenskoye could hardly tell who had control of the town, who was looting, raping, murdering Jews and implementing ‘punishments’: the town changed hands over twenty times between January 1918 and December 1920.39 Contrary to the depiction in Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’, the period under German occupation from April to November 1918 was presumably the most peaceful. In June 1917, Ukraine had declared its independence under the Central Rada comprising various, primarily revolutionary parties. But in late 1917 the Rada was forced to flee the advancing Bolshevik troops, who saw in their victory the first – but not the last – opportunity to sack Kamenskoye and execute their political opponents.40 After the

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

21

Peace of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, the Bolsheviks had to relinquish Ukraine; the German and Austro-Hungarian troops reinstalled the Central Rada and did not leave until the capitulation of November 1918. While Dornberg claims that the occupiers conducted mass executions, the Kamenskoye worker M.A. Morozov writes that no such excesses took place.41 But this first year following the Revolution was a difficult time too; Morozov calls it the ‘year of terror and misery’: the Dnieper flooded the streets, the price of groceries rose from a few kopeks to several roubles, and in the April the last blast furnace was closed and all the workers were sent home. There was no longer any electricity or running water either.42 But Kamenskoye would not experience the full horrors of the Civil War until May to December 1919. On 11 May, the Kamenskoye soviet fled in panic when Nikifor Aleksandrovich Grigor’yev, once a Bolshevik, now a renegade with a special reputation for violence, attacked the town with his 16,000 men, indiscriminately murdering both Bolsheviks and Jews.43 The battle for Kamenskoye, which Grigor’yev waged partly from an armoured train he had looted, would not end until 19 May. At this point, bread rations were down to one-and-a-half pounds for two days; the market price ranged up to ten roubles.44 The Bolsheviks returned to Kamenskoye and mobilized the workers, sending them to Ekaterinoslav to do battle with the White Army general Anton Ivanovich Denikin, but many immediately fled, and those that did not were promptly wiped out.45 On 5 June, White Kuban Cossacks entered Kamenskoye, plundering Jewish shops, murdering Jews and shooting several representatives of Soviet power, including the chairman of the Kamenskoye soviet, Mikhail Arsenichev, after whom the institute at which Brezhnev studied would later be named.46 The Bolsheviks had barely taken back the town when Denikin entered with his troops on 6 July, but pro-Soviet troops under the command of Pavel Efimovich Dybenko and Nestor Makhno were able to drive them out. Red troops looted the Upper Colony, searched houses day and night and executed several of the factory’s engineers. The Bolsheviks ordered forced recruitment of the workers; the factory, which had undertaken emergency production and even supplied several armoured trains to Trotsky,47 was to be closed down, disassembled and transported beyond the Urals. The newspapers announced that ‘Red Terror’ would be implemented; anyone refusing to disassemble and load the factory would be shot. This almost provoked an uprising by the workers, who wanted neither to give up their factory nor to fight; twenty of them were executed as ‘counter-revolutionaries’.48 Only twenty days later, on 26 July, Denikin’s troops retook Kamenskoye and captured ‘collaborators’ in order to torture them.49 This time, Denikin was able to hold out in the city until late December, but there were repeated attacks, especially by Makhno’s troops, themselves now renegades, Makhno having killed Grigor’yev and integrated his men into his own army.50 His headquarters were at Ekaterinoslav; from here he frequently invaded Kamenskoye, looting and murdering before disappearing again.51 In October 1919, the factory finally came to a standstill; the workers received no more pay and were forced to exchange household goods for groceries if they wanted to survive. A bottle of milk now cost 170 roubles; butter would soon be 500 roubles a pound.52 On 18 December, the White troops relinquished Kamenskoye in the face of the Red Army’s superiority and took flight.53

22

Brezhnev

We do not know exactly what the Brezhnevs did at this time, only that they were there and experienced it all. We do not know whether Brezhnev’s father was one of the forced recruits, how he reacted to the evacuation of the factory, whether he was suspected of cooperating with Denikin’s men or whether they considered him a collaborator. We only know that he and his family survived the Civil War and that he became a shift manager in 1917, presumably working on the assembly of two armoured trains.54 Under the Bolsheviks, the boys’ grammar school became the First Workers’ School in 1919. The portraits of the tsar had already disappeared; in 1919 the icons followed.55 But the changes were not only cosmetic: when the town was under attack from troops or gangs of peasants, bells rang the warning and school was cancelled.56 Unlike Brezhnev, some of his schoolmates joined the Red or the White Guards and returned to settle scores with their old teachers: the Orthodox priest Konstantin, who also used to call by Brezhnev’s house and taught him at the grammar school, was shot by the Bolsheviks in early 1918. His successor was executed in late December 1918 by a schoolmate of Brezhnev’s who had joined the White Guard.57 Another fellow pupil entered the town with Denikin in July 1919, dragged his former Russian teacher to the river and shot him.58 Similar excesses, of which Leonid was probably aware, also occurred at the girls’ school: the former pupil Sënka Mishuk had joined the Bolsheviks and worked as an executioner for the Cheka. In one night she shot around fifty people; she quite publicly executed her former schoolteacher Spiridon Moroz and his wife Anna in the market place.59 As biographer Paul Murphy assumes, the Brezhnevs probably lived in permanent fear of attacks, executions and arbitrary acts of violence.60 But the worst was yet to come. After the Civil War between the Red Army and the White Guard ended in 1920, the Bolsheviks continued the struggle against the insurgent peasants. It resulted in a catastrophic famine in 1921/22 that cost five million lives. The teachers no longer received wages from the state and demanded food and clothes from parents as payment for lessons. There was neither writing paper nor fuel for heating. In the winter of 1920/21, the pupils remained standing during lessons and stamped their feet to keep warm. These conditions gave rise to a typhus epidemic that affected nine in ten pupils. While many of them died of the illness, Brezhnev survived and after a long absence returned to school, completely emaciated. In the spring of 1921, the school administration allowed teachers and pupils to attend barefoot, since few people owned shoes. Not only Brezhnev, but also the headmaster Shtokalo now attended lessons barefoot.61 In the summer of 1921, Brezhnev received his school-leaving certificate, after six years at the grammar or workers’ school. The highlight of the ceremony is said to have been that the pupils received a sugar lump with their cup of hot water.62 Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ also depict the deprivation: At the same time, from 1921 to 1922, the Ukraine was also seized by drought and hunger. The crops were burning all around Ekaterisnoslavschina, and each worker was given about 200 grams of bread, and not even that always. […] People went off to the neighbouring villages and exchanged what they could for food products. […] Our family did not distinguish itself by such enterprise, nor had we accumulated anything for exchange.63

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

23

However, if Brezhnev’s classmate Kruglyak is to be believed, Brezhnev’s mother certainly was one of the meshokniki who filled a sack (Russian meshok) with household items and set out on the long, arduous and by no means safe train ride to Kiev to exchange them for groceries for the family.64 If we consider that before 1917 the Brezhnevs had made modest attempts to live a petty bourgeois life, it is likely there were a few items his mother could swap, if only their Sunday best. It is also feasible that after the factory was closed for good, his father took tools and material to ensure his family’s survival. Looting one’s own works was a desperate measure and certainly a widespread practice, as even Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ relate, although they deny that Brezhnev senior had any involvement.65 Salvation finally came from abroad: US aid in the form of the Hoover Relief Administration finally reached Kamenskoye.66 Flight from Kamenskoye, 1921 While there is no doubt Leonid left school in the summer of 1921, there are three versions relating what came next: his first employment, as a metal worker in the factory; enrolment at the improvized polytechnic that was organized at the disused plant by a returning engineer; or flight to Kursk, where he made ends meet as an assistant loader. For an ‘ideal Soviet biography’ it was crucial not only that one’s father was a worker, but that one swiftly became a dyed-in-the-wool proletarian oneself. Hence Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ claim that upon leaving school he became a worker at the factory like his father: ‘Then came a most important day in my life. At fifteen I became a worker. […] I had to earn a living and help the family. They gave me the job of stoker at the mill, then I was transferred to metal working and I mastered this profession quite easily.’67 Yet this cannot be true, since the large plant was not operational between 1919 and 1925 due to a shortage of coal and iron ore.68 His classmate Kruglyak and others report, however, that in these dark days the engineer Petrov, out of work upon returning from the Civil War, set up a kind of polytechnic school in the derelict works for the unemployed youth, holding lessons in the administrative offices using the factory’s drawings and blueprints. The practical took place in the factory grounds, Petrov leading his pupils on a crawl through the cold blast furnaces, for instance.69 All we have to go on here is the memory of Kruglyak, who claims to have attended this self-organized course together with Brezhnev. On the other hand, the various personnel forms Brezhnev completed in his own hand between 1929 and 1949 state that he worked as a porter in a cooking fat factory in Kursk from September 1921 to June 1926, helping to unload wood and grain.70 Besides these tabular forms, there is also a detailed curriculum vitae in which Brezhnev writes: ‘My working life began in 1921 with my employment at the Kursk cooking fat factory as a worker and porter […].’71 The curator of the museum in Kamenskoye, Natal’ya Bulanova, even claims that Il’ya Brezhnev evacuated his family to Kursk as early as 1920 to save them from starvation, Leonid remaining in Kamenskoye until he had finished school before joining his family in the summer of 1921.72 Brezhnev himself regaled the Party Presidium with yet another version: after leaving school he fled to Moscow, but ‘gave up’ on the city and went to work in a factory.73 In 1962 he also jokingly told the Indian diplomat T.N. Kaul that he ran away

24

Brezhnev

from home in 1921, not to Moscow, but for India, but his father brought him back and wanted him to go to the diplomatic academy, whereupon he decided to become an engineer.74 While it sounds rather adventurous, Brezhnev did testify on two other occasions that he ran away at the age of fifteen and his father returned him to his family, clearly to Kursk. Hence in all likelihood Kruglyak is not to be believed when he says he attended Petrov’s polytechnic courses together with Brezhnev, and the claim that the later general secretary became a steel worker at the age of fifteen can be dismissed with great certainty as a myth. It is hardly surprising that Brezhnev’s role as a porter is not mentioned by any of the official biographies, even if it did last five years: this was the role of an assistant, offering nothing of the heroic required by the biography of a real Bolshevik. One could be a porter under the exploitation of the empire, from whose chains one had broken free in the Revolution of 1917, but in the 1920s one was a genuine proletarian, a functionary or a student. There was no hiding what working as a porter had really been: a job taken out of necessity to support himself and probably his family too, and which he then kept until he enrolled at the Technical College of Land Management and Melioration in Kursk in 1923. His siblings went to school in Kursk; the family was presumably supported by Leonid and his father, who found employment in the cable factory before returning to the Kamenskoye plant once it had returned to operations in 1925.75 Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ make no secret of the fact that the family left Kamenskoye due to the famine, but the ghostwriters put back the date by a year so that Leonid could become a worker: ‘Illness was rife, hunger set in and every day someone died in the neighbouring houses. The town became depopulated and we had to move away.’76 What the ‘memoirs’ claim was motivated by his burgeoning ‘respect for agricultural work’77 was born out of sheer desperation. If we consider that Leonid arrived in Kursk in the summer of 1921 and did not become a student until 1923, then two years passed during which he worked as a porter, either not knowing what else to do or failing to find alternative employment or a place at a college – we simply don’t know. Clearly, sheer survival remained the priority. Amateur thespian and poet, student, 1923–1927 The situation improved in the summer of 1922; the return to trade in the course of the New Economic Policy (NEP) had a tangible impact, markets were once again bustling hubs of activity, shops and cafés reopened and many people regained optimism, believing the catastrophes were over and they would never again have to live through world war, revolution and civil war. Hence it is certainly conceivable that the seventeen-year-old Brezhnev also imagined a different life in which his dream of becoming an actor came true.78 The photograph depicting him as an amateur player was taken in 1924, but when he began to tread the boards is not known. We only know of his enthusiasm for drama and poetry via his later aides; he told them that in his youth he played in the ‘Blue Shirt’, an agitation theatre movement that had sprung up in 1923 in Moscow. He later told his assistant Anatoliy Chernyayev that he partly financed his studies in Kursk as

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

25

an extra at the local theatre.79 He also used his talent as an actor to entertain his aides in the 1960s and 1970s, standing on a chair at the Zavidovo hunting lodge to recite the poem ‘Anna Snegina’ by his favourite poet Sergei Yesenin or Dmitriy Merezhkovskiy’s ballad ‘Sakya Muni’.80 In the 1960s, he liked to surround himself with actors. A few days before Khrushchev was ousted, he told such a gathering, ‘No, why drink to me? We shall drink to the artists. What are politicians, we are here today and gone tomorrow. But art is eternal. Let us drink to the artists!’81 In his younger days, Brezhnev also wrote poetry himself. We know from a journalist granted access to the Brezhnev holdings in the Presidential Archive in 2001 that one of his poems from 1927 is preserved there. Interestingly, in the volume of his ‘memoirs’ ‘Love for One’s Country’, it is attributed to a fellow female student.82 Brezhnev wrote the poem in response to the murder of the Soviet ambassador Vatslav Vorovskiy, shot by a White Guardist in Lausanne in 1923. Biographer Leonid Mlechin, who enjoyed unrestricted access to the Brezhnev holdings, cites the entire poem, with all its orthographical errors. The verses seem awkward and clumsy, but are nevertheless full of pathos in glorifying the violent murder as a hero’s death, the victim a martyr who eschewed the garb of the upper classes in fighting for the just cause of the young Soviet Union: Into the room in the din of conversation stepped Vorovsky Delegate of the U.S.S.R. Shockling! [presumably ‘Shocking!’] Cultural decline, no gloss In the fine society whispers and noise How could you appear here without a tailcoat Without a top hat he is a ‘peasant’ [muzhik] […] In the morning in the hotel of the Astria company [correct: ‘with the name Astoria’] Our ambassador was murdered by the hand of the murderer And the book of great Rusian [sic] history Another victim has entered!!!83

In the ‘memoirs’, Brezhnev certainly makes no bones about his passion for poetry; this fervour, however, is packaged in political engagement: The needs of the country were our needs; we dreamed of a radiant future for all mankind, made a good deal of noise, argued, fell in love, read and composed verse. We did not consider ourselves knowledgeable in poetry, but more important than anything else was the topicality and political current of the verse. And we had our own Komsomol poets.84

Presumably Brezhnev was one of these poets himself, but his biographers did not consider it opportune to portray the general secretary as a fanciful youth penning dilettante verse; neither clunky lines nor theatrical ambitions were befitting of a serious party leader in the Soviet Union. What his ghostwriters do tell us, however, is that he attended a reading by the celebrated revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in Kursk

26

Brezhnev

Figure 4 Brezhnev, centre, fifth from the left in the light shirt, as a student at the college in Kursk, wearing a student’s uniform and cap, 1927.

and was possibly just as enthusiastic as in the above description, albeit perhaps not so much due to the political messages as to passion for the man and his art.85 We do not know why Brezhnev ultimately decided to study agriculture in 1923. There is a photograph from 1927, when he graduated from the college, showing him in his student’s uniform, a smock and peaked cap. His ‘memoirs’ claim that he chose the subject out of respect for working the land and bread. Indeed, in his later career it would prove a boon that he was both an agriculture expert and an industrial engineer, thus ticking the two most important boxes in the Soviet Union. In 1923, his decision was presumably due to the sheer lack of alternatives or his experience of the Civil War, which taught him that you could secure your survival if you knew how to grow crops. At the same time, Brezhnev joined the Komsomol, the Bolshevik youth organization.86 He had already turned seventeen, and was thus in fact too old. Quite apart from that, his relative maturity contradicts his purported enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks: a convinced communist would have become a Komsomol member at the age of fourteen.87 Thus biographer Murphy also surmises that Brezhnev’s membership of the organization was purely careerist.88 We do not have to brand him an opportunist, but either way it was most likely a pragmatic decision, since without joining the Komsomol or the party, there was little chance of being allowed to study. It is also a mystery why in 1924 Brezhnev did not follow the ‘call of Lenin’ like many other young communists and join the party to honour its deceased leader.89

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

27

It also gave cause for speculation that when Brezhnev finally applied to join the party in 1929, aged almost twenty-three,90 in his cadre file he put under social status ‘employee’. As such, he then had to spend two years as a candidate, unlike workers, who could become full members after just six months.91 Biographer Avtorkhanov thus goes as far as to claim that, as ‘employees’, Brezhnev and his father had never done any physical work.92 The above facts demonstrate that this is clearly untrue. In 1949, Brezhnev again described his social status as an ‘employee’, but the origin of his parents as ‘workers’.93 That he put this status is quite easy to explain, for in 1929 Brezhnev was already working as a land manager and was thus an ‘employee’.94 And so read the minutes of the meeting of the party bureau in the town of Bisert’: ‘Admit Brezhnev Leonid Il’ich (Soviet cell) with two-year candidacy status as an employeespecialist actively participating in societal work’.95 It can be established, then, that Brezhnev clearly had a relatively instrumental relationship with the Komsomol and the party. Unlike his politically engaged fellow students, he clearly did not strive for positions on the Kursk technical college committee or undertake any other conspicuous political activities. His life seems to have consisted of studying, working as a porter, and leisure pursuits such as acting and writing poetry. Around this time (1923–1927) he also met his wife, Viktoriya Petrovna Denisova, who was born in Kursk as one of five children of an engine driver and who contrary to all speculation was not Jewish.96 In 1925 he asked her to dance in the student hall of residence: How could I not have fancied him?! Slim, with dark eyebrows, his hair so thick, like tar. You could recognize him from afar by his eyebrows. His eyes were big, brown, bright. At that time, dances were coming into fashion. But Leonid Il’ich couldn’t dance, and I taught him: the waltz, Pas d’Espagne, the polka … I was a good dancer. We went to the theatre together, always in the back row and always with friends. To the last screening in the cinema, because those tickets were cheaper. And Saturdays without fail to the club, to dance.97

She studied at the Technical College of Medicine in Kursk, graduating as a midwife. When he was sent to the Urals in March 1928, he finally proposed to her, without great fuss, as was then common in the profane Soviet Union: ‘Let’s get married.’98 It is difficult to verify the claim made by Vladimir Semichastnyy, whom Brezhnev later dismissed as head of the KGB, that even in his college days Brezhnev ‘didn’t turn down any skirt’ and only married Viktoriya Petrovna because her mother had threatened to cause a scandal.99 It is presumably slander, but perhaps there is also an element of truth to it. Either way, the marriage proved a stable relationship: on 26 March 1978 Leonid and Viktoriya celebrated their golden wedding.100 Viktoriya only worked as a midwife at the beginning of their marriage, soon limiting herself to looking after the household and their two children, Galina, born in 1929, and Yuriy, born in 1933. She styled his hair for him, chose his outfits and above all took care of grocery shopping at the markets and baking and cooking, which she first had to learn how to do.101 In the hard times under collectivization, it was a great

28

Brezhnev

advantage that Brezhnev was passionate about his hunting. He shot capercaillie, black grouse, hares and ducks.102 He is reported to have said, ‘It is good to eat game, because it contains a lot of microelements.’103 The young couple initially rented a room in a house in the village of Shemakha near Sverdlovsk in Mikhaylovskiy rayon, where two friends lived with them.104 A year later, in March 1929, they moved to Bisert’ and a year later, in February 1930, to Sverdlovsk.105 In Bisert’ they bought a horse, which Brezhnev needed to get to work, but which they also used for sleigh rides.106 After the misery of the Civil War and famine, the Brezhnevs clearly enjoyed a modicum of wealth, the relative peace and security that emerged during the first years of the NEP, and a happy private life. His parents had returned to Kamenskoye in 1925, and hence he could live without inhibition, first in the student halls of residence and then in his own room. And so there are some indications that it was here that Brezhnev first showed traits that would later become characteristic: the pleasure he took in hunting, his enjoyment of the good life, and his weakness for the ladies. Any kind of outstanding political career was certainly not foreseeable at this stage.

Land manager in turbulent times, 1927–1930 According to his profiles of 1929 and 1949, Leonid Brezhnev was a trainee at the okrug land registry of the town of Orsha in White Russia from June to October 1926. He graduated from the technical college a year later, in May 1927. The same month, he became a land manager in Grayvoronskiy uyezd, a subsidiary of the land registry of Kursk Governorate. He remained in this post for a year, until he came under the control of the okrug land registry of Sverdlovsk in April 1928, when he was sent to Mikhaylovskiy rayon in the Urals. There too he remained for only a year; in March 1929 he was elected to the rayon soviet of workers’ deputies and appointed chairman of the land registry of the rayon executive committee for the town of Bisert’ in Sverdlovskiy okrug. Less than a year later, in February 1930, the municipal government of Sverdlovsk made him chairman of the city land registry.107 Within three years he thus enjoyed a rapid rise through four different posts. In September 1930, he suddenly broke it off – but we will return to that later. Let us first examine the situation in which Brezhnev began his career: the year 1927 marks the transition from the NEP to the collectivization of agriculture, the foundation of large collective farms, the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, which communitarized the property of farmers, many of whom had only joined under duress and upon the threat of violence. This year was still relatively peaceful and land management was still a largely ‘innocent’, apolitical profession, neither particularly exciting nor especially dangerous. This would change overnight in December 1927, when Stalin persuaded the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress that peasants should no longer have any choice about the transition to collective farming – their participation was rather to be enforced in a necessary restructuring of village life. The same month, he sent men from his ‘inner circle’ to the country’s grain regions with the task of personally ensuring the state’s grain quotas were met emphatically. He sent Vyacheslav Molotov to Ukraine, but also made him responsible for the Ural region in early 1928.108 Stalin and his acolytes

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

29

thereby set in motion a battle that was soon to become a full-blown war with the peasants, whom they despised as the embodiment of backwardness and indiscriminately suspected of being speculators and ‘kulaks’, that is, wealthy upper peasants hostile to Soviet power and disinclined to deliver their grain. Thus in early 1928, at the age of twenty-two, Brezhnev once again found himself in a land on the cusp of civil war. This time he was not a victim but a perpetrator, or at least an actor, since it was his task to resurvey the collectivized land and register it as property of the collective farms. In Kursk too, the secret police (OGPU) had conducted three ‘mass operations’ between December 1927 and February 1928, confiscating grain and other commodities and arresting 149 people.109 Whether Brezhnev was sent to the Urals because he had proven himself in Kursk and his posting was a consequence of Molotov’s inspection, which had reported sloppy work on the part of the local organs, remains unknown.110 But thanks to a report by an auditor who controlled the village of Shemakha in Mikhaylovskiy rayon in September 1928, we do know that Brezhnev’s work there met with satisfaction: the land was surveyed, boundaries were marked with stakes and 39,000 hectares were mapped. The auditor Ozerskoy had few complaints concerning administration and accounting, his only recommendation being that the work be done even quicker and in closer cooperation with the party organizations.111 Brezhnev’s literary alter ego writes of his work: Earlier, people of my speciality were called land-surveyors. Now the name has changed, we have become land-managers in the authentic sense of the word. As we created agricultural artels, people pooled their land, cattle, farm buildings and implements in them. And we, land-managers, had not only to erase the boundaries, but to unite on the maps all the broken up, individual strips of land into one collective field.112

Sources do not relate how much resistance Brezhnev encountered in his work in Mikhaylovsk in 1928 or how much violence it entailed. A further report from March 1929 notes that land management in the rayon was only implemented where the land was farmed by the community. ‘Registration took place with considerable passivity on behalf of the lower organs of the local executive committee and complete indifference on the part of the population itself. There were no cases of categorical refusal to register.’113 It seems these were still mostly peaceful times. This also appears to be confirmed by a speech on the situation in Mikhaylovsk during the office meeting of the Sverdlovsk okrug committee in April 1929: the number of peasants in the collectives had risen from 200 to 460 and from 235 to 1,085 in the cooperatives. Every communist was called upon to join the kolkhozes, assemblies were to be held, but that, they noted, was clearly not enough.114 Indeed, 1929 was the year in which the tone and pattern of collectivization took a decisive turn. In the March of that year, Brezhnev took up a new position as a land manager in the town of Bisert’, where his task for the summer was to completely reorganize the agricultural area – that is, to divide the land into five sections and distribute them to kolkhozes that were to be established, ignoring all previous uses and former ownership. Brezhnev was given full responsibility and a staff of land

30

Brezhnev

managers, technicians, clerks etc., and had to keep Sverdlovsk constantly posted regarding progress.115 At the same time, in Bisert’ the Komsomol was ‘purged’ in May 1929, as was the party organization in the July.116 In May 1929, Brezhnev gave a speech on the state of land management at the rayon party assembly. The text has not survived, but the resolution that followed it has: the final ‘destruction of the obsolete forms’ of land use and the introduction of collective farms. Land was to be distributed in strict accordance with the ‘class principle’, i.e. the best land was to go to the kolkhozes, the less fertile to the cooperatives and only the worst and remotest farmland was to be given to the remaining individual peasants. All this was to be accompanied by political assemblies and an increase in mass work.117 On the one hand, it is clear that Brezhnev adopted the intensified rhetoric of class struggle. On the other hand, in July 1929 he made a submission to Sverdlovsk in which he outlined that the commissioned survey of arable land in Bisert’ could not be conducted because the lands had already been surveyed and re-registration would significantly delay the allocation process.118 The okrug administration in Sverdlovsk immediately replied that their instructions were to be carried out without question.119 This may be an indication that Brezhnev was still searching for meaning and purpose and did not blindly follow every order. That the situation in his area was chaotic is evident in another set of instructions he received shortly afterwards, in August 1929: in one of the five sections where kolkhozes had yet to be formed, work was to be stopped and the local comrades were to be recalled immediately. The missive continued that since there was ‘great confusion in the use of land’ in the other settlement areas, work should continue there: ‘The matter must be brought to a close.’120 We can only guess as to the violent measures this implied. It is presumably to such missions that Brezhnev’s literary alter ego is referring when he writes: ‘Together with other komsomoltsy I had confrontations in the fields with kulaks and discussions with them at rural assemblies. They threatened us with stakes, pitchforks, malicious notes and stones thrown through windows.’121 In the summer of 1929, Brezhnev was elected deputy chairman of the rayon administration.122 He was thus yet to reach the top of the hierarchy – besides which, governmental responsibility lay chiefly with the party and not the administration. Hence biographer Murphy cannot be right when he attributes the initiative for confiscating grain and punitive measures to Brezhnev: such campaigns were usually determined by the local party leadership and everyone else then had to vote in favour. And the directives as to how much grain was to be delivered when and which measures were to be used came from the OGPU headquarters in Moscow.123 Against this background, however, Brezhnev’s joining the party on 9 October 1929 appears in a new light: he now held political responsibility, and hence it was high time he became a card-carrying member. This was expedient not only for forging a career, but also in order to avoid being suspected of being on the wrong side. Nevertheless, Brezhnev remained the executor: at the same party bureau meeting, he and another colleague were posted to the Zuyevskiy agricultural soviet, in order that they prove themselves to the party. His task was to subjugate the local agricultural soviets to an auditing campaign in order to monitor tax payments, the establishment of a reserve fund of plots, the implementation of new elections, and party classes.124 This

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

31

task was presumably directly connected to a series of resolutions by the Moscow Politburo in August 1929 to intensify the ‘repressive methods of grain procurement’.125 The report Brezhnev read to the office of the rayon party committee was favourably received; the committee was satisfied that the land management was being conducted correctly and making headway.126 Brezhnev’s abilities were valued and his responsibilities expanded: a day later the Sverdlovsk okrug administration entrusted him with the task of monitoring the reallocation of forests.127 In the early November, the party committee sent him on another monitoring mission, this time to ‘improve work in the provision of hay and potatoes’ in the rural soviets of Nakoryakovsk and Vaskinsk.128 Flight from ‘total collectivization’, 1930 The original plan was for only fifteen per cent of all peasant households to be collectivized by 1934. At the November Plenum of 1929, however, the CC decided to implement total collectivization. Stalin announced that rural areas were to be plundered.129 On 4 December 1929, the Bisert’ active party group assembled to discuss these resolutions. Brezhnev too welcomed the new directives: ‘The right-wingers’ strategy failed, they yielded to the difficulties. The first year of the five-year plan has confirmed the correctness of the party’s general line. In our work, the struggle against the right-wingers must be the priority.’130 The active party group resolved to resolutely pursue collectivization of fifty per cent of all farms. Wherever there were not yet any kolkhozes, they were to be established, and where they did exist, all remaining poor and middle peasants were to be animated into joining.131 While on the one hand, Brezhnev demonstrated command of the party jargon, he also repeatedly issued warnings to his comrades: at the Bisert’ party plenum of 5 and 6 December, he pointed out that the requisite agricultural machinery was lacking for the upcoming land management and the spring sowing season, and that the situation was very tense. While the best land had been given to the poor and middle peasants, now everything had to be done to ensure that they could actually farm it. It goes without saying that there will be kulak sabotage here. […] I consider the absence of plans a big defect when doing work on collectivisation, and the rural Soviets have not carried out the work with proper planning. The departing bosses [students and activists who were sent to arouse class struggle in the villages] did not emphasise questions of collectivisation in the villages …132

Brezhnev employed the rhetoric of class struggle in reckoning with ‘resistance from the kulaks’. In the Bisert’ district, grain stores had indeed repeatedly been set on fire on the kolkhozes,133 and in the neighbouring region kulaks had doused a tractor driver with kerosene and set light to him.134 As early as 1927, Brezhnev is said to have demanded a Browning for self-defence, thereby coming into conflict with the OGPU.135 Nevertheless, his speech to the plenum was not a diatribe, but that of an organizer who wanted to see a good harvest. It is also both characteristic of the man and typical of the time that he criticized the lack of a rulebook providing orientation. Whether he really wished for more activism is uncertain. In a nutshell, we do not

32

Brezhnev

know what his thoughts were. His niece Lyubov’ Brezhneva claims that he initially believed in the correctness of collectivization but soon became disillusioned when he saw that dekulakization meant nothing but stealing from simple people and one’s own neighbours.136 One of his later speech-writers in the CC apparatus, Vadim Pechenev, also relates how Brezhnev told his aides in Zavidovo in early 1981: Yes, we believed in all that back then. And how would it have worked without belief […] You enter a farmhouse to collect surplus grain, and see for yourself that the children’s eyes are watering from the beetroot since they no longer have anything else to eat […] And yet we took whatever foodstuffs we could find. Yes, we believed in it all very strongly; if we hadn’t, it would have impossible to live and work […]137

On 29 December 1929, Brezhnev took his annual leave for 1928 and 1929; it was the first time he had been allowed to – further indication that these two years were extremely tense. He remained on leave for two entire months, until 29 February 1930.138 On 4 December 1929, the Bisert’ party bureau had already discussed his work and determined to decide on his further activities once he returned.139 Perhaps Brezhnev had applied to be posted elsewhere, then; we do not know. On 13 February, however, the okrug party committee of Sverdlovsk in the Urals appointed him both vice chairman of the okrug’s department of land management and chairman of the city department of land management; he thus became head of the Sverdlovsk city land registry.140 When Brezhnev left Bisert’, ninety-five per cent of the region’s farms had been collectivized; in his role as a land manager, he had outdone all the other regions in Sverdlovskiy okrug.141 Having spent three years in rural areas and villages, where he was directly involved in reallocating farmland, as the head of the authority Brezhnev now largely found himself behind a desk. Now it was he to whom the land managers and auditors throughout the entire district reported and he who decided what should happen.142 He also had to make decisions concerning many claims and complaints made by both private individuals and kolkhozes who protested they had not received the land they were due.143 Brezhnev was now in charge of the land registry’s ‘administrativetechnical advice’ and was provided with a deputy and two inspectors.144 If he was hoping for a calmer working life with less strain and violence, he soon discovered otherwise. In January 1930, while he was still on leave, a commission headed by Molotov had resolved there would be three categories of dekulakization according to quotas. In line with these instructions, the party committee in Uralskaya oblast had decided to arrest five thousand peasants as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ (category 1) and circumnavigate the courts by having them ‘dealt with’ by the OGPU, i.e. placed in concentration camps and shot if resisting arrest. It was further resolved that 15,000 ‘influential kulaks’ (category 2) were to be deported to scarcely populated areas and that all ‘remaining kulaks’ (category 3) within the respective administrative districts were to be resettled to the worst and most remote lands.145 The party did not make these operations public, but the rhetoric escalated accordingly. Although he was officially still on leave, Brezhnev’s work at the Sverdlovsk land registry began with the Fifth Plenum of the Sverdlovsk party committee on 15 February 1930, where he heard the new battle cries: the mass transition from entire

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

33

rural districts and regions to collective farms was imminent; collectivization would be ninety-five per cent complete by the end of the year; the kulaks had to be liquidated as a class.146 What ensued was the final outbreak of rural class struggle: on 1 March 1930, the Politburo in Moscow decided to use the ‘25,000ers’ – young urban activists armed and sent into the countryside to force the peasants to give up hidden grain and surrender their farms to collectivization – not just for dekulakization, but also for the spring sowing campaign, assigning them to the kolkhozes and regions. Just two days later, on 3 March, Pravda published Stalin’s article ‘Dizzy with Success’, in which he warned against the very ‘violation and distortion’147 in collectivization he himself had set in motion earlier that year. On 10 March, there followed a directive to the regional and district committees to proceed against ‘rule breaches’ in collectivization.148 Accordingly, at a meeting of 11 March, Brezhnev reminded his colleagues that those kulaks who had lost suffrage but not their right to land had to be allocated parcels, albeit the worst and the remotest.149 In order to ensure allocation followed the rules, the land administration authority sent Brezhnev to Bazhenovskiy rayon twice in the March and to Egorshino and Rezhevsk in the May.150 He thus still had to intervene on site in allocation battles, but now received a sixty-per-cent bonus for such trips.151 Stalin’s article and the new directives caused chaos in the villages and confusion and incomprehension in the party organizations. At their assembly in late March, members of the Sverdlovsk active party group admitted that they themselves were to blame for the mass exodus of up to forty per cent of peasants from the kolkhozes, having spread ‘terrible fear among the people’, with the result that entire communes joined but left soon afterwards.152 Nevertheless, many comrades were outraged at Stalin’s article and reported that this issue of Pravda had first been out of print for six days and that they had then considered the text to be a bad joke.153 Many speeches voiced a call for clear instructions, complaining that it was not right to have to constantly keep changing course and that the party activists were panicking:154 ‘Now nobody in the village can sleep: neither those who have remained in the kolkhoz, nor those who have left it, nor us.’155 Indeed, on 13 May Brezhnev reported from his trip to Egorshino and Rezhevsk that there had been gross violations in the allocation of land: the norms for the kolkhozes had been artificially increased while the individual peasants with husbandry rights had not received any more tracts. The land administration resolved to continue monitoring allocation closely. At the same time, however, it was decided that all of the land once owned by the dekulakized and deported peasants should go to the kolkhozes.156 Thus while the OGPU and their henchmen from the cities arrested and forcibly resettled peasants, it was Brezhnev’s task to survey the confiscated land, allocate it to the kolkhozes and ensure that the ‘remaining kulaks’ received a patch on the edge of the district. A particularly controversial point was that the party stipulated from above how many peasants were to be arrested and deported, but left it to the administrative district authorities to decide who belonged to ‘category 3’.157 It can be assumed that, as head of the land registry, Brezhnev was involved in the decision as to how many peasants and which ones were to be resettled, since their fields were to be used for the kolkhozes. After less than four taxing months in his new post, Brezhnev was granted leave by the land administration authority from 7 June to 1 August 1930.158

34

Brezhnev

The career leap to head of the land registry was enormous and it is all the more remarkable – as the dissident and historian Roy Medvedev notes – that Brezhnev relinquished the position after only half a year, virtually fleeing the Urals for Moscow to enrol as a student at the Kalinin Institute of Agricultural Machinery.159 L.S. Klimenko, director of the evening school at which Brezhnev would later study in Kamenskoye, reports that Brezhnev applied to be released in order to study.160 This is also confirmed by his wife Viktoriya, who says he decided to apply to study in Moscow together with a friend.161 But why? It seems he fled there to avoid the escalating dekulakization; with the introduction of quotas for arrests, deportations and resettlement in 1930, there was no shortage of excesses, particularly in Uralskaya oblast. Harvest time in the late summer of 1930 saw the next great wave of violence as grain was confiscated and peasants were deported.162 On 24 July 1931, the Politburo decreed that all employees delegated to Sverdlovsk were to be posted to the villages to enforce the meticulous grain procurement.163 Whether Brezhnev would have been involved, whether he had scruples, or could no longer cope with the pressure of the campaigns and diatribes – we do not know. His departure from Sverdlovsk (today’s Yekaterinburg) was certainly puzzling enough that to this day local legend has it he was expelled from the party there and steadfastly refused to ever set foot in the city again.164 With the collectivization of agriculture, Brezhnev became politicized. As an ‘expert in land management’, he not only had the task of arranging the expropriated lands into collective farms; as a deputy of a rayon soviet and head of a land department, he also had to function as a representative of state and party actions and propagate them in speeches. Perhaps the observation offered by his literary alter ego does his situation justice, both in a positive and in a negative sense: ‘While working as a land-manager, I felt myself to be, for the first time, a plenipotentiary of the Soviet regime in the eyes of hundreds of people.’165 Flight from Moscow: a worker, 1930/31 But he did not remain in Moscow very long either. His wife Viktoriya relates: ‘Where was I going to go? Where were we going to live? What were we going to live off? I had left [our daughter] Galya with my mother in Belgorod. Still, we saw that we had no livelihood in Moscow.’166 The city was completely inundated with refugees from the country; hundreds of thousands had left their villages in the wake of collectivization and dekulakization in the hope of slipping into anonymity in the metropolis and creating a new identity working on a building site or in a factory.167 After just two months, in November 1930 Brezhnev broke off his studies and returned to his parents in Kamenskoye.168 Interestingly, his Moscow interlude is not mentioned in any of the official Brezhnev biographies. His ‘memoirs’ simply omit the time he spent there: his ghostwriters delay his appointment to the Ural district land registry in early 1930 by a year to 1931; it is claimed he went from the Urals directly to his homeland to assist in its industrialization.169 Once again, then, there is a gap in Brezhnev’s biography which is not in keeping with the official image of a smooth rise to general secretary. Dropping out of college and leaving the capital for the provinces were clearly incompatible with the heroic

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

35

narrative. Fleeing twice, from dekulakization and the housing shortage in Moscow, is depicted in the ‘memoirs’ as a dutiful switch to the sector that was now in greater need of workers: I reasoned this way: an irreversible change for the better had already taken place in collectivization […], whereas industry was still gathering strength. On the industrial front today lies the first line in the struggle for Socialism. […] The factories of the South were producing two-thirds of the cast iron and the Dneprovsky factory, renamed F.E. Dzerzhinsky, was considered the largest of these – all this meant that my place was there.170

From these lines it becomes clear why Brezhnev’s switch from collectivization to industrialization was re-dated to 1931:171 the majority of villages had indeed been reorganized by 1931 – but not by 1930. But yet another station in his life is suppressed: he clearly did not find employment in his ‘home works’, but initially worked as a fitter at the Communard engineering plant in Zaporozh’ye, some 80 kilometres from Kamenskoye, from November 1930 to February 1931.172 Hence there was another reason to tweak the dates: there was no need to explain why he did not start his studies until 1931. Like the period 1921–1923, then, 1930/31 was also a time in Brezhnev’s life in which he ‘scraped through’ and was more concerned about securing his livelihood – and that of his family – than producing ‘heroic acts’ for the development of the country. However, 1931 marked the beginning of a phase in which his life certainly did correspond to the ideal of the committed Bolshevik: he received full membership of the party, worked by day in a factory, spent his evenings studying at an institute of technology and proved his engagement as a party activist. Together with his wife and one-year-old daughter he first moved in with his parents in ulitsa Pelina in Kamenskoye, where eleven of them squeezed into two rooms, until he was allocated a room in a student hall of residence; his son Yuriy was born there in 1933.173 Here he finally became a ‘proletarian’, with a delay of ten years, as it were, having set out on a different path in 1921. Like the typical ‘proletarian’, he worked during the day – first as a stoker, then as a lubricator for steam engines and finally as a fitter – and studied in the evenings at the Arsenichev Institute of Metallurgy at the Faculty of Thermal Power.174 The institute was founded in 1929 so that the local ironworkers could take evening classes given by the engineers. In 1931, six hundred aspiring engineers were enrolled.175 The metal works wasn’t just any factory, but one of the focal points for the enforced heavy industrialization of the first five-year plan (1928–1932). The ‘memoirs’ clearly attempt to raise Brezhnev’s significance by claiming that he worked under the famous chief engineer Ivan Bardin.176 But Bardin had already left the plant in 1929; during Brezhnev’s time there he was head of Kuznetskstroy, the gigantic foundry in the Kuzbass.177 It is also doubtful whether it really was Brezhnev who persuaded the equally famous blast furnace specialist Mikhail Pavlov to give a speech at the Worker’s Faculty.178 This namedropping probably served the sole purpose of associating Brezhnev with the greatest engineers of the first five-year plan.

36

Brezhnev

Evening classes and activism, 1931–1935 In fact, Brezhnev was a common student – but it was in these years his career in the party took off. He received his party book on 24 October 1931: ‘In addition, I was elected as group party organizer of the faculty, then president of the trade-union committee and finally secretary of the party committee for the whole institute.’179 According to his personnel file, he became secretary of his institute’s party organization in March 1932, at the same time ceasing to work as a fitter.180 It remains unclear how he went about his role as a functionary. The year 1931 saw a new wave of restructuring at the polytechnics with the aim of ensuring technical standards were met and cutting back on political education.181 It is possible that Brezhnev was involved in this reorganization, since the propaganda that went hand in hand with such measures was always the responsibility of the party leadership. What is certain is that he recruited students for a construction brigade that worked weekends to add two floors to the institute. He was also elected to the municipal flood protection committee.182 Here too he is said to have demonstrated that he could get things done: when one Saturday evening the annual Dnieper flood swelled so quickly that it became a threat to the factory power plant and many other halls, Brezhnev rushed to the park, where the young people went dancing, and had them all drag sandbags into position.183 Many years later he would tell a group of Afghan students in Kabul of his polytechnic days: They are great years in a person’s life. But my generation was forced to study and work under very harsh conditions. We studied and worked, and built our hall of residence and laboratories ourselves, and sometimes we also had to do construction service on the building sites of our first five-year plans.184

A fellow student recalled that Brezhnev was a good volleyball player and military sportsman, receiving the Voroshilov award for excellence in marksmanship (named in honour of the Civil War hero and People’s Defence Commissar Kliment Voroshilov) and the ‘Ready for Work and Defence’ award.185 Even the official English ‘memoirs’ mention that Brezhnev enjoyed singing and dancing: ‘A buoyant personality, Brezhnev found the time to join in singing and dancing.’186 But he was not blessed with the carefree student life he had probably yearned for in the Urals. On the contrary, in late 1932 he once again had to do battle with the peasants. As party organizer, he had the task of gathering groups of students to collect grain in the surrounding villages.187 Although the grain norms had been reduced in the September of that year,188 on 18 November the Politburo decided to activate workers and communists from Ukraine’s cities in brigades three or four strong and send them to enforce the quotas in the corn-growing regions beset by ‘kulak sabotage and disorganization in party work of the worst kind’.189 On 6 December 1932 Ukraine’s party chairman Stanislav Kosior called on all party functionaries to participate in the large-scale campaign against the ‘grain procurement saboteurs’. A comrade was to be sent to every village to disseminate propaganda with the aim of strengthening the kolkhozes and liberating them from the influence of the ‘kulaks and saboteurs’.190 It can be assumed that Brezhnev took part in both campaigns.

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

37

Once again, there were deportations: in January 1933, the OGPU had 4,037 peasants from Dnepropetrovskaya oblast sent to Arkhangel’sk in the Arctic Circle.191 Biographer Murphy is of the opinion that as a party functionary, Brezhnev enjoyed privileged access to groceries and did not want for anything.192 But as institute party secretary, he was low-ranking. The situation must have been apocalyptic. Even if the OGPU stopped at nothing to keep the starving peasants in rural areas, they fled to the cities, where they begged for food and often died, completely emaciated, in the streets.193 While all of Ukraine, the ‘breadbasket’ of the Soviet Union, was hit hard by collectivization and the ensuing famine, the situation in Dnepropetrovskaya oblast was especially critical.194 In March 1933 the OGPU reported from Kiev that in eleven villages in the Kamenskiy rayon, some 609 families, 1,192 adults and 1,407 children, were starving, 2,188 were sick, one case of cannibalism had been recorded, and no one had received help.195 It is not surprising that this episode is omitted from Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’, for even those who wrote their memoirs themselves almost always avoided the subject.196 To the same extent that collectivization was celebrated as a great success to the very end of the Soviet Union, the violence, deportations and famine that claimed an estimated five million victims remained taboo. Directorship and diploma, 1933–1935 It must have been to Brezhnev’s great relief that he received a new role in March 1933: he was to become director of the Workers’ Faculty in Kamenskoye, the educational establishment that had developed from the engineer Petrov’s polytechnic school and which now prepared workers for higher education via a two-year course.197 The fact that he was appointed director of an educational institution while still a student, even if he did have some experience as an expert administrator, suggests he must have proven himself in his previous roles in collectivization and as institute party organizer. If the recollections collected to mark his seventieth birthday in 1976 are to be believed, he was a prudent director who communicated with his colleagues in an easy and friendly manner while still demanding plenty of them, and restructured the curriculum and examinations.198 What sounds like all too positive a cliché seems to correspond to the facts if one reads the instructions Brezhnev gave while in the post: he demanded regular attendance, greater attention to orthography, and obligatory examinations in all subjects. He also ordered that measures be taken to restructure examinations.199 He played a pivotal role in the faculty’s development: in 1933, only thirteen graduated – in 1935 the figure stood at over a hundred.200 But in this position too, he still had to implement dekulakization, whether he wanted to or not:201 ‘19 May 1933. Expel from the student body as a foreign element the student in the fifth group Khren O.E. as the daughter of a kulak who is being dekulakized and has lost his voting rights.’202 On 27 January 1935, Brezhnev passed the viva for his dissertation A Design for Electrostatic Cleaning of Blast Furnace Gas in the Conditions at the Dzerzhinskiy Factory, receiving a distinction. The examining committee was chaired by the institute’s director, German Germanovich Pol’, and included two lecturers and five engineers from the metal works. Since 1925, the factory had been named after Feliks

38

Brezhnev

Dzerzhinskiy, who had organized its reconstruction, and was fondly known to the workforce as ‘Dzerzhinka’. They awarded Brezhnev the highest grade for both his written work and theory, as well for his oral answers. He received the title of Thermal Power Engineer.203 How meaningful this was remains uncertain, since party functionaries were often given ‘political’ grades of which their scholarship was undeserving. There is a revealing anecdote relating how in 1963 Brezhnev visited his alma mater, as he was wont to do, and was asked by his professor of mathematics if he could remember how many times he had taken the exam, to which Brezhnev replied, ‘Yes, five times, but then you gave me top marks.’204 This would compound the suspicion that he received his distinction primarily for political reasons. And yet the aesthetics of the graduation photograph showing him and eight other fellow engineering students are quite remarkable. There is nothing combative or martial about it; it rather corresponds to the intellectual aesthetics of the preRevolutionary era. Brezhnev is the only one wearing the party uniform, a dark shirt and jacket, while all the others are in suits and ties with white shirts. He seems to be the focal point, sitting, while the others are grouped around him, some sitting, some standing, their gazes directed towards him. The young men clearly share a bond as comrades; they have their hands on each others’ shoulders and are smiling at each other. Brezhnev’s pose and facial expression is no different to that of his comrades: a good-looking young man enjoying his friends’ company. The photo is thus fitting for the mid-1930s, the short period between the end of the famine in 1933 and the start

Figure 5 Brezhnev, sitting, first left, as a freshly graduated engineer in the company of his fellow students in Kamenskoye, 1935.

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

39

Figure 6 Viktoriya and Leonid Brezhnev as a married couple in Kamenskoye, 1935.

of the Great Terror of 1937/38 when the party did not so much drill engineers to struggle for industrialization and fight the enemy as promise them a privileged life for excellent work. Suits, white shirts and ties were acceptable again during the second five-year plan (1933–1938). This ‘middle-class aesthetic’ is also evident in a second photograph of Brezhnev from 1935, showing him with his wife, both shot front on, looking into the camera, their heads tilted slightly and leaning against each other’s. Brezhnev is wearing the dark shirt of the party, but has a dreamy look in his eyes. Viktoriya’s hair is freshly crimped, as was the fashion of the day, above a high-necked white blouse. As a qualified engineer, in 1935 Brezhnev corresponded to the ideal of the ‘New Man’, who was now permitted to clean the dirt from under his fingernails and put on a white shirt: of proletarian origins, himself a worker, tested and tempered in the crusade against the peasants, an engineer educated in close proximity to production, a party organizer who ran a workers’ faculty on the side. It is hardly surprising that with eighty-six recently graduated engineers to choose from, the works newspaper selected Brezhnev as the exemplary figure on whom to base its hymn to the new Soviet man in a piece entitled ‘His name was – Bolshevik’: I cannot imagine where this man gets so much energy and capacity for work. The son of a worker, he has himself worked at the factory as a stoker and a fitter… . From the factory he was sent to party-economic work. He had a tight and difficult schedule. This same man studied at our institute. He was our best party group

40

Brezhnev

organizer… . And he was at the top of his class, receiving the highest marks for his diploma project… . As he goes into industry, this young engineer has the makings for achieving much… . I’m certain he will achieve it… . I say this because he is made of tough material.205

Shock worker-engineer and director again, 1935/36 In fact, the man the factory newspaper predicted would have a great future only remained in his home town for a few months, as a shift manager in the power plant department.206 His ‘memoirs’ relate: ‘It was a year filled with intensive work, with searches for the best possible production procedures, discussions, the collective efforts of shock-workers, counter-plans, night calls and at times emergency jobs.’207 It was not an easy time to be an engineer; the factories were expected to deliver high performance beyond all technical norms and safety regulations, especially after late August 1935 with the announcement of the shock work campaign named after the miner Aleksey Stakhanov. Now every worker and engineer was obliged to wring the maximum from his machines, even if it meant breaking them or risking his own life in doing so – as indicated in Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ by the ‘counter-plans’ with which the workforce were determined to outdo the actual plan, the consequences being ‘night calls’ and ‘emergency jobs’. The workforce of the Dzerzhinskiy metal plant certainly bought into the spirit of ‘socialist competition’: they placed first among all metal works throughout the union three times between August 1935 and March 1936.208 But Brezhnev spent less than a year as a Stakhanov engineer: on 6 October 1935 he was drafted for military service.209 He received his military training in Chita in the Far East, quickly becoming ‘political leader’ of a tank division.210 According to a fellow student who was drafted with him, A.D. Kutsenko, Brezhnev proved a good comrade and organizer here too, always friendly and cheerful but very demanding. He further reports that faced with winter temperatures of minus 54 Celsius, Brezhnev joked that if the local camels could survive the climate, so could the soldiers, and also organized a group of twelve skiers and suggested a long-distance race as proof of their readiness for battle.211 When he returned home in November 1936, much had changed: not only had the town been renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk in honour of Feliks Dzerzhinskiy, the founder of the Cheka secret police and organizer of the metal works’ reconstruction,212 but in the August Stalin had staged the first show trial in Moscow. The aim was not only to execute his former comrades Grigoriy Zinov’ev and Lev Kamenev, but also to intensify the state of emergency and fear throughout the country. The way was being paved for the Great Terror, the party and its media suggesting the entire country was infested with enemies. At the same time, preparations were underway for the second show trial of January 1937, in which primarily representatives of the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry and engineers were in the dock and to be sentenced for alleged acts of sabotage.213 It is presumably against this background that the director of the Dneprodzerzhinsk Technical College of Metallurgy, I.P. Ivanov, was dismissed by the

Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man

41

People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry on 17 November 1936. He was replaced by Brezhnev.214 A book of Brezhnev’s directives has survived from this period too. Notably, unlike in 1933 he did not order any expulsions due to political transgressions. It would appear the technical college was a safe place that was yet to feel the impact of the hunt for ‘saboteurs’, ‘spies’ and ‘traitors to the people’. Instead, Brezhnev found himself having to deal with cases of hooliganism, truancy and damage to property, handing out ‘simple’ or ‘strict’ reprimands or, on rare occasions, expulsions. There are entries for an indoor snowball fight and an incident in which a cleaner was insulted, and retaliated with obscene swearing.215 Ten students were relegated, however, in the December for missing over 100 out of 260 lessons.216 Once again, as director he was faced with many students with poor spelling, issuing the directive that in future, all work was to be corrected for orthography and style, and that there be regular dictation; a recommended reading list was to be hung in the library.217 All the other problems he noted were the usual issues: sixteen per cent of students’ average marks were below the required level,218 the students who worked in the factory’s three-shift system were overburdened,219 there was a shortage of paper, partly due to theft,220 and conditions in the halls of residence were unacceptable, but the inhabitants objected to regular disinfection due to the smell of the chemicals.221 The technical college offered Brezhnev the opportunity to indulge in his passion for theatre once again; he set up a theatre group and a dance group.222 He and his family lived in a house belonging to the institute. In his spare time he loved not only to hunt, but also to take care of his pigeon loft. When other pigeons lured his away, he became terribly angry, his neighbours recall, but he followed the code of honour and bought them back.223

Summary In early 1937, Brezhnev was a rather normal example of the new type of engineer; there was certainly no indication he would become general secretary one day. On the contrary: he had not enthusiastically welcomed the Revolution, was late in joining the Komsomol and even later in joining the party, virtually waiting until it could no longer be avoided; he had always been more interested in his own survival than the fate of the Bolsheviks, had fled famine, dekulakization and the housing shortage, had a passion for poetry and theatre and was more interested in the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin than in Lenin and Stalin. It is important to consider Brezhnev from this perspective once again: without the Revolution and industrialization, he may well have become an actor. Many young people with a penchant for literature, art or history did not have the opportunity to pursue these interests, since the first five-year plan (1928–1932) meant that only technical studies offered prospects. Presumably Brezhnev was shaped more by the horrors of the Civil War and the ensuing famine and typhus epidemic than by the idea of creating a new society. A ‘good’ life in which one did not have to worry about where one’s next meal was coming from and had time for hunting or sleigh rides seemed important to him – but not just because of the

42

Brezhnev

depravation he witnessed. These were also the values that had been impressed upon him by his parents: to strive for bourgeois prosperity. This drive would later play a large role in shaping his politics. And one can imagine, even if it must remain speculation, that the conviction everyone should live well also influenced his actions as a land manager, agent of collectivization and party organizer, at least to the extent it was possible. One indication is provided by the recollection of a fellow student at the institute who was so poor that he attended lessons hungry and in rags. He relates that Brezhnev noticed immediately and from that point on his mother provided him with clothing and food.224 It is a cheap shot to accuse Brezhnev of enthusiastically having kulaks deported. In fact, he did as he was instructed. It was impossible to keep out of collectivization without risking one’s own life. There are only very few cases of ‘activists’ who avoided becoming responsible by withdrawing to remote regions or by shooting themselves. His breaking off his career as a land expert and leaving the Urals for Moscow can be seen as such a ‘withdrawal’, although it cannot be said with certainty. It is difficult to make any pronouncements regarding his thinking or his attitude, since the few quotations we have on these years are from the time when he was general secretary, and the image was consistent with the praise cited above: he was affable, without arrogance, friendly but demanding. In this respect, the eulogy printed in the factory newspaper in 1935 can be considered the least dubious source, since it offers a contemporary record: Brezhnev was a suitable embodiment of the ideal and a role model for the new Soviet engineer: comradely, good-looking and a man of action. It was predicted he would have a great career in production – not in politics.

Figure 7 Brezhnev during the war, with his favourite horse, Donchak.

Figure 8 Brezhnev (r.) talking with Nikita Khrushchev (l.), 1 June 1942.

43

2

‘How the Steel was Tempered’, or a Career Amidst Terror and War

While there are almost no photographs of Brezhnev from the years 1937–1941, there are a number from the war showing him as a tall, handsome young officer, usually with a beaming smile belying the horrors all around him. This relatively large collection of photographs is available thanks to the Red Army photographers who accompanied the troops to document the war. The images give the impression he was well aware he cut a dashing figure in his smart uniform, consciously posing for the camera. One photograph shows him alongside his favourite horse, Donchak, fondly stroking his head while smiling into the camera. Another from 1942 shows him as a political commissar addressing a group of soldiers four rows deep and listening attentively. Brezhnev has sat down, it would seem to address them on the same level, and is clearly speaking with purpose. It is unclear whether this photograph was staged or was a snapshot. Either way, it shows Brezhnev in the role he played throughout the entire war: addressing assembled troops to prepare them for battle. And then we have a photograph of him with Khrushchev taken on 1 June 1942. After 1964, this photograph no longer appeared in albums, since Brezhnev no longer wished to be associated with the mentor he himself had ousted. They are depicted deep in conversation, both in battledress and polished boots, turned towards one another in semi-profile. Khrushchev has his hands in his pockets while Brezhnev holds his over his stomach, a cigarette in one of them, and appears to be explaining something while Khrushchev listens. The stately Brezhnev stands half a head taller than the bald, rotund Khrushchev. The picture radiates calm and familiarity, and shows a turning point in Brezhnev’s career: meeting Khrushchev in 1938 in Dnepropetrovsk was a decisive moment, as was their second encounter at the front, whereafter Khrushchev employed him on a number of important missions. He largely had Khrushchev to thank for his post-war career.

Rise during the Great Terror Brezhnev was not able to enjoy the relative peace and quiet of a college director’s post for long. Ukraine was not spared Stalin’s mass terror of 1937/38, neither in general nor in terms of the targeted persecution, trials and executions of the elite 44

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

45

Figure 9 Brigade Commissar Brezhnev, in the foreground, seated, addresses the troops, 1942.

both in the party and in the technological and economic spheres. On the contrary, the Second Moscow Show Trial of January 1937 also focused on ‘wreckers’ in Ukraine. Stalin had embellished the fabricated ‘confession’ of Georgiy Pyatakov, the deputy people’s commissar for heavy industry accused of ‘Trotskyist conspiracy’, with the ‘admission’ that he was the organizer of a terrorist group planning to sabotage the coke ovens in Dneprodzerzhinsk.1 The infamous plenum of February–March 1937 in Moscow launched Stalin’s policy of terror, free rein being handed to the chairman of the NKVD, successor to the OGPU and predecessor of the KGB. Ukraine’s Second Secretary Pavel Postyshev was deposed in the March, having dared to defend the arrested erstwhile party favourite Nikolay Bukharin, who would be sentenced to death in the Third Moscow Show Trial of 1938. Stalin also considered Postyshev ‘too Ukrainian’.2 In the summer of 1937, Stalin sent Molotov, NKVD chairman Nikolay Ezhov and Khrushchev to Ukraine to press ahead with the purges. Mass arrests began there in 1938, when Stalin dismissed Ukraine’s party chairman Kosior and replaced him with Khrushchev. None of the members of the organizing bureau and the Secretariat of the Communist Party of Ukraine – the republic’s leading organs – or the seventeen people’s commissars survived the year 1938, and only three out of 102 CC members and candidates remained. The party was ‘purged’ of thirty-seven per cent of its members.3 In 1937, Brezhnev’s home city of Dneprodzerzhinsk had a population of 154,000. In 1937/38, some 1,468 were arrested, 1,139 of whom were shot. The metal works was hit particularly hard: 785 of the 15,000 employees were arrested. 705 of them were shot.4

46

Brezhnev

The year 1937 Stalin’s mass arrests of 1937/38 created a personnel crisis that promised young cadres rapid promotion, albeit with high risk. Brezhnev was typical of the first Soviet generation, educated as an engineer and catapulted into a new career by the terror. The launch of the ‘purges’ and the wave of arrests swept him into new positions, out of the factory and college and into the city and party offices. Since January 1937, the local NKVD chairman Veniamin Moiseyevich Paperman had stoked hysteria in the Dzerzhinskiy works, the first target being the director, Iosif Petrovich Manayenkov (1896–1938). As head of the factory, Manayenkov was a prominent personality in the city; the famous metallurgist Ivan Bardin had personally appointed him ‘red director’ in 1927.5 Now, however, the bureau of the city’s party committee agitated under the leadership of Semën Lysov, claiming the factory’s engineers were not doing enough to organize the Stakhanov campaign and had relaxed their ‘vigilance’ towards ‘wreckers’. The chairman of the party factory committee Mikhail Rafailov (1903–1938) was warned he had to do a better job of managing the engineers and should report every interruption to operations as proof of poor technical direction.6 The next step was not long in coming: in February 1937, a ‘counter-revolutionary’ group was exposed in the boiler works.7 In the March, the party bureau accused Manayenkov of allowing ‘hostile Trotskyites’ to do damage due to his ‘suppression of self-criticism’. Rafailov was also blamed for failing to uncover these ‘abuses’ sooner.8 In the May, the eighth blast furnace was fired up, an event celebrated across the Union; this probably allowed Manayenkov and Rafailov to escape the firing line for a while.9 In early 1937, the campaign against ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’ took aim at Brezhnev too, as director of the technical college: the extension to the building he had instigated in 1936/37 and implemented in collaboration with the factory had not been cleared by the city’s party leadership. Lysov now threatened to expel him from the party for his ‘high-handedness’. This was usually the first step leading to arrest and prosecution.10 Brezhnev’s niece later claimed that the NKVD had him in their sights.11 But Brezhnev remained unscathed, receiving not so much as a reprimand. On his personnel form of 1949 he wrote: ‘I have no party reprimands. I have never been in court or the focus of investigations.’12 It is possible that this leniency was due to Lysov’s dismissal as city party leader in the April, the post receiving a long-term replacement in Second Secretary Alexey Viktorov. Viktorov was not only well disposed towards Brezhnev, but even persuaded him to become deputy chairman of the city party committee in May 1937. In the early August, Brezhnev also took on the role of deputy chairman of the city soviet, a role equivalent to deputy mayor. Brezhnev thus became responsible for construction and municipal utilities.13 These new positions represented a considerable step in his career. At the same time, it was a promotion that put him in danger. While Roy Medvedev wrote that there was nothing to indicate that Brezhnev was involved in the Terror,14 in 1937 the Dneprodzerzhinsk city party committee barely discussed or voted on anything other than ‘wreckers’, expulsions and arrests, listed on the agenda under the heading ‘cases of conflict’. Brezhnev was not only responsible for

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

47

the expulsion of colleagues and friends, but was also in danger of being arrested himself. It is difficult to examine the years 1937/38 in terms of perpetrators and victims or dichotomies of ‘guilty–not guilty’, since such categories imply either–or and an autonomy of action that was simply not an option for many people at the time. Brezhnev was neither one of those who instigated and actively escalated the Terror, nor one of those who lost their liberty or their lives. Rather, he was swept into a maelstrom that severely reduced his options if he wanted to stay alive. Fëdor Kinzhalov, the successor to the deposed Party Secretary Lysov, was arrested after only a few days in office, in the April of 1937. He was replaced by Efim Makeyev, under whose leadership Brezhnev now worked. In July 1937 however, Lysov, First Secretary Makeyev and Second Secretary Viktorov, who had recruited him, were arrested. Declared enemies of the people, they were shot in the autumn.15 In the eye of the Terror The threat became even more tangible on 21 September 1937, when the party decided to expel German Germanovich Pol’, the director of the Institute of Metallurgy and chairman of Brezhnev’s examination committee, for a ‘loss of Bolshevist vigilance’ and ‘contact with enemies of the people’. The decision was unanimous, and included Brezhnev’s vote. Pol’ had been a mentor to Brezhnev: it was he who had appointed him to the institute and made him a party organizer; he not only lived in the same building as Brezhnev, but also went hunting with him.16 Nevertheless, the party committee qualified his expulsion in March 1938, changing the record in his cadre file from ‘strict censure’ to simply ‘censure’.17 More of Brezhnev’s supporters were hit with expulsions and arrests to which he agreed or had to agree: at the party bureau session of 14 November 1937, Rafailov was expelled as an enemy of the people. On 23 November 1937, the same fate befell Manayenkov.18 After being tortured and hurriedly convicted as enemies of the people, they were shot on 31 March 1938.19 Like Pol’, Manayenkov had been Brezhnev’s friend and patron: it was thanks to him that he had become head of the workers’ faculty in 1933 and the technical college in 1936.20 As a worker, party activist and engineer, he must also have collaborated closely with Rafailov and benefited from his patronage. On 25 November 1937, the acting secretary of the city party committee, Konstantin G. Steblëv, who had replaced Makeyev in the July, was arrested as an enemy of the people and shot in January 1938.21 Since the city party committee was now without anyone at the helm, on 28 November 1937 the plenum of the party committee and the active party group assembled to elect a new leader. After unanimously agreeing by show of hands to expel the enemies Manayenkov and Rafailov from both the plenum and the party bureau, the assembled elected a new organizing bureau, to which Brezhnev was appointed.22 The speech Brezhnev gave at this session followed the prescribed pattern in both structure and tenor: the enemies of the people were to be condemned and members had to exercise self-criticism in acknowledging their own ‘lack of vigilance’. This was the discourse he had to use if he was to avoid putting his own life in danger. His speech is revealing, not only because it is one of his first to be transcribed, but also

48

Brezhnev

because, faced with the options of hysterical screaming or sober accusation, he chose the latter. Moreover, he came close to speaking the unspeakable when he insisted he had not coveted any of the positions he had occupied. He blamed his ‘lack of vigilance’ towards the enemy on his inexperience: I, comrades, the youngest member of the bureau of our city party committee, was elected at the last plenum of the city party committee. I do not seek to justify myself in any way, but together with the party organization I deeply feel largely responsible for not being able to expose the enemies, although it must be said that there were enough signs, enough opportunities to do so. One only had to talk in the bureau about the expulsion of the Trotskyites for Rafailov to start up with his whitewashing, […] and the issue was postponed for the next session. I raised the case of Fertman [chairman of the city soviet or mayor; Brezhnev was his deputy] to the city soviet committee a dozen times, but Rafailov always asked, ‘Why are you, a newcomer, accusing Fertman’, and insisted he was a person of great integrity […].23

Rafailov, Makeyev and Viktorov, he said, had repeatedly managed to delay and obstruct the inquiries into wrecking: ‘There were certainly older office members, and if they had shared their experience, we could have addressed this issue systematically.’24 Brezhnev further concentrated on the ‘consequences of wrecking’, painting a picture of the difficult situation in the city that essentially made it clear it was not a case of sabotage at all, but a matter of tough economic circumstances: the theatre had been granted a budget three times, but had not yet been restored; the same held for the sewers, a number of buildings and the tramway, none of which had been completed. Brezhnev demanded decisive action be taken by the party to avoid any further failure to expose enemies of the people, and better organization of the party bureau’s work; he had never received any minutes and the agendas were always badly prepared, as if neither active party groups nor plenums had been convened.25 Notably, Brezhnev’s discussion of municipal planning and the organization of the party are much more expansive and detailed than his call for vigilance towards enemies of the people, which seem rather formulaic. More precisely, he deflected attention from ‘wrecking’ to questions of urban development. Moreover, he not only omitted to demand the death penalty for the expelled, which was very much part of the ‘etiquette’ of the day, but also avoided ‘exposing’ anyone else. And his speech took a remarkable turn when he ended it by insisting he had not wanted to become a member of the city soviet and advocated that he should not be elected to the party bureau. While it was a common enough discourse to prefer to be a production engineer than a career cadre, the call of the party was to be accepted wholeheartedly: I think that at this plenum, every communist, even the simplest, should talk about himself. I am a down-to-earth person, I was born here. I didn’t have any connections to anyone, neither Kinzhalov nor Lysov nor Makeyev. The invitation to work on the city soviet seemed suspicious to me. I declined to work on the city soviet; I am an engineer and didn’t want to do this work, and resisted for a long time. [The members of the city soviet] Karpov, Shcherbakov and Zhupinas made

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

49

a lot out of this, as though I had something against the party. I said that I was a party member, but such pressure seemed suspicious to me.26

Brezhnev played the naive worker who had also refused to attend party committee meetings and had not received adequate training in the work of the party bureau.27 He continued in this vein when a list of seven candidates for the bureau was read out: ‘I was only in the bureau four times, but I nevertheless think that I made a big mistake, and completely agree with your opinion on the dissolution of the old bureau. This is a question of political order, and so I have given it some thought and I think that my name should be removed from the list.’28 He was not the only one at this session to request his name be removed from the list of candidates. The majority of those present did the same, even voicing self-criticism for having promoted or recommended for office individuals who were now under arrest as enemies of the people or were related to those that were. After an open vote, some of the candidates were indeed removed from the list.29 But the incumbent chairman of the city soviet, Pavel Alfërov, who had graduated from the Institute of Metallurgy a year before Brezhnev, supported his candidacy: I recommended Brezhnev as a candidate and adhere to it for the following reasons. Brezhnev is the son of a real worker at the Dzerzhinskiy factory; Brezhnev himself worked in the Urals for some years. I studied with him at the Institute. He is a good comrade, his only mistake is that he is a huntsman and hunted together with Pol’; they lived in the same house. Brezhnev is a young force who is still developing.30

Whether Brezhnev wanted them to or not, after this speech they unanimously voted to retain his candidacy and in a secret ballot elected him to the organizing bureau.31 Thus while Brezhnev profited from the terror and was involved in the expulsion of others, he was hardly the driving force behind the purges; indeed, he too lived with the threat of accusations and arrest. He was not an agitator or instigator who pushed for colleagues’ ‘exposure’ and arrest, nor was evading the ritual ‘uncovering’ of ‘enemies of the people’ and ‘wreckers’ an option. As a member of the city soviet and the city party committee, he had to take a stance on the accusations brought by the NKVD. He chose a course that caused the least possible harm to others and kept himself out of danger. It was a remarkable and certainly an original tactic to refer to himself as ‘down-toearth’ in the pejorative sense of ‘simple’ in order to depict his failures as the result of ignorance and naiveté. He took this even further when he claimed he had virtually been forced to take up his posts. Given everything we know about him from the 1920s and early 1930s, it was probably true that he had not wanted to accept the role of deputy chairman of the city soviet: he wished neither to be exposed to the terror nor to move into politics in general. He lent the prescribed narrative another personal accent with his attempt to switch the ‘wrecker’ discourse to the objective level of infrastructural projects. These are all strong indications that he did not succumb to the hysteria of the Great Terror, but understood that men like himself were sacrificed because the Soviet economy could not fulfil the demands of the plans. The arrests and expulsions continued after November 1937, a whole succession of city soviet leaders being deposed in the March, May and September of 1938.32 Now

50

Brezhnev

there were only ‘acting’ first and second secretaries, since they only remained in office for a few months. Brezhnev now worked under G.I. Zhupinas, who asked to be released from his duties as first secretary as early as late January, and under Second Secretary A.I. Trofimov, who succeeded Zhupinas in the March after the latter was removed ‘due to weak leadership’.33 Along with the ‘cases of conflict’, i.e. the expulsions, the agendas of party bureau meetings contained many urgent tasks that could soon lead to new accusations of ‘wrecking’ if they were not fulfilled. The minutes note who spoke on which topic; thus we know which subjects Brezhnev addressed, although we do not know what he said. As head of the construction and public works sector, he dealt with the kolkhozes and machinery and tractor stations, the city’s food supplies, the spring sowing campaign and work in the bread factory.34 In early March, the organizing bureau gave him the task of ensuring that the Shevchenko Theatre, the poor condition of which had caused several party secretaries to be labelled enemies of the people, was finished in time for the autumn theatre season.35 Brezhnev took care of the commuter workers who still lived in distant villages, opened the tram line and joined a commission regulating the transfer of the factory’s fleet to the city’s shipping organization.36 Together with the new first secretary of the city soviet council, Trofimov, it was his duty to find suitable rooms for the electoral commission, and he also had to explain why the orders of the Moscow CC and the Council of Ministers to supply the Dnepr region with electricity had not been fulfilled.37 With expulsions from the party and arrests accompanied by a constant changing of the guard within the city soviet and feverish fulfilment of plans and missions prescribed by Moscow, this must have been an extremely tense and nerve-wracking time. Given the many arrests in his immediate environment, Brezhnev must have lived in constant fear of being arrested. We do not know how he coped with the threat, whether like so many others he lay awake at night waiting to be dragged off by the NKVD, whether he suppressed the dangers or channelled his fear into a manic work ethic. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ depict the Great Terror as a ‘most interesting time’ in which people were in awe of the heroic deeds of their contemporaries and were glad to witness the city’s growth: It was a real triumph when the red tram-cars ran through the whole town. I remember the beautiful building which now houses the Palace of Pioneers going up (in 62 days), the komsomoltsy building a stadium and the four-storeyed ‘highrise’ apartment blocks with balconies and wide windows that appeared. […] more goods appeared in the shops, people dressed up more and life became better – my time of work in Dneprodzerzhinsk was memorable for these reasons.38

Thrown together by the Terror During the war and in the years immediately thereafter, Brezhnev encountered men who were of such importance to him that he firmly attached himself to them and later took them to Moscow. However, his fellow students from Kamenskoye/ Dneprodzerzhinsk and his party comrades from Dnepropretrovsk seemed to hold a

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

51

special significance for him. It was not for nothing that this retinue was later known as the ‘Dnepropetrovsk mafia’, even if some of his acolytes were from Moldavia and Kazakhstan. It is unclear how these friendships developed, what drove them, and whether they emerged out of circumstance, convenience, or simply fondness. It can certainly be said, however, that they were extraordinarily solid relationships and that these men stuck together through thick and thin. We can only assume that it was the experience of the Terror of 1937/38, the inhuman pressure to succeed that could suddenly tip over into accusations of sabotage, and the omnipresent hysteria about enemies that bonded the Dnepropetrovsk clique. It was a time in which it was crucial to have people whom you could trust and rely on not to expose you as an ‘enemy of the people’ or a ‘traitor’ and vote for your expulsion from the party. There were no guarantees, but perhaps the hope that people with a similar biography, from the same region and with the same alma mater, with the same patrons and the same responsibility, would have greater inhibitions when it came to denouncing companions. If neither the law nor state institutions nor societal organizations offered protection from accusations of treachery even despite an immaculate record, then the only safety net was one’s personal contacts. Stalin’s terror was intended to destroy such networks in order to further atomize society. But the Terror also caused those who escaped it, no matter how narrowly, to form even tighter unions of unconditional support and protection. A strong network meant enjoying the patronage of a powerful figure in the state, the party or the economy who could offer protection and resources. For Brezhnev, this protector and patron was Nikita Khrushchev, who became the new leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party on 27 January 1938. After the majority of the party elite had been arrested, and in the face of constant further arrests, Khrushchev needed his own network of acolytes he could rely on. This group included Demyan Sergeyevich Korotchenko (1894–1969) and Semën Borisovich Zadionchenko (1898–1972), successive heads of the oblast committee of Dnepropetrovsk from 1937 to 1941 who set to work establishing a power base and rebuilding a party ripped apart by the Terror. They came to know Konstantin Stepanovich Grushevoy (1906–1982), who was a close friend of Brezhnev’s from his college days and had graduated from the Institute of Metallurgy the year before him, together with the chairman of the Dneprodzerzhinsk city soviet, Alfërov, in 1934.39 At his suggestion, on 16 May 1938 they made Brezhnev head of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast party committee’s department of trade.40 For Brezhnev, this meant a double promotion: after just one year as deputy chairman of a regional city soviet, he and his family moved to the oblast’s administrative centre around forty-five kilometres away, where he no longer worked in the state administration, but on the higher level of the party itself. According to Dornberg, he was allocated a large apartment in an old building on the main street, Karl Marx prospekt.41 It was not long before he progressed further. When Grushevoy was promoted to second secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast party committee in early 1939, he made sure Brezhnev was appointed propaganda secretary in the February.42 The files of the Dnepropetrovsk party conferences, plenums and bureau meetings contain hardly any speeches by Brezhnev; it seems he kept a low profile and allowed others to take centre stage.43 He was in charge of countless newspapers and magazines and an ‘army’ of eighty propagandists,44 his task being to disseminate and implement

52

Brezhnev

the party’s instructions: it fell to him to silence the last remaining Ukrainian nationalist tendencies, russify the republic, ensure the use of Russian in schools and the press and have the history books rewritten in line with Stalin’s orders. His role also included performing several readings of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course,45 a work of gross falsification principally commissioned by Stalin, to nearly half a million people; he performed 2,229 readings in 1939 alone.46 It was also his task to stir up hatred of Hitler, then, following the Hitler–Stalin pact of August 1939, praise the alliance and explain the German invasion of Poland.47 According to Mlechin, Brezhnev did not enjoy his new role as chief propagandist. He is said to have later confessed to a small circle of confidants: ‘I hate this nonsense, I don’t like concerning myself with endless blather. With a bit of effort I’ll be shut of it …’48 Indeed, his next post followed a year and a half later: in late September 1940 he advanced to third secretary of the oblast committee, presumably now responsible for the armament industry,49 for which he was formally made secretary at the suggestion of Grushevoy in March 1941.50 What is certainly not true is what the official English biography claims: that he was secretary for agriculture from 1940 onwards.51 This was clearly a Cold War attempt to deny any connections to the armament industry. Once again, we can only speculate as to Brezhnev’s attitude to these tasks. His role as head of the trade department at least involved duties similar to those he had had in Dneprodzerzhinsk and entailed a clearly defined, specific task: ensuring the population was supplied with sufficient food and goods. But the propaganda department represented uncharted waters: the slogans permanently changed, success was hard to quantify, and the role required an edge that Brezhnev had certainly never demonstrated hitherto. Hence it is quite possible it came as a great relief to him when he could switch to organizing the weapons factories. The Dnepropetrovsk area was one of the most important industrial regions in the Soviet Union, providing twenty per cent of the country’s pig iron and sixteen per cent of its steel production.52 As an engineer and organizer, Brezhnev was much more at home in the role. Companies and plants had to be adapted for military production: the locomotive factories were to manufacture engines for lorries and tanks, the metal plants cannon and munitions, the clothing factories uniforms.53 The ‘memoirs’ note that ‘The enterprises which had been working strictly on peacetime production began to work for the army: the Artemis mill was turning out spare parts for fighter planes, the Cominternmill – mortars, the Dneprovsky metallurgical mill (the Dzerzhinsky) – artillery shells …’.54 As secretary for armament, Brezhnev was constantly on the road: ‘I had to keep in touch with several ministries, to fly to Moscow and to travel endlessly all over the region. There were no such things as days off and I was rarely home with my family.’55 Many of the loyal followers who supported him as general secretary when he summoned them to Moscow after 1964 got to know and appreciate Brezhnev during these Dnepropetrovsk years of 1938–1941, from his chief bodyguard and his closest colleagues to the deputy chairmen of the Council of Ministers and the head of the KGB. Like Grushevoy and Alfërov, many of them were fellow graduates of the Institute of Metallurgy in Kamenskoye/Dneprodzerzhinsk: the later deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (1962–1983) Ignatiy Trofimovich Novikov (1907–1993), who

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

53

like Brezhnev was the son of a worker, grew up in Kamenskoye and studied with him in the early 1930s; Georgiy Emanuilovich Tsukanov (1919–2001), who graduated from the Institute in 1941 and served as his personal advisor from 1958 until his death; his later personal secretary Georgiy Sergeyevich Pavlov (1910–1991), who received his engineering diploma in Kamenskoye a year after Brezhnev and was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the CC in 1964, a position he held until 1983. Those who had not studied in Kamenskoye/Dneprodzerzhinsk were graduates of the Institute of Metallurgy in Dnepropetrovsk, such as Nikolay Aleksandrovich Tikhonov (1905–1997), factory manager at the city’s pipe mill, appointed deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1965 before succeeding Kosygin in 1980. Or Georgiy Karpovich Tsinëv (1907–1996), whom Brezhnev encountered as regional party secretary in Dnepropetrovsk in 1939.56 He became a close friend and was appointed deputy to KGB chief Yuri Andropov in 1970. He met his later minister of the interior (1966–1982) Nikolay Anisimovich Shchëlokov, himself the son of a worker and an engineer, when he was chairman of the Dnepropetrovsk city soviet (1939–1941). Andrey Pavlovich Kirilenko, an aircraft designer who like Brezhnev had entered politics in 1938, came into contact with him while second secretary (1939–1941) in the neighbouring oblast of Zaporozh’ye just eighty kilometres from Dnepropetrovsk; Brezhnev appointed him CC secretary in 1966 and put him in charge of all industries, a position he retained until Brezhnev’s death.57 Brezhnev also met Aleksandr Yakovlevich Ryabenko, who would serve as his bodyguard for four decades, in Dnepropetrovsk in 1938. Ryabenko was a chauffeur at the time and drove the new secretary from the party committee sessions. Years later, Ryabenko said of their first meeting: ‘Out came a young fellow in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up: Let’s go! – Where? I’m waiting for oblast committee secretary Brezhnev. – I’m Brezhnev. – Alright then …’.58 After the war, Brezhnev ordered that his former driver be found, and soon made him his chief bodyguard.59 Apart from the few lines we have from Ryabenko, little is known about how they met and how their relationships developed. Brezhnev clearly made an impression with his youthful appearance and casual manner. What is more interesting, however, is that he sought out his former driver. There was obviously a close connection and enormous trust if he was the only man for the job. The common experience of surviving the Terror of 1937/38 and the tense years up to the outbreak of war in 1941 must have formed a bond so tight that they themselves presumably lacked the words to describe it. When Konstantin Grushevoy died in 1982, Brezhnev is said to have fallen to his knees before the coffin, weeping uncontrollably.60

The ‘Great Patriotic War’ The ‘Great Patriotic War’ is of immense significance both for the Soviet Union as a whole and for Brezhnev personally. Victory over Hitler established the USSR as a Great Power, silenced any remaining doubts regarding the permanence of the political system, brought hegemony over half of Europe and precipitated the Cold War with the USA and the Union’s role as the second superpower. It was Brezhnev who in 1965,

54

Brezhnev

twenty years after the war had ended, lent the commemoration of Soviet heroism a new dimension by declaring 9 May a public holiday. The date had already been celebrated; now people could enjoy a day off work. In the years that followed, he had a series of ‘Hero Cities’ built along with museums, war dioramas (partly painted, partly three-dimensional life-size scenes from the war) and gigantic monuments, inaugurating them himself. In order to assert himself as general secretary, he had to be able to demonstrate that he had fought on the frontlines. For an ideal biography, it was not enough to have been the son of a worker, a land manager, fitter and engineer; you had to have done your bit to defend the mother country in the ‘Great Patriotic War’. To stress the role he had played, in 1976 Brezhnev had himself appointed marshal on his seventieth birthday. The ‘memoirs’ trilogy also placed special emphasis on his wartime experiences by making ‘Little Land’ the first volume in 1978. The Soviet people loved military heroes, and Brezhnev’s ghostwriters tried to establish him as a central figure in the heroic epic of the Great Patriotic War.61 However, the extremely unsubtle attempt to portray the general secretary as a brilliant commander and stylize his completely run-of-the-mill duties as decisive acts of heroism did not have the effect that was intended. The claims were met with ridicule by broad swathes of the population. One of the jokes that did the rounds went: ‘What did Brezhnev get the title of “Marshal” for?’ – ‘For taking the Kremlin’.62 Another was: Stalin rings Marshal Zhukov ahead of a new offensive. ‘All clear, Georgiy Konstantinovich [Zhukov], you can proceed to attack! I mean no, first I have to get the advice of Colonel Brezhnev!’63 Indeed, the editor of Zhukov’s memoirs was persuaded to add a paragraph stating that during the war, Zhukov urgently sought Brezhnev’s advice – in reality, at that point he had not even met him.64 But this way, the ghostwriters could refer to Zhukov’s purported recollection in Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’: ‘We were all worried then about one thing – whether Soviet soldiers would be able to hold out in this unequal fight against an enemy attacking day and night from the air and shelling the beachhead. The marshal went on to say he had wanted my opinion on that very point.’65 General David Ortenberg, correspondent for the army newspaper Red Star, was advised by the editors of his memoirs in 1975 that he ought to write about Brezhnev in the ‘Little Land’ or at least mention his name. But while Zhukov acquiesced, fearing his memoirs would otherwise not be published, Ortenberg refused.66 In striking disproportion to the great significance of the war, little is known about what Brezhnev actually did in those years. We only know where he was stationed, but he was neither a soldier in combat nor a commanding officer. Rather, he was a political commissar responsible for the morale of the troops. Even if the volume ‘Little Land’ seeks to claim the opposite, Brezhnev was not involved in any of the deciding battles. His career stagnated during these years. ‘During the time of the Great Patriotic War, I was one of the Soviet troops abroad, in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Germany.’67 He took part in the victory parade on Red Square on 24 June 1945,68 but was not demobilized; he served for another year in Bucovina helping to sovietize the annexed region. The wartime escapades we do know about are the romances he is said to have had with female soldiers. His later behaviour alone allows assumptions regarding his wartime experience: in contrast to Khrushchev, who could not abide war films after 1945, Brezhnev showed

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

55

a weakness for a genre that always moved him to tears.69 His efforts to seek compromise with the USA and establish the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe were rooted in his wartime experience; his partners in international dialogue testify that his references to the war were not mere posturing, but that it was clearly a subject that moved him. Even if he was not directly involved in the fighting, he had clearly witnessed enough horrors for them to have a lifelong impact. June 1941 In the early hours of Sunday 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Like most Soviet citizens, Brezhnev was taken by surprise. The party oblast committee had convened deep into the night to discuss the implementation of Moscow’s latest directives for the organization and production of the armament industry and to finish a report to Moscow on the latest successes. After leaving the oblast committee headquarters at 2.00 am, Brezhnev went to the airport to see how construction work was progressing.70 Only seconds later, Second Secretary Grushevoy re-assembled the oblast committee to inform them that Germany had invaded and Kiev was already under bombardment. They now had to implement the existing plans for mobilization. Brezhnev’s task was to inform the oblast’s town and rayon committees.71 The order came from Kiev to ensure Foreign Minister Molotov’s radio address scheduled for twelve could be heard by everyone in the streets, parks and factories and to hold ‘meetings’ immediately afterwards.72 The following days were spent trying to fulfil the promise to mobilize 20,000 communists for new units while obeying Moscow’s orders to maintain full military production. Brezhnev was involved on both ‘fronts’: he monitored the armament industry and drove to areas where mobilization proved difficult; the oblast committee members slept on camp beds at their headquarters.73 But after only a week they realized, at least according to Grushevoy, that Dnepropetrovsk was under immediate threat. It was not until 28 June that the committee received the order to prepare to receive evacuees from the west and to plan to evacuate Dnepropetrovsk itself.74 A week later, on 5 July, the order came through to dismantle the first factories. Brezhnev’s job was now to monitor the disassembly and loading of the engine factories along with other plants.75 On 9 July the German bombing campaign reached Dnepropetrovsk.76 Brezhnev was mobilized on 14 July, at his own urgent request, as his ‘memoirs’ record.77 But what was largely unknown hitherto was that he had only been appointed first deputy director of the political administration of the Southern Front in mid-September, before which he was head of a special group that was apparently to secure evacuation, fortifications and accommodation for the army.78 He returned to Dnepropetrovsk in this function on 7 August, since the Southern Front was in retreat towards the Caucasus via Dnepropetrovsk, the Donbass and Rostov-on-Don.79 His task was to set up a headquarters there.80 Grushevoy’s memoirs, published in 1974, were presumably edited to suit Brezhnev. Given their friendship and our current knowledge about Brezhnev, it is hardly surprising that Grushevoy describes his reunion with his comrade in glowing terms:

56

Brezhnev

Tanned, somewhat thinner, energetic, constantly sweeping back the thick black hair that kept falling over his high forehead, Leonid Il’ich greeted his old comrades with a broad smile, shook hands, embraced friends, and only the dark rings around his eyes and the tension in his gaze suggested that the calm façade hid concern and agitation.81

Together with Grushevoy, the representative of the head of the oblast committee, and Shchëlokov, the chairman of the executive committee of the city soviet, he inspected the progress of the defences and armament factories.82 On 6 August, Moscow had given the order to evacuate most of the factories, kolkhozes and the civilian population. The plants were disassembled by day and loaded onto 99,000 freight cars by night. At the same time, two partisan schools were set up in the city, armoured trains were built, tanks repaired and Molotov cocktails prepared. Brezhnev is said to have ordered the local spirits distillery to empty all its bottles so they could be filled with petrol. On 13 August, the artillery bombardment of Dnepropetrovsk began; the same day, Brezhnev’s family joined the evacuation to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan while Brezhnev returned to the front line.83 On 19 August he found himself in Dnepropetrovsk once more, this time with the troops retreating from vicious battles, and remained there for all six days of the bitter fight for the city that resulted in huge losses for the Red Army.84 Stalin had given the order to hold Dnepropetrovsk at all costs, and when asked for clarification, Marshal Semën Budënnyy, commander of the Southern Front, had confirmed: ‘Defend it to the last’.85 Brezhnev did not leave the city until the last minute, on 25 August, with the party and military leadership, after most of the defenders had fallen and the Germans had blown up one of the bridges over the Dnieper.86 During the Red Army’s further retreat, Grushevoy met his friend Brezhnev again in the late September in the village of Peschanka in the Dnepropetrovsk region: ‘When I asked him what the situation was, Leonid Il’ich answered briefly, worried and rushed,“Bad. We’re having a hard time holding out”. He wasn’t looking well: emaciated, his eyes red from a lack of sleep, his face half burnt by the sun, half darkened with fatigue.’87 Brezhnev experienced his first success during the bloody retreat in late November 1941, when Rostov-on-Don was retaken and the Wehrmacht was pushed back as far as 80 kilometres.88 When the Southern Front was finally able to follow Stalin’s command to advance in early 1942, Brezhnev received the first of two medals.89 But when in the May the mission to retake Kharkov, again by order of Stalin, ended in disaster – the loss of 230,000 Soviet soldiers and the Wehrmacht’s subsequent unhindered advance into Crimea and all the way to Stalingrad –90 Stalin not only demoted several officers, such as the Southern Front commander Rodion Malinovskiy and Lev Mekhlis,91 but also ordered a review of political work within the army. Brezhnev received a damning report: he was ‘not able to produce a change in morale and better behaviour (in service and the day-to-day) on the part of his staff in the front’s political administration’.92 The daily work of a political commissar Brezhnev’s daily duties indeed comprised organizing political work, that is, leading the simple political workers and ensuring they were properly employed:

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

57

On 20 December I held an assembly for all staff of the army’s political department to discuss the results of the front’s assembly and the tasks for reinforcing leadership of party-political work in the units. In connection with the forthcoming combat operations, the army’s political department prepared a directive setting out the specific tasks for the political support of the operation. […] I have held discussions with the individual leaders of the political departments and the deputy commanders of the army units regarding political work to ensure they are ready for the combat operations and that other issues pertaining to party-political work in the units are resolved.93

Several of his directives have survived; he demanded that political work be better organized, that political workers should maintain a permanent presence in the combat units, and that they should remain in constant discussions with the soldiers and supply them with sufficient propaganda material.94 The authors of his ‘memoirs’ romanticized this work of the political commissar, stylizing Brezhnev as the counsellor to the army: A true political worker in the army is a man round whom all others rally, a man with deep knowledge of the soldiers’ mood, their needs, hopes and dreams; he inspires them to self-sacrifice and to heroic deeds. If we bear in mind that the fighting spirit of troops has always been considered a very important element of their courage, then the most effective weapon of the war was in the hands of the political workers. It was they who steeled the soldiers’ hearts and minds and without that nothing – not tanks, guns or planes – would have won victory for us.95

The implication was that Brezhnev himself was in permanent contact with the rank and file, whereas he was actually a superior to the political workers and mainly coordinated their duties. Another, by no means less tendentious insight into Brezhnev’s activities is provided by the officer and dissident Pëtr Grigorenko, who served with Brezhnev in the Fourth Ukrainian Front for nine months in 1944/45: he claims Brezhnev rarely came within three kilometres of the frontline, as was common practice for a political worker, but turned up in commander Mekhlis’ entourage, having clearly attempted to ingratiate himself by appearing zealous and turning his smile on and off, as if donning a mask. Brezhnev clearly remembered Grigorenko, since he had firmly opposed removing the ‘severe reprimand’ from the latter’s service record: ‘Disrespect towards Stalin? No, for that he should keep it! Keep it! Keep it!’ His face took on the mask ‘sternest of lectures’. With every ‘Keep it!’ he pointed his finger at me. And I suddenly thought, ‘What an actor!’ He came here specially for this. He came here to demonstrate before all party officials how much he cares about the authority of the ‘great Stalin’, how much he loves him.96

Here Grigorenko, who held a personal grudge against Brezhnev because he had had him expatriated in 1978, suppresses how little room for manoeuvre Brezhnev had if

58

Brezhnev

he did not want to appear to criticize Stalin himself. That is not to say that Brezhnev, like many communists and even later dissidents, might not have venerated Stalin in the face of the German invasion. As ambivalent as Grigorenko’s claims are, it is difficult to establish whether the aforementioned criticism that Brezhnev could not motivate the troops was justified or simply part of the search for scapegoats. The latter certainly seems possible, however, if one reads the reasons for all four medals Brezhnev would later receive in 1943 and 1944 once the Red Army was in the ascendancy. He was praised as a very capable and courageous political organizer who repeatedly sought the frontline to organize political work ‘practically’ and ‘concretely’ and to win the fight.97 Although these reasons may have been standard reports, the attributes ‘practical’ and ‘concrete’ are noteworthy: on the one hand, we have encountered the Brezhnev who was good with people; on the other hand, one can certainly imagine that the extreme conditions at the front – artillery bombardment and, especially in 1941/42, dire shortages of warm clothing, food and munitions – demanded more than mere instructions and exhortations to raise morale. And it is this aspect of his work, organizing supplies of all kinds, that seems to have been his real strength. Biographer Dmitriy Volkogonov cites Brezhnev’s personnel file: ‘he considers himself above the dirty work, his military knowledge is very limited. On many issues he makes decisions like a manager and not like a political worker. He does not treat the men equally, but tends to have his favourites.’98 Although it is not clear under what circumstances this was recorded, it does sound more like the Brezhnev we have come to know thus far: he was clearly neither a military man nor an agitator. His strength was indeed ‘managing’: organizing, taking care of people, getting things done. These characteristics are also emphasized by his ‘memoirs’, citing a directive he gave in late 1943 during the battle for Kiev. Although the ghostwriters suggest that he was single-handedly responsible for supplying the troops, it can be assumed that the source itself is genuine: Pay constant attention to the physical fitness and health of the soldiers. They must be regularly supplied with hot food and hot water. There must be the strictest control to ensure that everything the state issues for men and officers reaches them. People who are negligent or passive in this respect must be severely brought to account.99

Biographer Mlechin, who can certainly never be accused of seeking to glorify his subject, cited a report Brezhnev wrote in December 1943: ‘The units are poorly supplied. There is a lack of meat, fat, fish and other preserved foods. Bread keeps running out. There is a clear lack of winter uniforms. Many combatants and officers are still wearing their summer clothes and unsuitable shoes. That makes our situation even worse.’100 Another reliable and revealing text is that justifying Brezhnev’s first medal on 27 March 1942: ‘At a difficult time when the routes were covered by snowdrifts, he managed to keep the troops constantly supplied with everything they needed.’101 He received his medal, then, not so much for courage or political work as for clearing snow and organizing provisions.

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

59

War legends Not only did Brezhnev fail to advance his career during the war, but the further roles he received following the reorganization of the armies and frontlines rather resembled demotions. From December 1941 onwards, he held the rank of brigade commissar.102 Mlechin claims that when that same year Politburo member Andrey Andreyev sent Khrushchev a list of promising communists who would be of greater use in public service than in the army, Shchëlokov and two other secretaries from Dnepropetrovsk received mentions, but not Brezhnev.103 In the course of the Southern Front’s restructuring, in August 1942 Brezhnev was made deputy chief of the political administration of the North Caucasian Front, which was reorganized as the Black Sea Group within the North Caucasian Front in the September. In April 1943 he also lost his position as head of an entire group, being allocated only a single army, the Eighteenth, as leader of the political department under Major General Semën Kolonin.104 While he received his medals, awarded to everyone for the army’s victories, he did not receive any individual decorations.105 When the abolished military ranks were reinstalled in late 1942 and the political commissars were made either colonels or major generals, Brezhnev had to be satisfied with the rank of colonel.106 Hence the ghostwriters of Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ did all they could to turn the common Colonel Brezhnev into an outstanding officer of great wisdom and kindness. Here it is difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction, since there is so little to go on for the former. His writers claim for instance that he expressly wished ‘not to be recalled along with other frontline party workers to do administrative work in the rear. I am also grateful that in 1944 the Party complied with my request not to promote me to a higher post which would have taken me away from combat operations […]’.107 It cannot be discounted that this was the case, even if the authors’ intentions are clearly to stylize Brezhnev as a modest party leader devoted to the common people. Biographer Mlechin, on the other hand, claims that Brezhnev repeatedly complained about not being promoted.108 To disguise this lack of advancement, the ghostwriters attempted to bring forward the date of his promotion to chief of the political administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front, which did not take place until after the war, in 1945. Hence Brezhnev persuaded Marshal Kirill Moskalenko to include in his memoirs a photograph of the former when he was still leader of the political department of the Eighteenth Army with the caption: ‘Brezhnev, leader of the political administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front’.109 Ultimately, Brezhnev and his staff did everything they could to enshroud the Eighteenth Army in heroic myth: My life at the front was bound up with the Eighteenth Army and it became forever near and dear to me. With the Eighteenth Army I fought in the Caucasian Mountains when the fate of our country was being decided there, I fought in the Ukrainian plains, crossed the Carpathian Mountains and joined in liberating Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.110

As we have established, Brezhnev did not ‘fight’ at all and the retaking of Novorossiysk by the Eighteenth Army in 1943 did not decide the ‘fate of our country’.

60

Brezhnev

But to the great outrage of General Ortenberg, who had led parts of the offensives himself, the volume ‘Little Land’ stylized both the operation and Brezhnev’s participation as among ‘the biggest in the Great Patriotic War’.111 The ‘Little Land’, which was not known as such at the time, but received the name from the soldiers as ‘our land, Soviet land: it is drenched with our sweat and blood’,112 was the small headland on the Black Sea outside Novorossiysk conquered by the Red Army as a bridgehead on 3 February 1944 and held for 225 days until Novorossiysk was finally retaken in the September. Ortenberg claims that Brezhnev did not arrive there until the April and, contrary to the claims in ‘Little Land’, did not stay put until the decisive battle in the rocky no-man’s-land, but only went there on two occasions, to hand out party membership books and medals to the soldiers.113 Yet the truth seems to lie somewhere in between the ‘memoirs’ and Ortenberg’s recollection, for Brezhnev received a medal for his efforts during the advance on Novorossiysk in January 1943, and hence was on the scene long before the April.114 The closest to the truth is probably the account by General Andrey Grechko, commander of the Eighteenth Army from October 1942 onwards: The chief of the political department of the Eighteenth Army, Colonel L.I. Brezhnev, checked preparations for the next offensive whenever he was with the landing troops and asked what the soldiers needed. L.I. Brezhnev chatted with the combatants, led meetings with the commanders and political workers, was present at party and Komsomol meetings and handed out party membership books to the new recruits to the ranks of the VKP(b).115

The ghostwriters did not refrain from glorifying the situation in which Brezhnev received his only war wound as an act of heroism, nor did they hesitate to suppress the injury with which he was admitted to the field hospital. During the liberation of Novorossiysk in September 1943, Brezhnev also set out on the crossing to the ‘Little Land’, but the landing craft made contact with a mine and was thrown into the air. While the ‘memoirs’ claim that as a strong swimmer he heroically helped his comrades back into the boat, it is documented that Brezhnev was rescued unconscious from the water.116 This is also related by Grechko in his memoirs of 1967. The same year, Brezhnev appointed him minister of defence – clearly without bothering to instruct him on what to write in his memoirs.117 Brezhnev had suffered a bruise to the jaw so bad that he would have difficulty speaking in his old age.118 Regarding other details too, the author of ‘Little Land’ appears to have allowed his imagination free rein: while he reports a network of trenches on the headland in which the soldiers’ life was hard and marked by deprivation, but also entertaining, with celebrations, chess tournaments and dancing performances, those who had been at the front said it would have been impossible to dig trenches in the rock and that they had not enjoyed comforts of any kind.119 The ghostwriters made Brezhnev not only an advisor to Supreme Commander Konstantin Leselidze, but also had him lecture Major General Kolonin: ‘You’re a member of the Military Council. I’m head of the Political Department. I should be two steps ahead of you.’120 They then attributed a further act of heroism to Brezhnev:

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

61

on 12 December 1943, they claim he spontaneously picked up the machine gun of a fallen soldier on the road between Kiev and Zhitomir and held the position until reinforcements arrived: A single thought dominated my whole being: they had to be stopped! I don’t think I even heard the roar of battle or orders shouted around me. But at some point I suddenly noticed that enemy figures I hadn’t even been aiming at were dropping to the ground: they were being cut down by the fire of the men who had come to our assistance. One of them touched my arm: ‘Let a machine-gunner take over, comrade colonel.’121

Although it is highly unlikely Brezhnev did anything of the sort, a large monument was erected on this spot on the road to Kiev in 1973.122 The same year, Novorossiysk also received the title ‘Hero City’, underlining the significance of Brezhnev’s wartime experiences. In the course of the 1970s, his friends and comrades leading the Soviet republics participated in the fantasy by opening museums on their soil honouring the Eighteenth Army.123

In the Carpathians After Novorossiysk and the Taman peninsula were retaken, eventually followed by the bridgehead of Kerch and Crimea, the North Caucasian Front was dissolved. The Eighteenth Army was redeployed to the interior and placed under the command of the First Ukrainian Front, which took Kiev in November 1943, Khrushchev serving on the Kiev Military Council. Since Khrushchev became an unperson for Brezhnev after 1964, all official accounts remain silent regarding their relationship and encounters. As the photograph above (Figure 8) suggests and his subsequent career makes abundantly clear, Khrushchev was very taken with his young, tall and handsome countryman twelve years his junior.124 But while Khrushchev remained in Ukraine after its recapture125 to take care of the country’s reconstruction, on 5 August 1944 Brezhnev joined the Fourth Ukrainian Front together with the Eighteenth Army after Lwów had been taken in the July. As an officer who ‘had authority’, he finally rose to the rank of major general.126 Under Colonel General Ivan Petrov and his advisor Mekhlis, the Fourth Ukrainian Front launched the Eastern Carpathian Offensive in the early September, pushing as far as Prague in 1945. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ relate: ‘Fighting fiercely, liberating towns and villages, we advanced through the Kiev, Vinnitsa, Khmelnitsky, Chernovtsy, Lvov and other regions of the Ukraine and reached the Carpathian mountains.’127 The conditions encountered in crossing the mountain range must have been inhuman; General Grechko cites a report Brezhnev sent to the Military Council of the Fourth Front: The Carpathian advance was accompanied by great difficulties. Together with the combatants, a mountain chain 100 kilometres wide had to be crossed […]. The difficulties of the battles were further exacerbated by the fact that there are several

62

Brezhnev

mountain streams and rivers with steep banks and very different water levels here. When it rains here, and it does often in the mountains, the water can rise to three to five metres and render the rivers impassable. The army had to be supplied exclusively by trucks, since the railway line had been destroyed by the enemy.128

Even if much in this missive is merely implied, it certainly indicates the hardship the soldiers endured during their advance. Once again, Brezhnev had to prove himself as an organizer of supplies. To the usual subjects of political schooling, such as ‘Comrade Stalin – leader and organizer of our great victories’, he added instruction ‘On the specifics of military combat in the mountains’.129 On 28 October 1944, he reached Uzhgorod, the capital of Carpatho-Ukraine, which the Red Army had taken a day earlier.130 He not only stayed there for over two months, until early 1945, to build up Soviet structures, but was also sent back in the summer of 1945 to implement the region’s annexation to Ukraine.131 Here he was faced with a new situation: since September 1944, the First and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts had been operating beyond Soviet territory, fighting first on Polish, then on Czechoslovak soil. For the political officer Brezhnev, this meant schooling Soviet troops on how to deal with the civilian population and convincing the locals that the Red Army had come as their liberator. Now they no longer had to deal solely with the retreating Wehrmacht, but were also faced with armed gangs of Ukrainian nationalists, who, often disguised in Soviet uniform, attacked army units, looted weapons, lured Red Army soldiers into ambushes, and in particular killed those who collected food and grain from village peasants. In August 1944, nine of Brezhnev’s unit had been shot by henchmen of Stepan Bandera, who fought for Ukrainian independence.132 Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ relate: ‘The fighting was continuous and Party and political work among the troops never ceased for one minute. At the same time we had to help local comrades, Communists who had up hitherto [sic] worked underground, to organize life anew. Major political events were held one after another: a party conference, trade union congress, youth conference and women’s conference.’133 The official English biography places a slightly different stress on Brezhnev’s activities: Major General Brezhnev was directly involved in the work to open schools, shops, and medical institutions and to rebuild factories and plants. On his initiative, 9 million pounds of grain from army stores were handed over to the needy population. He spoke at meetings and rallies […]. In the meantime, he continued to guide party and political work in the Eighteenth Army, which was still engaged in active military operations.134

The first of Brezhnev’s notes to have survived from this time are from these two months; they are not really ordered by date, but are rather aides-mémoires that clearly assisted his organizational work. One of the greatest challenges remained keeping up supplies, not only for the population, but also to ensure the army had provisions, clothing and shoes.135 During this time, eight soldiers deserted due to poor nutrition, a lack of warm meals and no opportunity to warm themselves occasionally.136 During these months, Brezhnev dealt with shops, picture galleries and theatres, schools and

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

63

textbooks, but also the expropriation of land and its redistribution to peasants.137 He not only had spoils of war delivered to senior officers – a piano for Khrushchev and an Opel for the leader of the political administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front, Mikhail Pronin138 – but also had to deal with his own soldiers looting and raping.139 While his political work had hitherto focused on inciting hatred, he was now responsible for teaching the troops that the civilian population was not the enemy.140 However, this was not the only reason he insisted on strengthening political work among the ranks: he also had to implement the new directive not to accept soldiers into the party automatically, but to subject them to thorough checks to establish whether they were really worthy communists or simply seeking privileges.141 But the main task was the political restructuring of the region. While Stalin had given the exiled Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, his word that he would not interfere in the political future of the region,142 he had in fact instructed Mekhlis to do the very opposite. Mekhlis and Brezhnev, serving under him, did everything they could to prevent the delegate of the exiled Czechoslovak government in London, František Nemec, from developing administrative structures. At the same time, they ensured that only people advocating annexation to the Soviet Union were nominated to the national committees Beneš and Stalin had agreed would be established.143 Brezhnev’s notes begin with a list of those they allowed to be elected to a provisional city soviet on 28 October 1944. For each of the twenty-four candidates, he made detailed notes on how they had acted when Hungary occupied this part of Czechoslovakia in 1939: had they collaborated, had they fled or had they gone underground, were they followers of Beneš or communists?144 Under the aegis of Mekhlis and Brezhnev, structures of rule were established in line with the Soviet model: in Mukachevo, taken on 2 October 1944,145 a party meeting was called on 13 November to elect a people’s committee, which prepared an initial party conference for 19 November and a congress for 26 November. The Red Army under General Petrov refused to allow Beneš’s delegate, František Nemec, to travel to Mukachevo, while Ivan Ivanovich Turyanitsa, a communist loyal to Moscow, was allowed to move freely in the alleged ‘combat zone’.146 Under the supervision of Mekhlis and Brezhnev, both the conference and the congress elected Turyanitsa as CC secretary and chairman of the People’s Government, which promptly opted for annexation to Ukraine. With the assistance of the Red Army, Turyanitsa then established three communist newspapers and had pamphlets distributed among the population propagating the union with the Soviet state.147 The congress also sent a delegation to Kiev and Moscow to request accession to the Soviet Union.148 There followed further constituent assemblies of the youth, women and teachers.149 In a parallel operation, the NKVD had anyone resisting sovietization arrested, tried and executed.150 The delegate of the exiled government, Nemec, repeatedly sought discussions with Petrov and Mekhlis in order to receive information on the process, but the commanders of the Soviet army always claimed they did not interfere in political matters.151 Whether Brezhnev was present at these meetings is unclear; he will certainly have been kept informed about them by Mekhlis himself, however.152 In the ‘memoirs’, the establishment of these political structures is nevertheless portrayed as an act of self-determination by the local population:

64

Brezhnev

The new atmosphere of freedom roused the entire population of the Transcarpathian Ukraine to political life. […] People’s committees were set up everywhere and were preparing to hold their first congress. Attending this congress later I witnessed the great enthusiasm with which participants adopted the historic decision to reunite Transcarpathia with its own people.153

In the official regional history of the Carpathians published in 1969, it is claimed Brezhnev played a leading political and ideological role: ‘The inhabitants of the Carpathians fondly remember his appearances at workers’ assemblies and meetings […]’.154 In fact, Brezhnev’s notes contain the text of a ‘Petition of the Citizens of Uzhgorod’ to join the Soviet Union with remarks and corrections in his hand. If he did not write it himself, he at least edited it.155 His notes clearly demonstrate that the army’s political leadership planned and determined the decisions which the ‘population’ then had to ‘make’. This included a ‘welcome for the Red Army’.156 The extent of the efforts to declare the conquered territory Soviet Ukrainian are well illustrated by Brezhnev’s demand that Red Army soldiers be forbidden to write on their comrades’ graves ‘He fell for the liberation of Czechoslovakia’. Instead, they were to write ‘He fell for our socialist homeland’.157 After the war January 1945 saw the launch of the Western Carpathian Offensive. Brezhnev accompanied the Eighteenth Army far over the High Tatras, where its political department set up camp in the village of Czarny Dunajec, near the town of Zakopane. From the March until the end of the war, the Eighteenth Army participated in the Moravian–Ostrava Offensive, which eventually liberated Prague on 8 May. It was during this time that Brezhnev made the acquaintance of Ludvik Svoboda, who would later become president of Czechoslovakia, in his capacity as commander of the First Czechoslovakian Brigade, which had liberated Kiev together with the First Ukrainian Front in 1943 before assisting with the Carpathian Offensive. Presumably, Svoboda and Brezhnev arrived in Košice on 21 January 1945; the city was liberated by the Eighteenth Army and the Czechoslovakian Brigade, thenceforth serving as the provisional seat of the National Front government.158 Brezhnev was also present when Prague was taken on 8 May 1945 and the last Germans to resist on Czech soil were captured on 12 May.159 For Brezhnev, the joint ‘liberation’ of Czechoslovakia by the Czechoslovakian Brigade under Svoboda and the Soviet troops of the Eighteenth Army would play a crucial role in his assessment of the CSSR’s potential departure in 1968; he spoke of the ‘ingratitude’ of his Czechoslovakian partner. The war was over and shortly thereafter Brezhnev was promoted to chief of the political administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front.160 There soon followed the great victory parade in Red Square on 24 June 1945; the picture shows a very stately Brezhnev smiling confidently in his parade uniform, medals on his breast.161 For these celebrations, Brezhnev was permitted to have his family come from Dnepropetrovsk to Moscow for the week; he had not seen them since 1941. His mother, his wife and their children had returned from Kazakhstan after the liberation of Dnepropetrovsk

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

65

Figure 10 Major General Brezhnev (centre) at the Red Square victory parade under the banner of the ‘Fourth Ukrainian Front’, left General Colonel Kirill Moskalenko, right General Lieutenant Andrey Bondarëv, 24 June 1945.

in November 1943.162 Since the parade was hit by torrential rain, Viktoriya Petrovna spent the whole day drying her husband’s dress uniform with an iron until it was time for the festive banquet in the evening.163 Brezhnev claimed he then drank with fighter pilot Aleksandr Pokryshkin long into the night at the Moskva hotel. When the waiters attempted to usher them out, Pokryshkin began to shoot up the place. Stalin, who caught wind of it, is supposed to have said, ‘A war hero can do this.’ Brezhnev, who later regaled his audience with the anecdote at his hunting lodge, said he himself also spent a long time that night ‘conversing’ with the historical Tsar Bell on display at the Kremlin.164 The end of the war did not signal a change in Brezhnev’s activities. On 9 July 1945, the troops of the Fourth Ukrainian Front became the Carpathian Military District with its headquarters in Cernăuți/Chernovtsy. In August 1945, Brezhnev was entrusted with leadership of this very military district,165 appointed by Stalin at the recommendation

66

Brezhnev

of Mekhlis, a member of its military council, and Khrushchev.166 Brezhnev was to implement the sovietization of this annexed region comprising Ruthenia (eastern Galicia and Volhynia), formerly part of Czechoslovakia, and northern Bucovina, stolen from Romania; although according to the 1943 Treaty of London it belonged to Czechoslovakia, Stalin made it part of Ukraine.167 Brezhnev flew to Dnepropetrovsk to collect his family168 and continued to serve under Andrey Erëmenko, commander of the Fourth Ukrainian Front from March 1945 and the Carpathian Military District from the July onwards.169 This military district for which Brezhnev took on political leadership was large and heterogeneous: it comprised old Ukrainian regions, such as Vinnitsa, as well as Carpatho-Ukraine, which had separated from Slovakia, while its seat was in the Chernovtsy region taken from Romania. The Soviet troops still met with resistance from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists; Brezhnev sent regular reports on the matter to Moscow.170 Biographer Dornberg is of the opinion that ‘If Brezhnev – like other Soviet leaders – has deeds on his conscience to hide, then in all likelihood some of them were committed during this period.’171 To date, there is no indication Brezhnev himself was guilty of anything. Dornberg is right, however, insofar as Brezhnev probably had decisive experiences that would later stand him in good stead as general secretary. Hardly anything is known about this time, since most of the official biographies succinctly state that the army remained in the region for a year following the end of the war and was not demobilized until mid-1946. Both the official publications and Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ remain silent concerning his activities in 1945/46. Biographer Mlechin did not find documents for these years, nor was Murphy able to reconstruct what happened in the Carpathians. While Brezhnev wrote several notes on his activities in October and November 1944, we have none for 1945/46. And the online Brezhnev exhibition of the Archive of Contemporary History has not released any documents from this period.172 Dornberg merely provides a brief outline of Brezhnev’s tasks: The incorporation […] into the Soviet Union involved total economic and social upheaval, the nationalization of property and industry, the forced collectivization of agriculture and the suppression of desperate armed anti-Communist partisan bands. […] Resistance to Sovietization had to be crushed, ‘bourgeois nationalists’ deported and liquidated.173

Indeed, there exist a whole series of communications Brezhnev sent to the chief of the political administration headquarters, General Colonel Iosif Shikin, reporting armed attacks by Ukrainian nationalists. The ‘gangs’ had targeted those who cooperated with the new rulers. In particular, the chairpersons of the village councils and kolkhozes, but also millers, teachers and Komsomol members were kidnapped, hanged or shot, and buildings were set on fire or destroyed by grenades. The partisans intimidated demobilized soldiers, stole their uniforms and pressured them into joining them.174 To gain control of the situation, suppress the ‘Terror’ and protect the forthcoming elections for the Supreme Soviet, Brezhnev, in accordance with the directives of January 1946, had 1,000 small units of soldiers stationed throughout the entire

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

67

region.175 Together with Erëmenko and Mekhlis, he also banned public assembly. They ordered the troops not to accept alcohol or food, since they could be poisoned, nor to become involved with women, since they could be spies.176 To break the resistance to the Soviet Union, Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Romanians and Jews were deported; all other minorities were forbidden from cultivating their national and cultural identity.177 The instruments of sovietization were the same the Bolsheviks had employed in the Soviet Union itself or in the annexed regions after 1939: industrialization; collectivization of agriculture; the establishment and ‘purging’ of the usual party structures; the appointment or replacement of leading functionaries by Soviet (in this case Ukrainian) cadres; resettlement of Soviet (in this case Russian-Ukrainian) skilled workers and technical specialists; the development of propaganda institutions and control of the media, educational and cultural institutions; the development of the school system (and even the foundation of a university in Uzhgorod); and the persecution, arrest, deportation and shooting of anyone who resisted in any way, seemed to show nationalist tendencies or was a member of the Catholic Church.178 While Brezhnev was not a representative of a civilian administrative body, as a member of the military command and director of the army’s political administration he was chief supervisor of the propaganda department. His task was to ensure that it developed along the right lines and that the soldiers were exposed to the right speeches: ‘Lenin and Stalin’, ‘Comrade Stalin’s Speech to the Voters on 9 February 1946’ or ‘On the Twenty-Eigth Anniversary of the Red Army’.179 Many of his activities picked up where he had left off before the war: as chief propagandist he was responsible for schooling the cadres, holding meetings and recruiting new members to the party. The opening of the Marxist-Leninist Evening University in Chernovtsky in October 1945 and the foundation of several clubs and libraries meant Brezhnev was back in his familiar role as an organizer, obtaining rooms and taking care of their renovation and furnishing, but also ensuring the right films were shown in cinemas and the right pieces performed at lay concerts.180 Biographer Dornberg observes: It must have been an excellent training ground for the job he was to be called to perform five years later in the Republic of Moldavia, another chunk of Romanian territory that had become part of the USSR. Most important, though, his assignment in the Carpatho-Ukraine placed him in an ideal position to receive Khrushchev’s continuing notice. By the time he stepped out of uniform in August 1946, Brezhnev was clearly a trusted and chosen member of Khrushchev’s entourage.181

There is little to add here, other than that Brezhnev was in charge of a much larger territory than just Carpatho-Ukraine. When the Carpathian Military District was joined to that of Lvov, it briefly looked like he would receive a new post there.182 Instead, he was released from active military service. The impact of the war Brezhnev’s real tasks during the war, then, do not measure up to the heroic deeds that were later attributed to him. Yet although there is more disinformation for this period

68

Brezhnev

than there are reliable sources, several observations can be made: firstly, Brezhnev was repeatedly described as a ‘manager’, valued for the care he took of the soldiers and praised by General Grechko for his attention to detail.183 Even if it is quite clear that his ghostwriters went to every length to embellish this image of the caring party leader, a sufficient number of the above sources are credible and beyond suspicion. For instance, after reading ‘Little Land’, I.F. Urusov recalled making a crossing by landing craft with Brezhnev; when Brezhnev noticed his fear, he took his mind off things with jokes and helpful coaxing.184 Secondly, it cannot be denied that even three kilometres away from the frontlines, Brezhnev saw enough of the horrors of the war and had close-hand experience of the harsh conditions the soldiers had to fight in. Unlike Khrushchev, he did not lose any close relatives in the war. But the very experience of hitting a mine and being thrown into the water and rescued unconscious must have had more than a mere physical impact on him. When he met Viktor Golikov from Novorossiysk in Moldavia in 1950, he immediately made him one of his closest confidants and colleagues. He told him, his voice trembling, ‘I fought there. The battles there were cruel. Viktor … I nearly died several times in Novorossiysk. Believe me, I was in the entire war, but for me the true inferno was in your home city.’185 Thirdly, in the 1970s, Brezhnev used his wartime experience to justify his efforts for the peace process in Europe and compromise with the USA. His Western interlocutors mostly believed that his emotional descriptions of the war were real and not mere posturing. Many CC members found it a source of embarrassment that the ‘boss’ was always moved to tears by war films. But the film sector profited from it: while the censorship authorities wanted to ban the 1970 epic about an unbreakable wartime friendship, White Russian Station, reasoning it showed the militia in a bad light, during the screening Brezhnev began to sob upon hearing Bulat Okudzhava’s song about the parachute battalion.186 The film could be shown and thenceforth the song was often played in Brezhnev’s presence. Fourthly, during the war Brezhnev (re-)encountered important people who would play a decisive role for or during his career. He got to know Lev Mekhlis in 1942 in the Black Sea Group of the North Caucasian Front; Mekhlis clearly took Brezhnev under his wing as a demoted fellow sufferer and did his best to lend him his patronage. Mekhlis was a member of the Military Council on the fronts at which Brezhnev was deployed, including in the Carpathians. Kirilenko, whom he knew from Dnepropetrovsk and would later make one of his closest confidants in the Politburo, was another wartime comrade, as a member of the Military Council of the Eighteenth Army in 1941/42, when it was still under the Southern Front and thus Brezhnev’s political administration.187 Brezhnev also felt a debt of gratitude to Grechko; as commander of the Eighteenth Army, one of his great achievements was leading the battles from the North Caucasus to Lvov and from there to the Carpathians and all the way to Prague, the political preparation of which fell to Brezhnev in his role as a political officer. In his memoirs, Grechko reports how together with Brezhnev, Mekhlis and others they held meetings and discussions in August and October 1944 to prepare the units of the Eighteenth Army for the Carpathian Offensive.188 These meetings clearly forged immense trust between them: in 1967, Brezhnev made Grechko minister of defence and summoned him to the Politburo in 1973. It is presumed that

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

69

Brezhnev also came to know Suslov, who would become chief ideologue, in 1943, when he led a staff of partisan units as regional secretary of Stavropol’.189 Borys Levytskyy goes so far as to say that during the war, almost the entire Ukrainian party leadership became a ‘partisan clan’ that continued to stick together in peacetime.190 However, firstly, many partisan detachments operated independently of the party and often against it, and secondly, there is no evidence Brezhnev had any connections to partisan units. Had he had significant contact with them, his official biographers would surely not have remained silent about it. The bond Brezhnev felt with his wartime comrades after 1945 is nevertheless striking. He regularly received veterans of the Eighteenth Army and held a large annual reception for them.191 Ultimately, the crucial moment for Brezhnev came in 1943, when he re-encountered Khrushchev, who would serve as his patron and send him on his further career after the war. Fifthly, Brezhnev’s later activities were presumably shaped in no small measure by his experience during the sovietization of the Carpathians. If there are ‘origins’ to the general secretary, they are probably neither in Kamenskoye nor in Dnepropetrovsk, nor on the ‘Little Land’, but in the Carpathians. While Brezhnev had previously been a loader, land manager and engineer, director of a technical college, deputy chairman of a city soviet and oblast secretary and had supported the troops during the war by taking care of provisions and awarding them medals, this was the first time he was responsible for an entire region that was to be returned to peace, fed, rebuilt and integrated into Ukraine. The war, or rather the new territory and devastation it brought with it, created the conditions under which Brezhnev could prove himself to Khrushchev and ultimately to Stalin: as the sovietizer of the Carpathians, the organizer of the reconstruction of Zaporozh’ye and Dnepropetrovsk, and the leader of the newly established Soviet Republic of Moldavia. It is also important to consider this: the terror created vacancies that brought men like Brezhnev into positions they otherwise might not have reached had it not been for the arrests and murders. The devastation wrought by the Germans left a field of activity which gave this generation the opportunity to prove themselves in a comprehensive, existential fashion as rebuilders, renewers, sovietizers and organizers in a way that would not have been possible without the war. As the example of Brezhnev clearly demonstrates, this generation did not even need to strive for a career; they hardly had any other option than to accept the posts to which they were summoned, and had to do the work regardless of what was going on around them, be it during 1937/38, when friends, comrades and colleagues were arrested and shot, or 1941–1945, when their homeland was destroyed and soldiers had to go into battle hungry, in summer uniforms and without sufficient weapons. As in Nikolay Ostrovskiy’s famous Civil War epic How the Steel was Tempered, Brezhnev’s generation experienced things during the Terror and the war that would shape their actions and thinking for the rest of their lives. Brezhnev in particular was evidently ‘thrown’ into this career; he did not choose its stations and did not strive for great responsibilities and prominent positions. The party called – and he had to follow. The exertions, the physical and mental strain he was placed under, can only be imagined. Sixthly, the war was a hard test for Brezhnev’s family. For the men, one of the few escapes from the day-to-day of the frontline was to form relationships with female

70

Brezhnev

members of the army. Like so many Red Army officers, Brezhnev had at least one ‘field wife’. Silence has long reigned over the role women played in the Red Army. On the one hand, they were denied the recognition they deserved for their efforts in battle; on the other hand, the women themselves remained silent about the many sexual transgressions to which they were subjected.192 A relationship with an officer often served as protection from the pushiness of the common soldiers. Brezhnev met the nurse Tamara Nikolayevna Levchenko when she was deployed from a field hospital to the army’s political department under his leadership. He liked that she was from Dnepropetrovsk; she was clearly taken with his impeccable manners; unlike other men, he was neither vulgar nor forward. He spoke with a soft baritone, was goodlooking, had a radiant smile and enjoyed dancing. She stayed with him until the end of the war.193 If his granddaughter Viktoriya and his photographer Musael’yan are to be believed, this relationship was more than just an affair to Brezhnev. He is said to have demanded a divorce from his wife Viktoriya Petrovna, but when she insisted he would have to tell their children himself, he did not have the heart to do it.194 After the war, Tamara went to Kiev and married there, but Brezhnev is said to have asked her to meet him –

Figure 11 Brezhnev and his wartime love Tamara Levchenko, 1943.

‘How the Steel was Tempered’

71

clearly in 1947, when he was in Zaporozh’ye. When she went to Brezhnev’s flat, Viktoriya answered the door – and sent her on her way. Brezhnev is said to have caught up with her at the station, but could not get her to change her mind, even, it is said, when he visited her in Kiev with Mekhlis.195 Given the party’s ‘puritanical morals’ and the risk of losing his career, biographer Mlechin severely doubts this story’s credibility. Nevertheless, there are two independent sources for the incident, and we do know that Brezhnev was not very interested in this career, at least not at that time. It seems commensurate with his impulsive, emotional nature that he did not rein in his passions. Brezhnev’s war thus not only involved witnessing all its horrors and tirelessly going about his daily duties as an organizer and political educator; he also became estranged from his family, whom he did not see for four long years. In 1945, he would have preferred to have been demobilized. At least that is what he would later tell a gathering of his aides at the hunting lodge in Zavidovo: At the end of the war we were suddenly told our division might be deployed to Paris as part of the Allied troops. To be honest, I fretted about it a great deal: I wanted to go home at any price, I was tired, had had enough of everything … I remember writing to my mother: ‘I miss my homeland very much, Mama. As soon as I arrive in Paris, I will climb the Eiffel Tower and from there I will spit on the whole of Europe!’ That’s how much I wanted to go home.196

Figure 12 Brezhnev (first right) at a ceremony marking the re-firing of the first blast furnace at Zaporozhstal’ steelworks in Zaporozh’ye, 30 June 1947.

Figure 13 Brezhnev (second right) with a government commission at Zaporozhstal’, 1947.

72

3

In Stalin’s Shadow, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship I

There are only a handful of photographs of Brezhnev in the immediate post-war period. Most of them are press shots taken at great events: at a ceremony to fire up the first blast furnace at Zaporozhstal’ steelworks on 30 June 1947; on a government commission’s visit to the steelworks’ production hall; upon his being elected a Delegate of the Supreme Soviet as Party Chairman of Dnepropetrovsk in February 1948. They depict a tall, slim young man with striking eyebrows, looking serious and focused. The photograph showing Brezhnev on the end of a podium at Zaporozhstal’, looking up at the speaker before a portrait of Stalin so large that only his legs and torso are in shot, seems somewhat symbolic. This photograph was later used in his official biographies, with Stalin’s torso simply cut out of the background.1 There is also a portrait of Brezhnev from 1945 that reveals his penchant for carefully selected outfits; he appears in semi-profile in a fashionable felt hat, a shirt and tie and a dark three-piece suit with extra-wide lapels, as was the fashion of the day. The photographs reveal Brezhnev’s success under Stalin and his passion for fine clothes – but not the battles, strain and dangers hidden beneath them.

Patronage Much has been written about the immense importance of patronage networks in the Soviet Union, but few cases better demonstrate the decisive influence of patron–client relationships than that of Brezhnev.2 As already outlined in Chapter 2, it is hardly surprising that in an era in which you could be arrested at any moment as an enemy and saboteur, personal trust and reliability took on a significance all of their own. Within the party apparatus in particular, it was crucial to be able to count on people that you knew would neither denounce you nor defect to another network. Thus when it came to appointments and promotions, blind obedience was a much more essential quality than competence. The patron took care of promotion, protection and access to resources; the client repaid him with absolute loyalty. Lenin had formed the Bolshevik Party with his writings and his pointed speeches, thereby securing his leadership; Stalin laid claim to this position by removing his rivals first via intrigue, then via arrests and murder; Khrushchev owed his ascendancy to Stalin’s moods and skilful manoeuvring after his death. Brezhnev, on the other 73

74

Brezhnev

Figure 14 Brezhnev, 1945.

hand, owed his rise to patronage, to a far greater extent than any of his predecessors. He did not have to fight, intrigue or align himself with anyone – at least not early on. He simply fulfilled the tasks he was given and was sent from one position to another, from one patron to the next. This speaks volumes for the loyalty he showed his supporters. He was reliable, pleasant to deal with and good-looking, which was certainly a factor, as is often suggested.3 That this patronage was constantly renewed also indicates, however, that he was indeed a good organizer and administrator, a man of action who rolled up his sleeves and got things done. Brezhnev enjoyed the patronage of several party leaders: first Grushevoy in Dnepropetrovsk and Mekhlis during the war, then Khrushchev after 1945, who, as Chairman of Ukraine supported his countryman and also recommended him to Stalin. As in 1938, after the war Khrushchev needed men he could count on to rebuild Ukraine. And so he ensured, with the backing of Mekhlis, that the Politburo under Stalin released Brezhnev from the army and placed him under the command of the Ukrainian CC.4 Brezhnev’s career thus became dependent on Stalin: in 1946 he was city and oblast leader of the industrial city of Zaporozh’ye, in 1947 he held the same position in the important regional centre of Dnepropetrovsk and in 1950 he was made first secretary of the Republic of Moldavia, before Stalin summoned him to

In Stalin’s Shadow

75

Moscow as secretary of the Party Presidium in 1952. When Stalin died in 1953, Brezhnev immediately lost his post. The networks that would protect him from Stalin’s excesses thus entailed both proximity to and dependence on him. On the other hand, as in 1937, he seems to have found a way to distance himself from Stalin’s methods. He resisted the pressure and the rhetoric of seeing enemies everywhere, deposing colleagues and expelling comrades from the party. He proved himself as a pragmatic organizer who eschewed extremes. In political speeches he concentrated on issues instead of agitating, and in his day-to-day work he drove from construction site to construction site instead of ensconcing himself behind a desk. In his dealings with people he was firm but friendly. Brezhnev thus appears to be the prototype of the ‘strong leader’ that the historians Oleg Khlevnyuk and Yoram Gorlizki identify as having emerged in the course of the 1950s and that would become the established model: he was neither a despotic ‘little Stalin’ who agitated and bullied everyone in his path, nor a puppet manipulated by strong interest groups.5 Rather, he was a party secretary who acted in accordance with clear rules and principles and was thus predictable for those around him. It is essential to note that this approach of not exposing himself or polarizing opinion, but rather perceiving himself as an administrator, later decried as a lack of leadership, developed in the specific context of late Stalinism and demonstrated a fundamental strength: he was able to retain a certain independence within the context of Stalinist orders. Nevertheless, the political agitation campaigns intensified after 1945: the imagined enemies of the years before the war were joined by new bogeymen from ‘the West’ with all its insidious influences. A further threat was presented by the new nationalist movements triggered by the war, in the form of uncontrolled partisan detachments and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which was not ultimately defeated until the early 1950s. The war had opened a door on the West that Stalin and his entourage sought to close at all costs. To this end, in 1946 the CC secretary responsible for ideology, Andrey Zhdanov, initiated a campaign against Western influences in art and literature, mirrored in Ukraine by the fight against ‘bourgeois-nationalist dissent’.6 Because he had to share responsibility for this policy, Brezhnev developed a strategy that on the one hand did not encourage the Stalinist agitation, and on the other hand focused entirely on fulfilling the plan so that he could not be suspected of causing deficits. His seven-year apprenticeship under Stalin between 1946 and 1953 was a strenuous period of intensive work: as in the late 1930s, Brezhnev worked almost round the clock, with very little sleep. Intense pressure of work, a lack of sleep, and restlessness were a general consequence of Stalinism: at a time when Moscow not only issued unrealizable plans, but also constantly expected them to be surpassed, no party leader could afford not to go to extremes in attempting to fulfil them. Since until 1953 any failure to meet the plan could potentially be punished as sabotage and obstacles were always attributed to human failure rather than adverse circumstances or a shortage of resources, actionism was one way of saving one’s own skin. And everyone who was directly under Stalin knew that they had to be available round the clock, since the ‘leader’ was notorious for working until three in the morning and ringing his underlings at such hours as a matter of course. Finally, there is one further point that must be considered concerning the development of Brezhnev’s style of politics: all important questions were decided by

76

Brezhnev

the Politburo in Moscow. This included both the election of party and government leaders and the content and duration of the plans. Moscow decided, Kiev confirmed and Zaporozh’ye, Dnepropetrovsk or Kishinev executed. Potential to shape politics in the republics, oblasts, cities and rayons was limited to the ways the directives from the centre were implemented. Resources for reconstruction were also centrally assigned by Moscow. Whenever he wanted to erect a new building or needed light bulbs for a construction site, Brezhnev had to apply to the responsible CC secretary and ministers in the capital.

Zaporozh’ye The train journey from the Carpathians to Brezhnev’s native Ukraine took two weeks,7 during which he got to see the full extent of the country’s destruction. There was essentially nothing left of Zaporozh’ye, once known as ‘the Pittsburgh of the Ukraine’.8 Everything had been laid to waste. The dam, with its power station the jewel of the first five-year plan, the pride of the entire Soviet Union and once the world’s largest, had been destroyed: initially blown up by Soviet soldiers, it continued to be a target for aerial bombing by the Wehrmacht; some seventy 500-kilogram bombs were buried in the rubble.9 Only fourteen of the forty-seven outflow pipes remained intact; all of the turbines had been destroyed by the Germans.10 Marshall MacDuffie, who led a UN mission to Ukraine in 1946, considered ninety per cent of the dam to have been destroyed, while Soviet engineers ‘optimistically’ insisted that only two-thirds had been reduced to ruins.11 German experts estimated that it would take twenty-five years to reconstruct the region, but Stalin ordered that the pre-war situation be restored by the end of the sixth five-year plan (1946–1950).12 And yet the city’s other showpiece facility, the Zaporozhstal’ steelworks, also lay in ruins, international specialists recommending it be rebuilt from scratch.13 Since Zaporozhstal’ was the Soviet Union’s only steel plate factory and the USA had imposed an embargo on the export of such plates, which were urgently needed in the automobile, consumer goods and construction industries, the plant’s reconstruction placed Brezhnev under great pressure – and close watch by Moscow.14 But that was not all he had to contend with, as his second volume of ‘memoirs’, ‘Rebirth’, relates: ‘The entire city, too, lay in ruins. The following figures were established by the State Commission: over a thousand large houses in Zaporozh’ye had been destroyed, as well as 24 hospitals, 74 schools, two colleges, five cinemas, and 239 shops. There was no water, no heating and no electricity.’15 He nevertheless had his family follow him to Zaporozh’ye. They swapped the house they had inhabited in Chernovtsy for a damp new construction before being able to move into his predecessor’s apartment.16 Rebuilding Upon the ‘recommendation’ of Stalin and Khrushchev, the Eleventh Plenum of the Zaporozh’ye oblast committee elected Brezhnev as its new secretary on 30 August 1946.17 This was followed by the Eighth Plenum of the city committee, which

In Stalin’s Shadow

77

appointed him first secretary on 12 September 1946.18 As always under Stalin, the new appointments came in the wake of failure: Brezhnev’s predecessor Fëdor Matyushchin was accused of serious errors and shortcomings: he was said to have deployed cadres without having had them vetted, with the effect that leading positions were occupied by people who had received party reprimands and had since been expelled. He was further accused of refusing to provide the necessary support to others, leading to constant fluctuations; almost a quarter of cadres had been replaced within eight months.19 But these accusations do not so much reveal errors on the part of Matyushchin as reflect the shortage of personnel after the war. The majority of prewar cadres had fallen or were returning from evacuation, combat or imprisonment.20 If they were to meet Moscow’s ambitious plans, the local party leaders had no choice but to appoint whoever presented themselves. Yet even in the face of urgent economic problems, it was the nature of Stalinism to prioritize the appointment of cadres in order to blame all structural shortcomings on ‘enemies’ and ‘black sheep’. Brezhnev’s principal task, then, was to ensure that personnel were appointed strictly according to party guidelines and that the party subjected all cadres to checks. In the space of two months, he had to find seventy people he could entrust with leadership roles for the city and rayon committees.21 He soon showed his own style of renouncing agitation at the plenum of the city committee in September 1946. Although it would have been easy enough to criticize his predecessor, he lightened the mood by making his audience laugh with wellplaced witticisms.22 He even went so far as to defend individuals who were under attack by saying that if someone was indisposed, it was not a sign they were not doing their work; rather they were presumably overburdened – when he himself prepared his speeches, he could withdraw for four hours.23 He ultimately excused his reluctance to voice criticism by explaining he had not been in the city long enough: ‘Since I have not had sufficient time in my job [in Zaporozh’ye] to have the opportunity to criticize the work of the party’s individual rayon committee, I would like to concentrate fully on our tasks.’24 This approach mirrored his actions in 1937, when instead of accusing others he had also preferred to focus on issues. However, he also had to repeat and represent the Stalinist slogans. Irrespective of how unrealistic the plans were, how devastated the country, how poor material supplies, how obsolete and dilapidated the machinery, it was always down to people who did not put in enough effort, who had not displayed enough Bolshevik optimism and morale, and about whom the party had not been sufficiently diligent: Above all, we must improve our work with our cadres, as Stalin said; to this end we must improve our organizational work, must do our leadership role justice. Our second great task is ideology. The ideologically prepared and hardened person solves problems with greater ease, never leaves the correct LeninistStalinist path, is not concerned with things that cause him to err. He will walk the Bolshevik path straight and unswervingly.25

He immediately had to prove he was correctly educating and motivating the cadres to achieve superhuman feats at DneproGES, the hydroelectric power station on the

78

Brezhnev

Dnieper. DneproGES was not only a prestige project, but also a symbol of successful industrialization, destruction by the Germans and now Soviet man’s unbroken will to victory. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ emphasize its role with no small amount of pathos: ‘The Dnieper power station on our soil is just like Pushkin in literature, or Tchaikovsky in music. Whatever gigantic stations may arise on the Volga, the Angara, and the Yenisei, they cannot eclipse the glory of the patriarch of the Soviet power industry.’26 The electricity supply for the city, industry and the entire oblast depended on the plant with its maximum output of 650,000 kilowatts.27 Brezhnev was once again in the spotlight of the Union; he was guaranteed the attention of Stalin and Khrushchev. But he was not without support: Kirilenko, with whom he had become acquainted in Dnepropetrovsk before the war, had been second secretary of the oblast committee since 1943.28 The two of them became friends and faced the challenges and trials together. During this time, Brezhnev delegated leadership of most of the city committee’s plenums and office meetings to his deputy Nikolay Petrovich Moyseyenko, whom he also knew from before the war;29 he was even absent from some of the oblast committee bureau meetings.30 The ‘troika’ seemed to work well in these fraught circumstances: Brezhnev took care of the building sites, where he spent his days and nights, again sleeping on a camp bed; Moyseyenko directed the city committee, Kirilenko the oblast committee. Pravda was a source of considerable pressure, repeatedly printing critical articles on how the work was progressing, taking aim at Brezhnev and Kirilenko.31 Since he could not expect the necessary approval from Moscow for more spending, machinery and construction materials, Brezhnev had no other option but to drive the workers and engineers to their limits via agitation. He organized socialist competition so that construction sections sought to finish before one another and presented the first Stakhanov workers.32 Indeed, on 4 March 1947 he could triumphantly inform Moscow of the launch of the first turbine.33 The pressure and tension are quite evident even in Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’: ‘One could easily be swamped by the abundance of affairs awaiting rapid decision.’34 The famine of 1946/47 The various meetings of the city and oblast committees were dominated, however, by another urgent subject: the famine of 1946/47. It was the third that century, and hit Ukraine particularly hard. Unlike the famine of the 1930s, it was not the consequence of fateful policies, but the result of the devastation of the war and a sustained drought throughout Europe.35 An estimated one million people in Ukraine suffered dystrophy, 300,000 were hospitalized and 46,000 died.36 Khrushchev enraged Stalin when he dared to ask him for aid for the starving Ukraine.37 Brezhnev too wrote several requests for help to the CCs in Kiev, Moscow and other Soviet republics, without expressing the catastrophic extent of the situation. In a letter to the party secretary of Latvia, he merely asked for support with the purchase and transport of potatoes ‘to feed our workers’.38 In early 1947, he was indeed able to have aid packets distributed to kolkhozes.39 But the plight of the people, once again even culminating in cannibalism, received no mention on the agendas of the many meetings and assemblies – the bureaucratic

In Stalin’s Shadow

79

wording was ‘On the supervision by the oblast committees of the CPU of the autumn sowing on the kolkhozes and tilling the soil’.40 Nor was it raised by the delegates. There was no discussion of how to supply the starving population with the most basic provisions; talk revolved rather around how the state-decreed harvest quotas were to be implemented. In line with Stalin’s insistence that ‘enemies’ were at work here, there were no food shortages but guilty parties who had to answer for the poor yields. And once again we see Brezhnev’s peculiar tendency to eschew such agitation, and indeed to rein it in. When at the Twelfth Plenum of the Zaporozh’ye oblast committee on 15 November 1946 a party comrade demanded that the investigations finally be brought to a close and the guilty parties put on trial, Brezhnev intervened: ‘You wish to force us to drive the state prosecutors with the stick. […]. I think everyone should understand that the party’s CC decree primarily aims to eliminate the ills prevailing on the kolkhozes.’41 Brezhnev thus once again sought to defuse the debate by drawing attention to issues. Not only did he demand honest self-criticism, but he also warned it was time to stop merely bleeding the kolkhozes dry.42 In September 1946, he had proved equally headstrong at a meeting of the city and oblast committee secretaries in response to the CC’s decrees on how to deal with kolkhoz farmers ‘stealing’ parts of the harvest: The party’s CC demands harsh punishment be meted out to the guilty, quite irrespective of what they are guilty of. We should ask ourselves: whom among the leadership have we punished? And why should we assume that support for the delivery of grain to the state is dependent only on the kolkhozes and that we have nothing to do with it? That is wrong! […] If the rayon is in a bad way, then we may not look to blame other people, we must also critically examine ourselves, how we come out of it. If we are not capable of organizing things, then that means we are useless leaders.43

With remarkable clarity for the Stalin era, these words demonstrate that Brezhnev considered it wrong to punish starving people for ‘stealing’ grain and corn from the fields. In these tense times of 1946/47, he was probably taken back to the era of collectivization, when he was forced to take the last provisions from starving peasants. That he understood the kolkhoz farmers’ situation only too well and considered it not their duty, but the party’s, became quite clear when he appealed to another secretary’s conscience: ‘I have warned you that because we have only ever taken from the kolkhozes and never given them anything, in their eyes we have lost all credibility and our conscience, and hence it is very unpleasant to have to go to them at such a time and seize the last remaining seeds.’44 On the one hand, Brezhnev’s insistence he would not pressure the peasants any further can almost be understood as disobeying Stalin’s order. On the other hand, it also reveals the pressure he and the local party leadership were placed under: ‘I would prefer not to work with these [punitive] measures, but I have to. The weaker the discipline, the harsher the punishment must be. Discipline wavered at the front, and so Stalin gave order 227.45 Our situation is not quite like that, but it is similar.’46 The subject of famine – under the euphemism of agriculture – dominated Brezhnev’s entire time in Zaporozh’ye. At the Fourteenth Plenum of the oblast committee in

80

Brezhnev

March 1947, it was the main focus of his opening speech ‘On the measures for reviving agriculture in the post-war period’. The phrasing and demands remained formulaic, in line with the Stalinist style of the age: they had to sow more seeds, breed more livestock and hold more assemblies at the kolkhozes to re-educate the farmers: ‘Now we must agitate, explain the law, not apologize to the kolkhoz farmers, but make demands of them and begin our agitation, we must prepare the kolkhozes practically for this work.’47 But even the mere implication that they might have reason to apologize to the farmers represented a deviation from the Stalinist discourse and suggested that the party itself had erred in some way. As emphasized above, there was scant opportunity for variation in such speeches – and a party secretary’s room for manoeuvre was limited. But it is striking that as soon as his speeches were over, Brezhnev repeatedly invited a dialogue with the delegates that was as open as circumstances allowed, preferring to make specific enquiries as to the difficulties they faced. He clearly liked to get to the bottom of things and attempted to provide assistance. He did not shout or issue threats, but tried to find practical solutions, for his probing often revealed that tractors simply could not be used due to a lack of petrol, there were no trucks for transporting grain, or there was a shortage of seeds. It was also typical of the man that he expressed himself very colloquially and enjoyed making the plenum laugh with witty remarks. The March Plenum of 1947 also had to deal with the problem that, due to the drought, it was impossible to proceed with the winter sowing and that eighty per cent of what had been attempted had been blown away by the wind. Brezhnev observed, ‘That’s a very important question. That also applies to Andreyev rayon. […] I recently spoke about this on the phone with [the secretary] and he explained that over there, fifteen per cent had been blown away. That knocked me down. […] To this day I break out in a sweat over this fifteen per cent.’48 When the criticized secretary said that in future they intended to plant summer grains to target a bigger harvest but had neglected the issue in recent years, Brezhnev taunted: ‘It’s a complicated issue, so sweep it under the carpet’, to the amusement of the delegates.49 When the comrades he had mocked reported he had ‘scolded’ them ‘several times’, he always insisted, ‘For the benefit of the members of the plenum, I have not once scolded Comrade Gulkin, merely criticized him, otherwise one might think that I stir things up as secretary.’50 And indeed his criticism was always related to issues and never abusive. This was one of the characteristics distinguishing the ‘strong’ leader from the despotic or weak ruler: he neither agitated nor summoned the state prosecutor, nor did he close his eyes to the many problems. Rather, he demanded, within the scope of what was realistic, that everyone did their utmost and exhausted all possibilities. Brezhnev pushed himself to the limit, and demanded that others did too. To a certain extent, the Stalinist solutions converged with the available scope for action: since Brezhnev could alter neither the organizational structures nor the decrees, plans and resources such as money, machinery, seeds etc., his only option was to increase the pressure on the party secretaries and kolkhoz chairmen to make the impossible possible. This was precisely in line with the Stalinist ideology: ‘The cadres decide everything.’ Whether people fulfilled the plan, failed to do so or exceeded it was solely a question of education.

In Stalin’s Shadow

81

In Stalin’s sights As the famine and the agricultural crisis reached their nadir, another one was brewing for Brezhnev: Khrushchev fell out of favour with Stalin, since he had dared to request aid for Ukraine and had thereby failed to follow the rhetoric of ‘enemies’, instead acting independently. On 3 March 1947, he lost his post as first secretary of Ukraine.51 Stalin replaced him with his obedient follower Lazar’ Kaganovich. Khrushchev remained chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine, but no longer made public appearances in this function either, since he was suffering from severe pneumonia.52 As Khrushchev’s man, Brezhnev found himself in a very tricky situation, for it was likely that the new incumbent sent from Moscow would replace his predecessor’s people with his own. Two days after Brezhnev was able to announce the launch of the first turbine at the Dnieper power station on 4 March 1947, he was forced to praise the change in leadership at the Tenth Plenum of the Zaporozh’ye city soviet in Kiev: ‘I think that the comrades will understand that such a decision by the party’s CC is an expression of its great care and attention, above all for the Ukrainian party organizations and the entire Ukrainian people.’53 In fact, this move of Stalin’s pursued no other end than to bring Ukraine under his direct control via his emissaries. He also had the pressure on Brezhnev intensified by a series of articles in Pravda, all of which accused him of neglecting his work at Zaporozhstal’.54 Brezhnev’s memoirs recount: ‘In fact, Stalin did call me up that night, and the conversation we had was a serious one.’55 It is plausible that this telephone conversation really did take place. But even without this night-time call, Brezhnev would presumably have been well aware he was under direct observation by Stalin – and was at the mercy of his whims. The new construction deadlines determined by the Council of Ministers in Moscow on 16 March 1947 were completely arbitrary. In response to agitation by Construction Minister Pavel Yudin, the Stakhanov workers committed to fulfilling the annual plan by 7 November, Revolution Day, and to completing the first blast furnace by the June.56 But the work, which had initially progressed in line with the plan, had now fallen behind drastically. As Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ note, ‘What we had been able to achieve and had been recently considered good work now proved to be practically the reverse.’57 Correspondingly, a CC resolution of 8 April took aim at the Zaporozh’ye party committee; it was ‘sharply criticized […] for failing to live up to the demands of the situation in those complex conditions’.58 By ‘committee’, the CC meant Brezhnev and Kirilenko. Pravda attacked the party leadership for ‘indifference and self-conciliation’, holding it responsible for the massive construction delays.59 What Brezhnev’s ghostwriters casually portray as the normal burden besetting a party secretary must have been an extremely tense situation. The famine had not been overcome and that year’s harvest was yet to be secured, his patron Khrushchev had been deposed and Stalin himself had set seemingly impossible construction deadlines for Zaporozhstal’. Brezhnev’s days as party leader of Zaporozh’ye seemed numbered.60 Stalin sent Kaganovich to Zaporozh’ye to push for completion of the plant, ‘in which the CC and Stalin himself were particularly interested and about which they were worried, given the delays to its reconstruction and the great need for its production throughout the country’,61 as Kaganovich recalled.

82

Brezhnev

What Brezhnev needed was a miracle – one that he himself had to provide: Zaporozhstal’ had to open on time. Indeed, Brezhnev responded as a ‘Bolshevik’ was expected to: he did not lose his head, but called a plenum of the city party committee on 28 April 1947 devoted entirely to criticism and self-criticism. Even in this situation, he remained true to his style: he did not try to pin the blame on others, but expressed self-criticism: ‘Although I was aware of the situation at the construction site, I did not show enough resolve in solving some problems it was encountering, on some occasions allowing indifference to decisions of the party oblast committee to reign.’62 He did not threaten draconian punishments, but focused on the only method officially available to him: Bolshevik work discipline. Above all, we must demand awareness of responsibility on the part of every party member. Hardly anyone can want any kind of stain on his party file. By this, I do not mean to intimidate anyone. I do not wish to demand the party expel anyone or empty a whole bag of reprimands. That is not an educative method either, but if we remain passive – that is very dangerous.63

He made no secret of the dramatic nature of the situation: ‘Hence if Comrades [construction directors] Dymshits and Kuz’min do not clear up the situation with the blast furnace and the thermal power station in every detail, then we can find ourselves in such a situation that in a month’s time the only thing that will remain for us to establish is that we have failed.’64 He thus conveyed with unusual clarity that they would all be facing the end of their careers and perhaps worse if a solution could not be found. This is also expressed with remarkable candour in Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’: ‘It was generally realized that, in our planning, we were in duty bound to proceed not from what was “possible”, but from what was “needed”.’65 In his speech, he implied his perplexity when he finally presented his solution: The CC demands that the party committee create an atmosphere of intense battling to fulfil the work plan. I have thought about this question and cannot imagine how such an atmosphere of intense battling can be created if we do not hold a weapon with which we can create this intense atmosphere. What do I mean by that? If we do not have a schedule, if we do not hold a weapon with which we can monitor, demand, drive and punish, then an intense atmosphere is not conceivable.66

That meant nothing other than doubling the speed and increasing productivity by twenty per cent.67 Brezhnev instructed the director of the Zaporozhstroy construction trust, Benjamin Dymshits, who like Brezhnev had only been sent to Zaporozh’ye in the autumn of 1946 to return the steelworks to operation, to prioritize thirty of the fifty outstanding tasks and personally monitor their progress on a daily basis.68 But Brezhnev wouldn’t have been Brezhnev had he not also pointed to the terrible situation in the workers’ canteen: ‘It is a disgrace that our workers stand in line because there are neither spoons nor forks.’69 He himself now barely left the construction site: he set up an office there, again with his camp bed, and monitored the work day and night.70 With immense effort,

In Stalin’s Shadow

83

he, Kirilenko, Moyseyenko, Dymshits and the director of the steelworks Anatoliy Kuz’min achieved what had seemed impossible: the first blast furnace was fired up on time, on 30 June 1947. As was common practice under Stalinism, they also employed unconventional, risky methods: blast furnace no. 3, the only one to have survived detonation, was as tilted as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but was not dismantled and rebuilt; instead, it was simply raised and realigned.71 In the October, Zaporozhstal’ was able to deliver the first sheets to the country’s automobile factories.72 Stalin and Kaganovich were clearly impressed, sending congratulatory telegrams from Moscow and Kiev.73 Brezhnev had successfully overcome this particular crisis: Stalin awarded him the Order of Lenin in December 1947.74 But ten years later, Brezhnev would settle his score with Kaganovich for his maltreatment and victimization in Ukraine that same year.75 Promotion The problems in Zaporozh’ye were by no means dealt with, however; the food shortage remained critical and agriculture was in a precarious situation. Although Brezhnev’s choice of words at the plenum of the city committee in October 1947 was combative, he nevertheless implied the full drama: We are not afraid to say that this year we have taken the food cards from neither the children nor the elderly; we have kept the kolkhoz peasants on starvation rations and yet we have still mobilized them; in spite of this we have gathered a large harvest and Ukraine has fulfilled its plan. We were not afraid of the workers at the time of elections, elections during which we cut back on bread. That is the genuine Bolshevist line.76

Pressure to drive on industrial reconstruction remained high after the initial successes at DneproGES and Zaporozhstal’, especially as another factory essential to the entire Union still awaited reopening: the Communard combine harvester plant,77 where Brezhnev had briefly worked after taking flight from Moscow in the winter of 1930/31. He also had to devote a lot of time to rebuilding the party organizations.78 His ‘memoirs’ reveal that security issues played a large role: the state security service persecuted those who had collaborated with the National Socialists, the police attempted to gain control over crime in the city, and in rural areas fighting continued with ‘armed bands’, the last units of the UPA: Shots could sometimes be heard at night. I did a lot of travelling along the roads, often at night and alone, doing my own driving. It would have been a pity to have gone through the entire war only to be hit by some stray bullet. But, frankly speaking, there was not time to think of one’s personal safety […]79

Most importantly, however, Brezhnev was no longer under attack. Stalin and Kaganovich now trusted him to fulfil their demands: in November 1947 they sent him to Dnepropetrovsk to achieve the same reconstruction ‘miracles’ he had managed in organizing work in Zaporozh’ye. ‘In November 1947 I was recommended by the

84

Brezhnev

CC of the VKP and the CC of the CPU for work as secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast committee of the CPU’, he wrote in his CV.80 The minutes of the Eleventh Plenum of the oblast committee from which he took his leave demonstrate that he had earned his comrades’ respect, their recognition and probably their affection too. Agriculture secretary P.S. Reznik prophesized: ‘Comrade Brezhnev will have to keep the pace going in Dnepropetrovsk the way he has done in Zaporozhye, and let me assure you, he’ll have to work hard.’ (Laughter) Comrade Brezhnev: ‘Remember that Bolsheviks are a great force in Dnepropetrovsk Region.’ Comrade Reznik: ‘And you remember that the headache is also great.’ (Laughter) Comrade Brezhnev: ‘Thank you, comrades! As for our competition, it will be healthy and Bolshevik in nature …’81

The ghostwriters have Brezhnev declare, ‘I left Zaporozhye with a sense of duty done.’82 This was something of an understatement: he had come through a baptism of fire as first party secretary. In the eyes of Stalin, re-launching two industrial giants during a famine was an admirable achievement. Brezhnev had now gained his respect and some breathing space – but also his next, no less difficult task in Dnepropetrovsk. While we can only assume what Brezhnev did in the Carpathians, it is clear that Zaporozh’ye laid the foundations for his career as general secretary. The remarkable thing was that he satisfied Stalin while remaining respectful in his dealings with people. It would almost appear that the more Moscow issued threats, the more Brezhnev stressed that he did not wish to make use of the punitive measures available to him. Roy Medvedev unwittingly confirms this when he writes: ‘However strange it may seem, what attracted so many people to Brezhnev was his softness, the lack of the usual hardness and cruelty associated with the party bosses of the time, a kindness that sometimes also came at the expense of business.’83 Once more, Brezhnev had to say goodbye to Kirilenko, with whom he had become firm friends. Another contact, although little is known about how it came about, remained intact: while Brezhnev was in Zaporozh’ye, Shchëlokov, his old pre-war acquaintance from Dnepropetrovsk, whom he would later make minister of the interior, had become deputy minister for local industry in Ukraine and became CC secretary of the CPU with responsibility for light industry in 1947. He consulted with Brezhnev concerning the reconstruction of industry, presumably in Zaporozh’ye and certainly in Dnepropetrovsk.84

Dnepropetrovsk Brezhnev returned to Dnepropetrovsk with his family. They now lived in on the western edge of the city at 1 Krutogornaya ulitsa; such was the extent of the ruins, the centre no longer existed.85 His deployment was again ordered by Moscow and Kiev, decided by the party committees in the November.86 Khrushchev, having recovered from his pneumonia and demotion by Stalin, again had a say; on 26 December 1947, Stalin reappointed him first secretary of Ukraine, but had already been involving him

In Stalin’s Shadow

85

in decision-making before his return to office.87 Once again, Brezhnev’s rise was not so much a promotion as replacing an alleged offender who had been unable to meet Stalin’s demands and deadlines: Pavel Andreyevich Naidënov had been first secretary in Dnepropetrovsk from 1944 onwards and was an acquaintance of Brezhnev’s.88 Unlike Brezhnev in Zaporozh’ye, he had not managed to implement Moscow’s directives and ensure the boom in agriculture that was so urgently needed.89 On 21 November 1947, Leonid Mel’nikov, a close confidant of Khrushchev’s, personally appeared at the plenum of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast committee to explain Moscow’s and Kiev’s resolutions and ensure Brezhnev was elected.90 In the usual tone of the day, the minutes signed by Brezhnev announced that the Communist Party’s CC and both Stalin and Kaganovich themselves had sent all the necessary aid to Dnepropetrovsk, but due to the ‘weak organization of party work’, industry and agriculture continued to stagnate.91 It seems Brezhnev was not at ease in Mel’nikov’s presence; his speech was certainly missing the usual witty personal remarks. Full of pathos, Brezhnev thanked ‘the CC of the VKP(b) and the Politburo of the CC of the CPU, and Lazar’ Moiseyevich Kaganovich personally’ for the trust placed in him and promised the assembled comrades he would do all he could to ensure they accomplished the impending tasks.92 Party organization One revealing statement at this meeting was made by the chairman of the city soviet of the Dnepropetrovsk worker deputies, Nikolay Gavrilenko, concerning the approach of the deposed Naidënov. After all the prepared speeches had been read, Gavrilenko reported that Naidënov was not good at dealing with people, and they had not heard a friendly word from him for years; he could be expected to yell at his colleagues at any time and accuse them of incompetence, saying he expected their resignation – which he never accepted, however. ‘We have learned to distinguish between criticism and insult, but the style of Comrade Naidënov was dominated by constant nervousness, permanent yelling and insults.’93 While these were not the official reasons why Kiev replaced him, this atmosphere, as Gavrilenko emphasized, had a negative impact on the work ethic: ‘And I must honestly say, if I did not love this city, I swear I would have up and left, for the conditions were such that it was impossible to think about working.’94 Brezhnev thus arrived at a place where the firm but friendly style he had hitherto shown saw him welcomed with open arms. The candid words of the chairman of the Dnepropetrovsk Soviet provide a rare insight into the mental state of the party and administrative staff under late Stalinism: they had had enough of the shouting, threats and humiliation that were ultimately merely an expression of the chairmen’s helplessness and fear in the face of Stalin’s demands. Yet while some, like Naidënov, remained helplessly trapped in a cycle of threats, other party secretaries such as Brezhnev sought to avoid passing on the pressure from Moscow and Kiev in the form of further threats, endeavouring instead to create, with their friendly but firm warnings and demands, a collective feeling that was more effective in motivating the cadres to do their best. In other words, renouncing Stalinist methods was their only

86

Brezhnev

chance of even coming close to fulfilling Stalin’s plans and quotas. The party secretary of Dneprodzerzhinsk, I.I. Sobolev, recalls: Leonid Il’ich demanded from us first secretaries of the city and rayon committee respectful and attentive dealings with the cadres, we were to show neither roughness nor indifference. Wherever possible, we were to persuade, offer comradely criticism, develop a relationship with our staff on the basis of communist trust, set an example for everyone around us. He himself always behaved this way towards the cadres.95

The real challenge Brezhnev faced in Dnepropetrovsk thus appears not to have been the appalling state of agriculture, still afflicted by the drought of 1946, or rebuilding industry, but the situation in the local party organizations. As was his wont, he began his new job with a tour of the rayons of Dnepropetrovsk oblast. He seems to have been genuinely horrified by the state in which he found the party, as he reported to the party plenum on 1 March 1948, again in his own idiosyncratic style: A problem that must be taken very seriously is the complete dissolution of individual areas of the apparatus. It is an abuse when the chairman of the department of the oblast committee comes to the rayon […] and announces he has come to expel people from the party. Is that an appropriate tone? This is not about the comrade as an individual. One has to take a closer look – this is a very strange manner. Or such jocular conversations, people congratulating one another on reprimands and other things […]. I think these are signs of unravelling, and we must take great care to get the apparatus back on its feet.96

Brezhnev more or less had to teach his party colleagues that he did not consider Stalin’s commandment of ‘criticism and self-criticism’ an instrument with which to punish others and spare oneself; rather he regarded it as a tool for collaboration in assessing and improving work. There was clearly great resignation in view of the discrepancy between the demands and the available means and between the threat of punishment and scope for action. With apparently unshakeable – or perhaps merely calculated – optimism, Brezhnev tried to make the functionaries throughout Dnepropetrovsk oblast realize that criticism and self-criticism were not a farce, but could actually serve as an instrument of mobilization. According to one witness to this plenum, Brezhnev declared a break so that the party secretaries could rewrite their speeches to include sufficient serious criticism and self-criticism. In doing so, he paraphrased Stalin, adapting his words for his own ends: ‘If you wish to spoil a good colleague, then stop criticizing him.’97 At a meeting of agricultural experts, he demanded, ‘We need criticism like we need air to breathe, without criticism we cannot progress and in the party, criticism is the decisive driving force.’98 Brezhnev not only demanded that his colleagues revived the practice of criticism and self-criticism; he also challenged the almost 100 newly elected members of the oblast committee to adopt a new understanding of their work: it wasn’t enough to attend plenums, they had to travel through the entire oblast, visit the

In Stalin’s Shadow

87

rayon and city committee, ask questions, look around, report their observations and provide help: ‘I would request that every member of the plenum ask himself: what have I done, what share did I have in this plenum’s success, what I can say on this issue, what observations do I have on this point, have I helped the plenum today or not?’99 How the infighting and rearguard actions exactly played out within the Dnepropetrovsk party organization can only be surmised or inferred by reading between the lines. For instance, at the February Plenum of 1948, many delegates expressed an unusual amount of criticism of Brezhnev’s financial report, which he was supposed to present at the next party conference. They hardly left a single paragraph as Brezhnev had conceived it. Brezhnev allowed this to happen, adopted all the proposed changes and held an open vote on all the various points.100 At the party conference in late February 1948 too, criticism of Brezhnev went beyond the norm. Brezhnev responded by saying: Much of what has been said here addressing the bureau and the oblast committee and its secretaries to a large extent applies to myself as secretary of the party’s oblast committee. […] I have listened attentively to all the delegates’ speeches and am not mistaken when I say that criticism of many or almost all delegates has left one or two colleagues […] feeling a little uneasy. I have to say that I took some of this criticism to be directed at me personally and have also taken it very much to heart.101

The subsequent discussion of candidature for the seventy-one full members and twenty-three candidates for the oblast committee was unusually lively and entailed a rare openness and harshness, leading, in some cases, to challenges to posts. Brezhnev read out the names of the candidates individually, and the assembled delegates made much use of the opportunity to argue why some of them were unsuitable and were to be removed from the list. Some of the criticism was so damning that Brezhnev saw himself forced to intervene as chair and to protect those candidates he himself wanted in office. When it was claimed Propaganda Secretary Dunayev did not understand the criticism he had been subjected to and should thus be struck from the list, Brezhnev leapt to his defence: ‘He is undoubtedly at fault as secretary, he has quite rightly been criticized and the assessment of his work is correct. But to say that he is not deserving of our trust, as someone who has been a member of the party since 1925, if my memory serves me correctly – I don’t think he requires educating in this fashion.’102 The delegates’ arguments remained within the framework of the prescribed discourse, pointing to irregularities, failures to fulfil the plan and a lack of understanding of criticism and self-criticism. Whether they were attempting to save their own networks or primarily to rid the party of the ‘little Stalins’ and despots is unclear from the minutes, however. The extent of their dissatisfaction is reflected in the outcome of the election: at a time when unanimity was expected, it was certainly unusual for some candidates to receive only 392 out of 413 votes.103 A year later, in January 1949, it seems the party organization remained dissatisfied. Unlike the previous year, when Brezhnev had only been in office a few months, this time the essence of the conflict consisted in the fact that there were candidates on whom he

88

Brezhnev

relied but who were obviously not accepted by the rank and file. Not many objected, but it was simply not the norm for there to be any strong disagreement regarding candidates at all. This time, the individual in question was Oblast Secretary Leonid Lukich, who was responsible for the reconstruction of industry. Following a lively debate on whether Lukich was an acceptable candidate, Brezhnev put his foot down: Most of the shortcomings do indeed exist in the area led by Comrade Lukich. I reported them in my speech, as did other comrades. But it is a difficult area. Hardly anyone would say that absolutely everything is down to Lukich. I think that a lot of things here can also be blamed on the bureau. The bureau has clearly not been able to resolve some issues conclusively. Hence, look, in my opinion one cannot make accusations against Lukich – that industry hasn’t been rebuilt and Lukich of all people is to blame.104

This intervention saved Lukich’s candidature, but three people voted against Brezhnev.105 While no one received more than three votes against them in the oblast committee election, the disputes in the Dnepropetrosvk city committee were much fiercer,106 as the votes against illustrate: in February 1949, after only three months in office, Brezhnev was opposed by two voters, while others had to contend with nineteen rejections.107 Despite the unusually harsh criticism to which he himself was subjected, he welcomed it as ‘completely justified’.108 To this extent, he remained true to his word not to use threats, admonitions and expulsions, but to consider criticism a productive process. His ‘memoirs’ note, however: ‘[…] it was hard to take; it probably cannot be otherwise. Criticism is no chocolate to be liked.’109 Agriculture Brezhnev thus had to work harder than in Zaporozh’ye to earn the party’s trust and to persuade people to react to criticism and self-criticism not with cynicism, but by rolling their sleeves up. He demanded they create a ‘pathos of peaceful rebuilding’, just as there had been a certain pathos in the ‘Great Patriotic War’.110 The state of agriculture was just as terrible as in Zaporozh’ye, however. The consequences of the famine had yet to be overcome, but Moscow sent new directives to plant more corn to feed livestock. Whereas in 1947 140,000 hectares of corn had been sown, but insufficient seed had taken, now 170,000 hectares were to be cultivated – comprising some forty per cent of the summer’s sowing. Success was entirely down to them, Brezhnev stressed, in the face of evident tensions: ‘At the moment the small peasants are still saying that wheat and barley are important, not corn. We have to re-educate 200,000 kolkhoz peasants and guide them accordingly so that they understand. […] Hence I sense such internal unrest regarding corn’.111 To direct the agronomists who were to school the kolkhozes, Brezhnev had even engaged the renowned and controversial geneticist Trofim Lysenko.112 But despite all expert opinion, it became clear that the problem lay elsewhere: there was a shortage of seeds and machinery. Due to the war, they were also short of 100,000 horses. Now all hopes rested with the 350 to 400 new tractors Moscow had promised.113

In Stalin’s Shadow

89

Like almost every sector, corn-growing had also produced its own socialist hero, a harvester of legendary yields who served as an example to everybody else: Mark Ozernoy. Brezhnev enthused that despite the successes of Ozernoy’s approach, which had increased the yield of a single hectare of cornfield by over 200 hundredweight using a special hybrid crop, there were still areas and kolkhozes that were not employing his method.114 This, then, was Brezhnev’s room for manoeuvre: on the one hand, he had to announce that the CC in Moscow and ‘Stalin himself ’ had assisted with seeds, machinery, tools and fuel and it was now up to them to prove themselves worthy of this assistance and deliver the harvest demanded of them. On the other hand, he spoke personally, passionately and full of commitment, attempting to recommunicate to his comrades the purpose of their activities: Now we must politically light the path we have to walk during the year ahead. We must open up new perspectives for everyone, give them confidence, awaken their drive, so that they see the perspective of their rayon, their oblast, their kolkhoz and their own personal perspective against the background of the general state perspective.115

We do not know how Brezhnev felt, which of the measures he himself thought worthwhile and which he implemented because he had to. It is possible that he thought it was right to force the kolkhozes to finally hold regular meetings, as the CC in Kiev had instructed, in order to introduce the peasants to the new cultivation techniques, but also to the party ideology.116 He had certainly had good experiences when it came to mobilizing cadres, however, and perhaps believed that the peasants might be persuaded. Additionally, in 1948 and 1949, he had signed a contract on behalf of the kolkhozes in Dnepropetrovskaya oblast in which they committed to ‘socialist competition’ with Zaporozhskaya oblast in order to increase agricultural productivity: to deliver 20.5 hundredweight of grain for every hectare, and to raise cattle breeding by twenty per cent and horse breeding by thirteen per cent.117 But Brezhnev was also obliged to monitor 457 kolkhozes, deport 347 Ukrainian peasants from 188 farms for ‘malicious refusal to do honest work’ and to issue a warning to a further 643, in line with the decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ‘On the measures for improving organization, increasing productivity and regulating payment of work on the kolkhozes.’118 It seems Brezhnev repeatedly attempted to expand his room for manoeuvre. His motives, however, sometimes remain a mystery. For instance, in 1948 he organized, without authorization, an exhibition of agricultural achievements in Dnepropetrovsk, probably in order to demonstrate success to Kiev and Moscow, but perhaps even more so to the population. When Moscow sent a commission to inspect what was going on, Khrushchev protected his protégé, claiming Brezhnev was not responsible, having merely done as he had told him.119 This once again demonstrates the strength of the bond between ‘patron’ and ‘client’; irrespective of what Brezhnev had done, Khrushchev would probably have gone to any length to avoid serving up one of his best men to ‘Moscow’, where he recognized the machinations of his enemies Lavrentiy Beriya and Georgiy Malenkov.

90

Brezhnev

Rebuilding Dnepropetrovsk was not home to such prominent industrial giants as Zaporozh’ye, but the work was no less urgent. The Wehrmacht had completely destroyed thirteen out of sixteen blast furnaces and heavily damaged three; of thirty-six open-hearth furnaces, only seven were still standing, and fifty-six rolling mills had been reduced to thirty-five. Brezhnev estimated the damage at 1.6 billion roubles.120 Along with coalmines, which the Germans had flooded, the Azovstal’ steelworks, the Avtozavod truck factory and the Karl Liebknecht pipe mill had to be either reopened or made considerably more productive.121 As if this were not enough, Brezhnev received a directive stating that all operations were to pledge to fulfil the five-year plan (1946– 1950) within just four years.122 He conveyed the message in his familiar matter-of-fact manner, without insults or personal attacks. He listed all the shortcomings and named all those responsible by name, demanding greater efforts: ‘It is our duty to present a serious account to the leaders of our sub-enterprises working for Yuzhavtostroy [Southern Car Construction], Comrades Rabinovich […], Perchenko, Editkin […], who are doing very poor work. According to the plan, Comrade Editkin, you are supposed to produce 2,000 cubic metres of earth, but you are delivering only 750 cubic metres.’123 However, Brezhnev had greater room for manoeuvre with regard to industry than he did in the agricultural sector: while the oblast secretaries could be punished for requesting more resources and money for the farmers, they could approach Moscow for support for the enterprises and their workers. This much we know from I.I. Sobolev, leader of the Dneprodzerzhinsk city party committee under Brezhnev. He reports that Brezhnev advised them to travel to Moscow with ‘large pockets’ to ‘collect money’: they were to ask and beg the ministries and return with whatever they could muster. This was most systematic and planned, since before every deployment of their ‘messengers with large pockets’, the company leaders and party met to compile their lists of requirements. The list was sent first, after which the chairman of the executive committee of the soviet or his deputy travelled to Moscow together with his advisors.124 This practice applied not only to the financial gaps and material requirements in industry, but also to the development of the city and communal infrastructure. Shortages still prevailed in every sector: housing, canteens, shops, hospitals, cultural institutions etc. Judging from the way Brezhnev spoke about the issue, he seems to have been genuinely concerned about ensuring better living conditions – something that would become his main programme once he was general secretary. Only seven per cent of the residential construction programme had been fulfilled, and even these new buildings were let in terrible condition.125 He complained, ‘Somebody recently told me that the director of the building trust has moved into a new residence he had built himself and that everything trickled down from above with the water dripping from the ceiling. It took him one-and-a-half months to sort it all out, since he had fitters and plumbers at hand. But what about all the others who don’t? (commotion in the hall).’126 He urged, ‘Comrades! Now that the country is healing the wounds afflicted upon it by the war, and the Soviet people want to live in such a way that they can satisfy their material and cultural needs, free Soviet movement of goods and developed trade turnover take on special significance.’127

In Stalin’s Shadow

91

The issue, however, was not promoting consumerism but feeding the population. Brezhnev’s time in Dnepropetrovsk coincided with the currency reform and the abolishment of ration cards in December 1947. At his very first city committee party plenum on 9 December, he and his comrades had to pledge their commitment to the impending task; ending ration cards was to be portrayed as a victory for the party: ‘At the same time, there will be difficulties if a shop does not have any bread. We must prepare people so that they can’t say the cards are gone and the shops are empty.’128 Brezhnev knew what he was talking about; in mid-1948, the city committee indeed reported to Kiev concerning ‘many misguided conversations and moods among the workers’ in connection with the ‘difficulties supplying the city’s population with bread.’ People complained that they had stood in line for two days and still hadn’t received any, and demanded all the factories be closed, since all the workers were queuing for said bread; the prevailing view was that there was less of it without ration cards than when they were in use. Rumour abounded that the grain was being delivered to England and that there would soon be a war with the USA, since the bread factories had begun to bake rusk.129 Brezhnev was well aware of how the people were faring, both from reports from the security service and from his own tours of the rayons and villages. At the same time, he still had to deal with the long-term effects of the war in Dnepropetrovsk; he was to establish who had collaborated with the Germans and who had not. Almost all of the 11,606 communists who had remained ‘in the occupied territory without permission’ were expelled from the party.130 Networks The situation in Dnepropetrovsk was thus characterized by great tensions and required all his strength. Indeed, he probably had to sacrifice his health. The minutes of the office of the oblast committee’s meeting of 21 January 1949 certainly note that Brezhnev was absent due to illness.131 Given the severe conflicts within the party leadership and the unstable party basis, it is not surprising that Brezhnev sought allies in Dnepropetrovsk too, whom he protected in turn: if his ‘memoirs’ are to be believed, he defended the former director of the Nikopol’ pipe mill, N.A. Tikhonov, whom he would later make deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, for spending more money on hospitals, canteens and roads than he had been allocated. He told Moscow that without the road there would have been no night shift at the factory – after all, a workers’ club was not a private dacha.132 Another trusted comrade was Georgiy Tsukanov, senior engineer at the steelworks and his personal consultant after 1960. He also became acquainted with Vladimir Semichastnyy, who was then head of the Komsomol in Kiev under Khrushchev and who as head of the KGB would later assist Brezhnev in ousting their common mentor.133 It was in Dnepropetrovsk that he also came to know and value Vladimir Shcherbitskiy, second secretary of Dneprodzerzhinsk, who would later become one of his closest friends and confidants. Murphy claims Brezhnev saw Shcherbitskiy, twelve years his junior, as a kind of son.134 He would have liked to have taken him to Moscow with him, but Shcherbitskiy wished to remain head of the party in Ukraine.135 According to Brezhnev’s photographer Musael’yan, Brezhnev even planned to

92

Brezhnev

announce him as his successor in 1982.136 Brezhnev presumably also remained in close contact with his friend Kirilenko, who succeeded him as party leader of Dnepropetrovsk in June 1950. Brezhnev received recognition for his successes: from Khrushchev and Stalin, and later from his more critical biographers; Mlechin and Murphy credit him with the reconstruction of Dnepropetrovsk.137 Roy Medvedev concedes that even back then he believed in ‘cadre stability’ and pacified the party with his gentle, calm manner.138 In January 1949, Brezhnev was elected to the CC of the CPU in Kiev.139 He clearly made a lasting impression in other ways too: he was already noted for attaching importance to good, or at least appropriate clothing. Varvara Shokhanova relates how in 1947 Brezhnev not only motivated her to accept a position as secretary to the city committee, but also raised the dress code. He insisted the women wear stockings and men wear a suit. Always dressed in a black suit, one summer’s day he sent all the members of the party assembly home because they had turned up in short-sleeved shirts and without ties.140 To a certain extent, this dress code was also an expression of mutual respect and the style of leadership he sought to convey to his comrades. Little is known about his private life. He continued to travel around, undertaking his tours of the region, but no longer appeared to sleep at factories or construction sites. The family moved back to the centre, to ulitsa Rogalëva; today, the house sports a commemorative plaque in what is now known as Krutogornyy spusk.

In Moldavia In March 1950, Brezhnev was elected Dnepropetrovskaya oblast’s representative to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.141 He travelled to Moscow, where he was relieved of his position as secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast committee the same month, and appointed inspector of the CC of the VKP(b) in the June.142 Nothing is known about these months in Moscow, but the plan had clearly been to entrust him with higher political positions. This was probably down to Khrushchev, whom Stalin had made head of the party in Moscow in December 1949, a post he had held before the war, and who now sought to surround himself with his own retinue in the capital. This remains conjecture, however. Brezhnev had only been party inspector a month when the Politburo sent him to Moldavia as party chairman in the mid-July. This move too was probably at the recommendation of Khrushchev, who seized the opportunity presented by the ousting of the previous Moldavian leader, Nikolay Grigor’yevich Koval, on 5 June 1950, to deploy his client and thereby secure another power base for himself beyond Ukraine.143 However, Khrushchev also had to convince Stalin that Brezhnev was the right man to be entrusted with a republic. Various legends abound on this matter. At one of the few party meetings in 1950, Stalin is said to have seen Brezhnev and been taken with the ‘able, strong, handsome lad with a round face radiating good health and bushy eyebrows’.144 Taking him for a Moldavian because of his suntan, he is supposed to have asked him, ‘And, how are things in your Moldavia?’ Brezhnev corrected him, ‘In Ukraine, Iosif Vissarionovich’, whereupon Stalin amiably insisted, ‘Not in Ukraine, in

In Stalin’s Shadow

93

Moldavia.’145 And, legend has it, because Stalin was never wrong he immediately deployed him to Ukraine. An even more curious story is told by the local historian Maksim Kavun: one of the many events marking Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949 was a performance by a Moldavian dance troupe, which pleased him so much that he congratulated Brezhnev, saying, ‘Your Moldavians dance wonderfully.’ A few days later, he made Brezhnev head of Moldavia.146 That Stalin mistook Brezhnev for a Moldavian is presumably an apocryphal story rooted in popular insight: party leaders were selected on the basis of their appearance and the credo ‘The leader is always right’ led to strange appointments. Brezhnev and his family moved to Kishinev, some 600 kilometres from Dnepropetrovsk, living in Sadovaya ulitsa in a single-storey nineteenth-century house typical of the formerly Russian provincial city.147 Moldavia was located on the periphery of the empire, and the situation in the Union’s youngest republic, first under Soviet occupation following the Hitler–Stalin pact and then retaken in 1944, was dramatic to say the least: Moldavia was the poorhouse of the Soviet Union’s European territories. The drought of 1946/47, the ensuing famine and the devastation wrought by the war were even more catastrophic than in Ukraine. The ‘non-workers’ received a daily ration of only 250 grams of bread, and the kolkhoz peasants were entitled to half a kilo of grain per working day. In the fertile Bessarabia, once world-renowned for its fruits and wines, ninety-five per cent of the population were starving; the famine is estimated to have claimed between 36,000 and 200,000 lives, and the authorities recorded dozens of cases of cannibalism.148 As in the case of the famine in Ukraine, Stalin didn’t want to know, but did send food aid in 1947, along with Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Aleksei Kosygin to monitor its distribution.149 Yet the worst had barely been overcome when the Moscow Politburo ordered the final collectivization and dekulakization of agriculture. Under the aegis of the Moldavian Party Secretary Koval and Chairman of the Council of Ministers Gerasim Yakovlevich Rud’, the republic’s NKVD conducted ‘Operation South’ in the night of 5 July 1949, a mass deportation that is still considered a national trauma in today’s Moldova. Over 11,000 families, 35,000 people in total, most of them weakened by two years of famine, were taken without warning and deported to Kazakhstan or Siberia. Many died of exhaustion on the way, countless others in the ‘special settlements’, where the families were exposed to the open steppe.150 According to Moldavia’s later party leader Ivan Ivanovich Bodyul, there had not even been significant resistance to collectivization; the peasants were simply too frail.151 Indeed, so many deportees requested that Moscow reverse the decision that as late as 1952, still under Stalin, an investigative committee allowed around 500 people to return from exile.152 The banishment of the peasants and the lack of improvement to conditions in the young republic formed the backdrop, then, to Stalin’s decision to replace Chairman Koval with Brezhnev. Brezhnev thus entered a land suffering from a double trauma and a shortage of everything: seeds, agricultural machinery, infrastructure, electricity, housing, educational institutions, healthcare – and above all confidence and trust in Soviet development. There were other issues – some of the fields were still mined, the army was still involved in armed conflict with gangs of partisans, sifting out cadres

94

Brezhnev

who had ‘collaborated’ with the German occupier was a long drawn-out process and Brezhnev did not understand the national language, Romanian – but these seemed minor problems in comparison.153 It was certainly very likely that Brezhnev would fail to fulfil his tasks and that Stalin would soon unceremoniously dismiss him just like he had Koval before him. Murphy suggests that Khrushchev’s nemesis Malenkov reckoned as much too.154 The ‘strong hand’ versus the ‘new style’ As always, Stalin wanted to ensure that his choice would be accepted by the comrades in Moldavia. While in Dnepropetrovsk it had been Khrushchev’s follower Mel’nikov who had introduced Brezhnev and proposed him for election, Stalin sent a member of the Central Revision Commission, Nikolay Nikolayevich Shatalin, to Kishinev. Shatalin had to ensure that Brezhnev was indeed elected at the Fifth Plenum of the Moldavian CP in early July 1950. Shatalin praised Brezhnev as an outsider who would be able to see the situation without prejudice: Comrade Brezhnev has been a member of the party for over two decades, is a comparatively young comrade, full of strength, he has studied agriculture and worked in land management, graduated from the Institute of Metallurgy, has worked in party positions for almost fifteen years, some of them as oblast secretary. Most recently, he worked in Dnepropetrovskaya oblast, a large oblast with over 50,000 communists, an oblast that supplies the state with fifty million pud [a Russian unit of measurement, 1 pud = 16.38 kilograms] of grain. In many ways the region is similar to Moldavia, for example in the cultivation of corn, cotton, with which you have now been involved, wheat etc. Comrade Brezhnev has shown himself to be at his best in its organization. He is an energetic, experienced man. He performed party work during the war as well as in party positions in peacetime: […] It is said that he has the appropriate hand etc. In a word, given the current situation, the CC of the VKP is of the opinion that Comrade Brezhnev can do much to assist the Moldavian party organization. Hence it is recommended it be noted under point ‘b’ of the resolutions: ‘Elect Comrade Brezhnev as first secretary of the CC of the CP of Moldavia’.155

When during the ensuing vote not every comrade raised his hand, Shatalin insisted, ‘Some have not voted, how is that to be understood?’156 It was only when the session leader, Second Secretary Boris Arkhipovich Gorban, explained that they were candidates for membership and CC apparatus staff without voting rights that Stalin’s emissary was satisfied. It is quite characteristic of the age that Brezhnev’s ‘election’ was ordered by Stalin and pushed through by his henchman. It is equally characteristic that Brezhnev was praised as a man with the ‘appropriate hand’ – meaning a ‘strong’ one.157 A ‘strong hand’ or a ‘hand that does not tremble’ was the criterion by which Stalin judged the suitability of his companions. It was implied that he was prepared to implement the party line without ifs and buts, overseeing arrests, deportations and shootings without hesitation.

In Stalin’s Shadow

95

But this characterization was entirely inapt. That Brezhnev did not fail in Moldavia but fulfilled his mission was not only because the rain brought better harvests after 1951 and Stalin finally provided financial aid in early 1952; his success owed not least to his method of approaching the locals, listening to them and taking them seriously, but also making demands of them, appealing to their conscience and motivating them. As in Ukraine, given the dependence on Moscow in all questions of resources, cadres and administrative structures, this was the only means at Brezhnev’s disposal. The party plenum that elected Brezhnev under Shatalin’s supervision demonstrated to him that it was dogged by a quarrelling CC whose members were all too happy to savage each other when called upon to do so, as they had been by Shatalin. Even if the harshness of the accusations was part and parcel of Stalinist rhetoric, which most of them believed they had to use, the manner of the accusations revealed a number of problems within the Moldavian party: there was barely a single party organization in the rural regions and what functionaries there were had incriminated themselves during the deportations of 1949, used the property of the deportees for personal enrichment, or discredited themselves with drunkenness, nepotism and, it was alleged, polygamy.158 The party leaders in Kishinev had clearly made every effort to keep their distance from the desolate situation in the rural areas, sending instructions and decrees by post without taking care of them themselves.159 Given the depressing housing situation and poor food supplies, even the rayon functionaries sought to live in the capital and spend as little time in the countryside as possible.160 Ministers used their positions to provide their own relatives and friends with positions, food and accommodation.161 In the midst of this misery, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Rud’ was treated leniently, since he had led a partisan unit during the Second World War, had to deal with problems in his own family and was simply ‘drained’. In contrast, the CC members accused First Secretary Koval of being irascible, short-tempered, nervous and oversensitive in his reactions, and of bullying some comrades while affording others preferential treatment.162 Hence Brezhnev had to deal with the typical Stalinist combination of fatalism, opportunism and agitation. As in Dnepropetrovsk, once again he seemed to be made for this situation – not because he intervened with a ‘strong hand’, but because he was able to motivate his comrades under the most adverse circumstances and demonstrated to them that it was possible to evade the Stalinist antagonism with objective argument. It was an important early step for building trust that Koval and Rud’ were not dismissed in disgrace or expelled from the party. Instead, Rud’ retained his position as chairman of the Council of Ministers, receiving only a ‘rebuke’, while Koval took over Moldavia’s Ministry of Agriculture and was thus responsible for one of the most important sectors.163 Brezhnev explained that Rud’ remained in office because ‘We believe him, and if he does indeed keep his promise, improves his work, does not commit any political errors, then I think that will be to our credit.’164 In this way, Brezhnev not only suggested that everyone would receive a fair chance under him; his rhetorical approach was fundamentally different to that displayed by Koval, Rud’ and Gorban. Brezhnev adopted a markedly polite tone when opening plenums or party meetings, establishing who was present, introducing the agenda and

96

Brezhnev

asking if anyone had any comments on it. He used expressions like ‘I think’, ‘we have had an exchange on the matter’ and other hedging devices in order to make clear that he was sharing a personal opinion that could also be contradicted.165 Second Secretary Gorban, on the other hand, spoke like a sergeant major, announcing that the subject of the meeting and the speakers had been decided, anyone else who wished to speak could write his name on the list, and he expected all those who had arrived late to apologize to him in the break.166 In contrast, at Brezhnev’s very first meeting in early August 1950, to which he invited the secretaries of the rayon party committees and the chairmen of the rayon executive committees, he went to great lengths to signal that they would take as long as necessary to discuss whatever the comrades were concerned about. He also invited debate on the procedure: ‘We ask you to be here tomorrow too. We will not prescribe the kind of meeting you wish to call, you must determine that for yourselves: either a rayon party meeting or a rayon active party group; if you need to discuss the matter, do it.’167 Brezhnev made clear that he did not consider dissenting opinions to be a crime against the party. For instance, regarding the obvious displeasure at the need to fulfil the harvest plan ahead of schedule on 1 August 1950, he said, ‘I think that this occurred due to the comrades’ failure to recognize the political and economic significance.’168 It was new for someone not to shout, pronounce suspicions or issue threats. Perhaps it was even more surprising to his comrades that Brezhnev thanked them for the work they had done: ‘Hence, when one considers the circumstances, one must say a party thankyou to these comrades.’169 Brezhnev even apologized to his comrades whenever he thought he had spoken for too long and had perhaps tested their patience.170 He put his reports up for discussion in such a way that harsh criticism could be expressed, and when it came, he accepted it and promised to accommodate it.171 Gorban did not become accustomed to a different tone, although Brezhnev even corrected him. Whenever Gorban suggested calling an item on the agenda ‘On the failure to fulfil the plan regarding new buildings’, Brezhnev contradicted him in his calm manner: ‘I think it would be more correct to adopt the question ‘Results of the fulfilment of the plan for implementing investments.’172 Chairman of the Council of Ministers Rud’ also used language that Brezhnev avoided: ‘People from the Ministry of Agriculture have to be sent to check if there aren’t wreckers slowing down the work. Why didn’t you, Comrade Shtukel’man, help when you were on site? In the explanation by the chairman of the rayon executive committee it says the place was full of crooks, good-for-nothings, only two or three were of any use.’173 While Brezhnev constantly tried to educate, understand and find solutions, Rud’ was one of those who liked to make threats or lost control in the face of the hopeless situation. In August 1950 he raged at a rayon executive committee chairman: ‘You have made a mess of collectivization, the children’s homes, healthcare, and many other issues too. How long do you think we will continue to tolerate you in the rayon?’174 Unlike Brezhnev, Rud’ offered no positive incentives, but relied entirely on intimidation: ‘It is forbidden to sow third-rate seeds. We warn you, only sow as is prescribed. You want to leave the kolkhozes without grain, you’ll go to court for that.’175 Or: ‘Who gave you the right to confiscate the seed drills as part of dekulakization? […] You will be held responsible, responsible for the seed drill, for the

In Stalin’s Shadow

97

plough, for the work of the MTSs [machine tractor stations], for the whole rayon.’176 When Brezhnev heard such statements, he made it clear that he considered both the threat of expulsion from the party and expulsion itself to be ineffective motivation: ‘Who [should be expelled]? This agronomist? What will this person be expelled for then? There is a new task. The man says he agrees to it, but he will not be expelled from the party.’177 Brezhnev also forbade criticism of comrades in their absence178 and opposed criticism that was harsh and personal in nature and clearly intended not to solve anything but to embarrass the person in question.179 Instead, he instructed his comrades to examine their own mistakes rather than constantly point the finger at others: ‘And he is bad and so and so is bad, but none of you have admitted, none of you have said, look, we stuffed up, they are our mistakes. I think that that is our common problem. We are afraid of digging up our own shortcomings, but that would help us overcome them.’180 That is not to say that Brezhnev never had people expelled from the party or dismissed from their positions. In March 1951, for instance, he dismissed Minister of Trade Grigoriy Akimov, but explained: If you want to know my opinion, when I first came to see your poor evaluation as a communist and colleague in my first days working here, I observed most patiently, tried to help and I helped at the ministry. I thought that Comrade Akimov would […] draw his own conclusions following the corresponding hints and especially following the Vth Plenum […]. I think either he does not understand or has presumably let himself go to the extent that he can no longer pull himself together. Why that is? How can a communist get into such a state? Mainly because he does not work on himself.181

Brezhnev demanded that the members of the party leadership, instead of sitting selfsatisfied in their offices, sending orders to the villages, receiving reports and then complaining, should drive to the rayons, form their own impressions and help wherever possible in any way they could. He told his comrades anecdotes about Khrushchev, who as head of the republic had come to Dnepropetrovsk to monitor grain planting and had thus learnt about crucial problems first-hand.182 Brezhnev’s message was that if the country’s first secretary was not above personally taking care of the farmers and tractor drivers, then neither were all the other comrades. In August 1950, he called out the rayon committee secretaries: ‘I think that I must criticize you for this business here. 1,400 of your farms have not joined the kolkhozes, but you sit there and wait to be sent a decree from Moscow […]’.183 At his first party plenum, which he held in early October 1950, he told his comrades from the Ministry of Agriculture: You must draw conclusions from the criticism at this plenum. Every member of the ministry must develop a strong awareness of his responsibility. […] You must conduct your work meetings daily, but not here in my office. I have nothing against it, but you must take responsibility yourselves for meeting the resolutions of the party’s CC on the subject of reploughing the fields, you must hold meetings with your staff, you must establish what they have done in the group, and what

98

Brezhnev

still needs to be done. Comrades, you must drive to the rayons. Why are the secretaries of the rayon committees fighting, fighting for an appointment with you, why don’t you seek a dialogue with the secretaries of the rayons yourselves to say that we, Comrade Brezhnev or Comrade Volkov, are aware that you have these difficulties. […] That is your sacred duty […].184

In April 1951, Brezhnev appealed to his comrades’ consciences in the most personal terms to make clear it was ultimately down to them how the lower-ranking cadres acted: Of course it is nice to have a day off at the cost of perfect work, to lie on the beach, maybe it would even go unnoticed, but since we have clearly yet to achieve this perfection so as we might take a long rest while everything runs smoothly, I think that in this case one must assume that physical exertion must help the matter.185

As outlined above, Brezhnev had understood that complete reliance on Moscow for resources meant that the cadres, their motivation and commitment were the only factor for success that was within his control. And hence he pressed others to take the issue of personnel seriously: ‘The most important thing is honesty at work, honesty in our relationship with the cadres in every respect, especially on the issue of working with the cadres, their deployment.’186 There are various indications that this new kind of personal approach was certainly welcomed and valued. The official English biography cites a member of the CC: On the way to his office Leonid Brezhnev would step into nearly every room to say hello, tell a joke, inquire about people’s health and mood and the latest news. All this took ten to fifteen minutes – Brezhnev treasured time and taught us to value it, too. Yet in those few minutes he set a vibrant tone for the entire Central Committee staff. Not only did he infuse us with fresh energy, but he knew how to draw energy for himself from the people around him.187

While this source could have been manipulated, Ivan Bodyul, who worked under Brezhnev at the time and would later become head of the party in Moldavia, is beyond suspicion in this regard, since his memoirs otherwise express disappointment and bitterness concerning his superior: As far as fulfilling the plans is concerned, Leonid Il’ich was an unstoppable organizer. His high demands of the cadres strengthened discipline, created more responsibility on the part of the managers with respect to fulfilling the tasks they had been given, and instilled in them the confidence that the difficulties could be overcome and the plan figures could be achieved.188

It appears he did indeed lead by example: according to Bodyul, Brezhnev spent most of his time in rural areas with the farmers or solving agricultural problems.189 He had

In Stalin’s Shadow

99

barely arrived in Moldavia when he became the first to travel to the country to form his own impression of the situation ahead of calling his first party plenum,190 at which he then urged his comrades: I was recently in Vulkaneshty rayon with Comrade M… and Grekov; we took a look at the fields not far from the centre and along the main roads, we looked at the fallows. […] they are battling weeds there, but I must tell you straight up, that Comrades Grekov and M… did not feel good when they sank up to their knees in weeds and looked at it. For the comrades drive along this road every day. If you, Comrades Grekov and M… had fought correctly, in Bolshevist fashion, for the cause, if you feverishly sought to improve the work ethic, then I am sure you would have had the opportunity to put this land in order using whatever methods you could […].191

What clearly annoyed Brezhnev most was indifference: ‘What sort of a party is it if during the course of an entire year no one from the party went there [to the kolkhozes of Strashenskiy rayon] and no one knows how the local people live’.192 Reward and punish Brezhnev constantly performed a balancing act between praising Moscow’s generosity and ‘Stalin himself ’ and passionately appealing to his comrades to show complete commitment despite the great adversity. While he eschewed agitation, he certainly left no one in any doubts that if they wallowed in fatalism, they would be dismissed and expelled from the party. He was not, then, a ‘weak’ party leader who allowed everyone to do as they pleased, but a ‘strong’ one in the sense that he made his rules clear and acted in accordance with them himself. If he thought those in question did not respond to his encouraging, admonishing words and his support, he took rigorous measures. When in July 1950 some rayons, kolkhozes and machine tractor stations (MTSs) evaded his campaigns after the first meetings in July 1950 and his tours of the rayons in the July and August, he invited those responsible to report to the CC bureau meeting in Kishinev, gave them both barrels and dismissed them. At the Buzharskiy MTS, the trailers stood rotting in the fields, and the chairman had arranged with the kolkhozes that they would not concern themselves with the state plans, but would deliver less than prescribed. Brezhnev’s rage comes across even in the minutes: ‘Can we have that? Of course not. I suggest: [MTS chairman] Comrade Kruglyak be dismissed and expelled from the party, for unscrupulous neglect of the government decrees on fulfilment of the contracts between the MTS and kolkhozes, and for inadequate maintenance of technical equipment and its [arbitrary] expropriation.’193 It is evident that above all there were two things which Brezhnev would not allow to go unpunished: unauthorized lowering of quotas, which directly impacted on the republic’s fulfilment of the plan, for which he answered to Stalin, and illegal expropriation of equipment, which in this case was left to go to ruin to boot. The MTSs remained a problem: not only were there kolkhozes that initially continued to refuse to use tractors because they were worried about having to reimburse the costs to the MTSs, but there was often a lack of fuel, trained drivers and the necessary

100

Brezhnev

maintenance and repairs.194 Brezhnev was repeatedly angered that such nuisances were tolerated by the local comrades, and he personally gave them a dressing down, as in February 1951: Why did you only accept for the [tractor] training kids who can’t work. I consider it indiscipline, not fulfilling the CC resolution, and Besarabov covers this indiscipline up. But no one will come to you, Comrade Besarabov, to put things in order. What a barbaric attitude towards the machines! They have been standing filthy, not cleaned of the filth. Comrade, I don’t know what to make of it.195

Here too, Brezhnev made it clear that in such cases he was strict, but transparent and non-arbitrary: We have to put an end to such liberal attitudes and I think that we won’t dismiss our comrades from their work in the first instance. We will pronounce a party reprimand. I support the proposal to add a strict reprimand to the file of the director of the MTS, Comrade Miroyedov, and to warm him that if he doesn’t take control of the situation in the rayon, we will dismiss him from his post as secretary and expel him from the party. We will not allow such things to go unpunished. If people won’t listen to us, we will implement it [the punishment].196

Brezhnev certainly made use of expulsions, then, but made it quite clear that this was only the last resort. He dealt with the leadership of Ungenskiy rayon the same way in September 1950. The secretary and the rayon executive were summoned to the CC bureau to explain themselves. An impassioned Brezhnev stressed, ‘The question is, can we be tempted away from our own resolutions and be satisfied with adopting a paper and quite possibly improving the situation in the rayon. I ask the members of the bureau to consider it.’ The bureau dismissed the rayon chief executive officer, but gave the rayon party secretary one last chance: ‘Here I have suggested the formulation that would lead to Comrade Goloshchapov’s dismissal. Let us decide this issue this way, especially seeing as Comrade Goloshchapov says he will get to grips with things […].’197 Brezhnev obliged the secretary to hold a plenum in October 1950 to discuss the mistakes and develop remedial measures. The secretaries and rayon executives under fire were thus not prejudged; Brezhnev could certainly be persuaded they deserved a second chance, as in the case of the head of Strashenskiy rayon too, even if it clearly took some effort for him to retain self-control: This is my impression. A reprimand will no longer achieve anything in this rayon. The picture is catastrophic. There can be no mucking about. It isn’t the party’s rayon committee that rules there, but someone else, and the party’s rayon committee doesn’t even exist there. […] sixty per cent of the kolkhozes have gone to ruin there, i.e. the kolkhoz has collapsed, common property is being stolen, the kolkhoz peasants are using kolkhoz livestock breeding for their own personal use.198

In Stalin’s Shadow

101

But that was not all: ‘There is abuse of office – the kolkhoz peasants have punishments slapped on them en masse, the kolkhoz peasants are beaten up, revolutionary law is broken in the rayon.’199 Brezhnev wanted both, then: for the kolkhozes to be maintained and the kolkhoz peasants to be treated with dignity. The consequences of such an approach were openly discussed by Brezhnev and the bureau members, and the accused rayon secretary Kiriyak also dared to take a stand: he considered the punishment too strict, even though he got away with a ‘severe reprimand with a warning’. But Brezhnev would not be moved: It is not for nothing that I warn you to take our decision seriously, consider that you could lose what is most valuable to you – your party membership book. Where did you learn to educate your organization in this fashion, to impose mass punishments for two to three days. […] You have run the rayon into the ground, you can be put on trial for that.200

It may just be a question of nuances, but Brezhnev’s speeches always give the impression that he was concerned about the cause rather than punishments and that he was genuinely outraged if his colleagues took liberties with abuse of power or sloppiness. It is also striking that he always justified his decisions objectively and demanded that the CC’s decisions also be adequately explained and rendered understandable for the people in the rayon in question. Harvests for Moscow Brezhnev hardly had any choice but to take care of the kolkhozes, since when he arrived in Moldavia the harvest was in full swing but considerably behind the quotas dictated by Moscow, and it was his job to announce fulfilment of the plan if he did not want to fall out of favour with Stalin. But he also avoided a ‘strong-handed’ approach to reviving agriculture, again preferring his own style. Two days after the plenum at which he had been elected on 6 July, he called a meeting of all agricultural cadres to tell them that only thirty per cent of the harvest had been collected and it was not enough to drive to kolkhoz farms and shout at people. ‘We need measures that look after people, strengthen their consciousness, bolster their confidence, so that they feel that they are cared for, corrected, guided, but not yelled at.’201 So far, however, a different practice had prevailed: ‘[Our delegate] sits in the rayon for five days, gets angry, comes back, has collected a lot of facts, now knows everything, but when he is asked what he has done, how he has helped, then it doesn’t look good.’202 On 2 and 3 August, Brezhnev called another meeting: they had been able to report successful completion of the grain harvest to Stalin ahead of schedule, on 1 August;203 after this initial flexing of muscles, it was a matter of preparing for further work and getting the rayon leaderships to commit to his new course. Characteristically, he adopted a very moderate tone even towards those whose rayons and kolkhozes had not met the plan: ‘We have no reason to seriously pile into our comrades who are lagging behind, they too are very close to fulfilling the plan, and there is no doubt that they will complete the fulfilment of the plan in one to two days.’204 His speech contains

102

Brezhnev

no references to ‘wreckers’ or enemies; he again identified objective factors behind the failure of some kolkhozes and rayons, including a lack of vehicles, a constant problem of Soviet agriculture. Some kolkhozes did not have any trucks or tractors at all, and hence they were simply unable to transport the harvest from the fields.205 At least in the September, Brezhnev was in a position to report to the CC bureau that Moscow had granted the Moldavian MTSs fourteen million roubles to repair agricultural machinery.206 But such donations from Moscow also supported the Stalinist argument that Brezhnev too was forced to adopt: the centre had shown its generosity by providing 1,490 tractors, 469 combine harvesters, 500 threshing machines etc. in 1950 alone, and hence the kolkhozes were to blame if they failed to fulfil the plan in spite of these ‘gifts’.207 He nevertheless attempted to follow up this official accusation with his own, conciliatory words: ‘I think that all that is a lesson to us, we will grow from it and make fewer mistakes in the coming years […].’208 Crucially, he emphasized the ‘we’ and did not distinguish between those who failed in agriculture and the party leadership. He was clearly very committed to this idea of team spirit. He went a step further when he demanded that since the harvest had now been collected, the peasants also had to be paid. This was an extremely controversial issue and the main reason for the misery in Soviet agriculture; the kolkhozes primarily had to fulfil the quotas set by Moscow and the peasants then received payment in kind in accordance with ‘days worked’. But since there was often no grain left after forced delivery, or the overcautious kolkhoz chairmen held back the remainder for additional demands, the peasants often went empty-handed and hence had no motivation to work for the state. Brezhnev argued that an end had to be put to this practice: I was recently at the kolkhoz ‘Vjaca Noue’. It is a very good kolkhoz, it has a very good chairman, but nothing is left for the days worked. So payment must now begin. I am told that in Nisporenskiy rayon in the kolkhoz ‘Soviet Frontiersman’, payment for working days began immediately after twenty hours. The entire rayon knew that in such and such a kolkhoz the days worked were remunerated, and then there were a further two kilograms per day. That is some event in the rayon. […] One old man there worked 500 days. […] And he received two tons of grain for one person. […] The worst thing is that people who work diligently in the second half of the year do not receive any grain. The kolkhoz chairmen hand out only fifteen per cent for the first half-year because they are afraid that [even more] will be taken. We have to bring about a revolutionary change in people’s consciousness. Yesterday a delegate from Nisporenskiy rayon told me that in some places there is now quarrelling – husband and wife, the man says to his wife: I did tell you we have to join the kolkhoz … I am certain that families will have such arguments, and if we organize everything in the villages with ceremony, then I think the comrades will say one has to join the kolkhoz.209

Brezhnev knew what he was talking about: for one thing, the figures indicated ‘bad work discipline’. In the first half of 1950, 227,000 kolkhoz peasants, some 31.4 per cent, had not put in their minimum days; 50,000, 6.3 per cent, had not even shown up for work at all.210 On the other hand, he knew that given the experience of mass

In Stalin’s Shadow

103

deportations a year earlier and the prospect of not being paid for their work, the kolkhoz peasants were completely demoralized. Brezhnev also recognized that few leaders of the kolkhozes were sufficiently qualified; only half of them were members of the party, and the same number had only attended their village school.211 Brezhnev put it down to a lack of (political) education that there were often transgressions by the kolkhoz chairmen, who beat up peasants, appropriated their property or had problems with alcohol. Hence he ordered inquiries in some eighteen rayons; 186 individuals were found to have abused their office.212 He was also painfully aware that the kolkhoz workers faced another problem in addition to the likelihood of outstanding payment: they could not expect their collectivized livestock to survive the winter either, since there was a shortage of stables and feed.213 Brezhnev’s successor Bodyul reports that the kolkhozes had to deliver so much feed to the state that only twenty to thirty per cent remained of what they actually needed to feed their own animals, which were completely emaciated by the end of the winter, if they got through it at all.214 In his memoirs, Bodyul accuses Brezhnev of not trying to reduce the ridiculously high quotas imposed on Moldavia. And yet he of all people must have been aware that this would have been a pointless or indeed dangerous undertaking under Stalin. He also criticizes Brezhnev for having been an enthusiastic planner who achieved everything via campaigns.215 From today’s perspective, it was rather his strength that he neither succumbed to resignation nor spread fear, instead trying to do his best with meagre resources. His passionate appeals and campaigns were presumably partly driven by desperation and opportunism, for instance when he told his comrades, ‘And we must indeed roll our sleeves up and go into battle, political battle’.216 Brezhnev found himself with the dilemma of entirely understanding the disastrous situation besetting the farmers while not only being committed to the directives from Moscow, but also having to implement them. Stalinist rhetoric and party discipline demanded, however, that in his speeches he repeatedly praised the ‘great help of Comrade Stalin’217 and sold the latest decrees from Moscow as wise and caring decisions: in August 1950 he had to announce that Stalin and Malenkov had decided Moldavia was no longer to receive assistance with seeds and that he and Chairman of the Council of Ministers Rud’ were personally liable for supplying every farm with sufficient seed stock. Hence the usual route of sending requests to Moscow was closed to them: ‘So clearly I will not make any efforts to turn to the CC of the VKP(b) and request seeds after such a directive from Comrade Stalin.’218 That Brezhnev was by no means certain whether they would succeed in their task is quite evident in a comment he made at the meeting of rayon delegates: ‘I would like to be quite open with you and say directly that it will be of use to the cause that whoever cannot supply his rayon with seeds – and this will be more conscientious and honest – this leader can come to me and submit his resignation. I say that here quite openly.’219 He said the same to the delegates at the Third Party Congress in the spring of 1951 after the first, still very poor harvest, citing the fable of the ant and the cricket: when the cricket asked the ant in the autumn to grant it food and lodgings because it had spent the whole summer making music, the ant asked, in Brezhnev’s version, ‘Cousin, that seems strange to me, didn’t you work during the summer?’220 Like the cricket,

104

Brezhnev

Brezhnev continued, many heads of the rayons had not tended to their duties and hence were to blame for the poor corn harvest. He knew only too well that the problem lay elsewhere: Moscow had also ordered Moldavia to begin mass cultivation of corn, cotton and citrus fruits. But since the country had neither experience of growing such seeds nor the necessary climate, the harvest was a disaster; most citrus trees did not survive the first frost and the cotton plants barely blossomed.221 Since Brezhnev was unable to change the sowing and harvesting plans and was repeatedly put under pressure by Moscow, he had no choice but to increase the pressure on the rayons and kolkhozes. Collectivization and kulaks Brezhnev not only had to fulfil Moscow’s harvest plans; he also had to complete the collectivization of Moldavia. Pressure, violence and deportations had increased collectivization to eighty per cent in 1949 alone.222 Brezhnev warned at the October Plenum of 1950: ‘But in a number of village soviets and villages, the percentage is lower. In … rayon only thirty farms are collectivized, in … it is 46 per cent, in Zubrezhsterskiy rayon – 56 per cent.’223 Only six months later, at the CP of Moldavia’s Third Party Congress in late March 1951, he announced that collectivization had been successfully completed.224 But while it was difficult to force all the peasants into collectivization, it was even more difficult to keep them there and ensure the large-scale farms were financially viable. Bodyul reports that Rud’ instructed him to ensure the fleeing peasants returned to the ‘Stalin kolkhoz’ – did he know what would happen if Stalin found out?225 In May 1950, the CC in Moscow had already decreed that of Moldavia’s total 2,001 kolkhozes, the smaller ones were to amalgamate to form larger ones in order to become more economical. Brezhnev reported to Malenkov that by 25 August 1950, they had turned 548 small kolkhozes into 266 large ones.226 By the year’s end, they had merged a further 657 kolkhozes into 301 collective farms. The republic’s remaining 1,645 kolkhozes now had over 284 farms instead of the earlier total of 226, a staff of 465 instead of the previous 368, and 1,123 instead of 902 hectares of arable land.227 In January 1952, Brezhnev told the Fifth Party Plenum that in 1951 they had again turned 1,125 small economic communities into 491 large-scale enterprises and that the republic now numbered 1,367 strong farms: ‘We now have kolkhozes that are “millionaires”.’228 But according to Bodyul, this supposed success was pure window dressing; ultimately, only the unprofitable kolkhozes were closed, and the large ones did not produce more, but were now able to report the combined yield of two farms.229 What’s more, the smaller settlements were often abandoned, since the state was not in a position to develop infrastructure or supply them with goods. But the peasants could seldom be persuaded to relinquish their farms, since the compensation on offer was pitiful.230 The question for Brezhnev was how to motivate the remaining twenty per cent of farms to join the kolkhozes after two years of famine and another year of deportations. He clearly hoped to achieve this by persuasion, sending 400 agitators to rural areas in the late summer of 1950.231 He also envisioned that the rayon party committees and rayon soviets would take over the political education of the peasants.232 To this end, in mid-August the CC bureau ordered all party, trade union and Komsomol organizations

In Stalin’s Shadow

105

to hold three-day seminars with the rayon soviets and secretaries.233 Brezhnev explained: Here we have related the difficulties of such meetings, we have told the secretaries, the chairmen, what a kolkhoz is, what the village is like and that it is not so easy to change the conditions there, to tear up the connections and bonds that have been formed over years, centuries, by family ties. It is not so easy for a family member, for an active woman, for a kolkhoz worker to take a stand against a slacker, an idler, their relations or members of their family.234

Nevertheless, he had to report to Malenkov that the party had far too little influence in the villages and kolkhozes. He hoped to improve matters by appointing more Moldavians and more women to positions in the rayon and city soviets,235 reasoning that they were more understanding of the issues besetting the population and would be more easily accepted as authority figures by the peasants. He urged, ‘Be bolder in your selection of cadres, check the people. All around us there is a large army of conscientious people. Select from them […]. They should be local cadres who are connected with everything, with their family, with the village, with the people – a person who knows the people and trusts them.’236 Wherever possible, Brezhnev relied on agitation, but to this end it was necessary to establish newspapers and radio stations, set up libraries and promote literacy and education.237 Because the task of educating the population was so complex, he divided the propaganda department into four new departments: for schools; for agitation and propaganda; for art; and colleges and culture. He even had Moscow approve the appointment of a sixth CC secretary dedicated to this area.238 He also went as far as to claim, ‘A museum is of great importance for our republic. Ideological work is no less important to us, rather it is even more important than repairing a tractor or preparing a harrow. All that is good for our economy, but in the first instance we must dedicate ourselves to the following task, and we are doing so: the ideological education of our people.’239 We do not know to what extent Brezhnev really believed that educational efforts alone could motivate the peasants to join the kolkhozes and persuade the kolkhoz chairmen, rayon secretaries and rayon soviets to educate them instead of punishing them. He certainly received reports to the contrary: in January 1951 a head of a department of the CC wrote of the situation in the merged kolkhozes in Lipkanskiy rayon, reporting that neither the state nor the party functionaries were looking after the farms. Since the merger, the former ‘Stalin’ kolkhoz, like a number of other kolkhozes, had not seen a single functionary hold a meeting; only four out of twelve kolkhozes had set up party organizations. Instead, punitive measures were taken: For instance, at the general meeting at the ‘Lenin’ kolkhoz on 2 September 1950, seventy-six kolkhoz peasants were punished with [having to work] two to five working days. Discipline did not improve. Kolkhoz Chairman Gits then convened a meeting on 14.9.1950 at which sixty-two kolkhoz peasants were punished. Working discipline did not improve. The third meeting was called on 15.10.1950 […] and to intimidate the peasants, as the chairman of this kolkhoz put it, we

106

Brezhnev

decided to punish kolkhoz members and brigadiers who do not keep work discipline with two to five days […].240

On the one hand, Brezhnev dismissed chairmen for such blunt punishment of peasants, or even expelled them from the party altogether. On the other hand, in his speeches at least he left no one in any doubt that there were slackers and work-shy individuals, and that at some point they had to face the consequences. Whether Brezhnev himself believed in the existence of ‘kulaks’ or ‘kulak nationalists’ is difficult to say. But he certainly used these terms in his correspondence with Moscow, where it was expected of him.241 What is clear is that he reported to Malenkov in March 1951 that an investigation had established there were still 800 ‘kulak families’ with 2,620 members living in Moldavia. In 1949, 530 of those families had gone into hiding and hence had escaped resettlement. After resettlement, the state security service had recorded a further 270 ‘kulak families’. Brezhnev requested Moscow on behalf of the Moldavian CC to order the deportation of these families.242 Moscow declined. In April 1952, Brezhnev once again requested instructions to resettle 730 ‘kulak families’, and Moscow once again refused; a commission had already been tasked with investigating the legality of the deportations of 1949.243 Brezhnev was not solely responsible for either the ‘kulak’ rhetoric or the deportation request. He regularly received reports from the Moldavian Ministry of Justice and State Security on the arrest and sentencing of ‘kulaks, traitors and Romanian-German agents’, ‘Ukrainian nationalists and bandits’ in the region bordering Romania and western Ukraine, a ‘Lvov Centre’ bankrolled by the USA, other counter-revolutionary organizations, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In these reports, the secret police, the MGB, successor to the NKVD, regularly called for ‘more repression’.244 Suggesting deportation of the ‘kulaks’ may have been a way of protecting himself against the MGB and Moscow as well as ensuring the ‘peace’ he sought for Moldavia by removing all those who resisted collectivization. It is also possible that he gave in to pressure from those members of the CC who wished to adhere to Stalinist-style repression. Nevertheless, Moscow-authorized controller A. Sych accused Brezhnev and Rud’ of allowing the local courts to treat transgressions against the harvest quotas far too leniently; the punishments were neither strict nor consistent enough when peasants failed to deliver sufficient grain, milk, meat or wool. Sych complained that all too often, the people’s judges refused to deal with such cases at all, and if they did, they imposed minimal compensation payments, but never punishment.245 There were, then, very different authorities with very different assessments of the peasants’ actions. And while Brezhnev sought less recourse to punishment, shouting and threats, the Moldavian Ministry of Justice was working to replace the judges with personnel loyal to the party line. Certainly, the Supreme Court of Moldavia reported to Brezhnev that the previous four years’ graduates from Moldavia’s only law school were unsuitable for work at the Ministry of Justice due to their ‘political unreliability’; they listened to ‘Voice of America’ and had been taught by a professor who had disparaged the Soviet Union and praised Israel and the USA.246 The conflict with the Supreme Court clearly became so intense that an inquiry was held and, following discussions in the CC bureau, leading figures in the judiciary were replaced on 1 February 1952. Although

In Stalin’s Shadow

107

little more is known about this dispute, it was characteristic of Brezhnev to respond by saying that under Comrade Kishlyan, the court had imposed excessively harsh punishments on those who could have been schooled while those who had committed genuine crimes against the state had been spared. Instead of moulding the court staff into a collective, Kishlyan had bullied anyone who dared to contradict him.247 Although it remains uncertain whom Brezhnev considered to have committed the ‘genuine crimes against the state’, he clearly considered draconian sentences for petty transgressions to be counterproductive. It remains unknown whether he actually wanted to deport the ‘kulak families’ or whether he sent the requests to Moscow for opportunistic reasons. Building a power base Unlike in Dnepropetrovsk, Brezhnev didn’t have a power base in Moldavia and had to stand his ground against many Stalinist cadres like the judge Kishlyan. In order to push through his policies and rein in the Stalinist repressions, he consciously sought protégés who would support him. One of his recruits was the MGB man Semën Kuz’mich Tsvigun, whom he would later make deputy chairman of the KGB. In 1951 he appointed Tsvigun Moldavia’s deputy minister for state security and had him elected as a CC candidate.248 Tsvigun was also an in-law, having married one of Brezhnev’s cousins in 1950. Brezhnev thus had a loyal henchman in a leading position within the power apparatus who reported everything to him directly, as the ‘shadow’ of the Moldavian head of the MGB, and whose post closely tied him to the party and hence to Brezhnev himself. Also in 1951, Brezhnev made Bodyul, initially the Union’s delegate for the kolkhozes in Moldavia, head of the party in the city of Kishinev; he now had the local party under control too.249 The two men are said to have become friends.250 For the political education that was so dear to him, Brezhnev could count on a comrade already entrenched in the relevant post: Sergey Pavlovich Trapeznikov had been head of the Kishinev Higher Party School since 1948. In the sometimes tempestuous ideological debates, Trapeznikov held speeches supporting Brezhnev’s position.251 Brezhnev later made him head of the CC science department in Moscow. His closest allies in Moldavia, however, were Shchëlokov, whom he had summoned from Ukraine, and Konstantin Chernenko, whom he met in his new post. Shchëlokov controlled the state apparatus, while Chernenko took care of propaganda together with Trapeznikov. Shchëlokov was elected deputy to Rud by the CC plenum on 2 April 1951,252 but he had clearly had this role since the new year; he had been present at the meetings of the bureau of the Council of Ministers since the January and since the February he had regularly chaired them when Rud’ was absent.253 Brezhnev thereby established a practice that would later become a typical tactic of his: whenever he was dissatisfied with officeholders or did not trust them sufficiently but could not find an objective reason for dismissal, he surrounded them with deputies from his own entourage who loyally reported to him or surreptitiously took control. Certainly, Shchëlokov chaired as many meetings of the bureau of the Council of Ministers as Rud’ in 1951/52.254 It is also striking that while both Rud’ and Shchëlokov were members of the CC bureau, and hence the nerve centre of power, Brezhnev only ever

108

Brezhnev

instructed Shchëlokov together with others, principally Chernenko, to form commissions or work on resolutions.255 Alongside Rud’, Shchëlokov clearly had the same role in the Council of Ministers as Brezhnev played alongside Gorban in the CC: introducing a new style and above all a new tone, relying on trust rather than intimidation and developing fresh team spirit. Shchëlokov introduced himself to the meeting of the Council of Ministers in January 1951 by saying, I would like to share my impression as a newcomer. Before I departed for here, I was present at the discussion on industrial production in the Council of Ministers of Ukraine and must say that I cannot sense the intensity and enthusiasm here I was used to in Ukraine, and that is a cause for concern for the members of the bureau of the Council of Ministers of the Moldavian SSR.256

Chernenko had been head of the CC department for agitation and propaganda in Kishinev since 1948. He and Brezhnev must have hit it off immediately, or at least trusted each other. One thing they had in common apart from their work was a love of Yesenin’s poetry.257 The journalist Vladislav Vladimirov described the pair as ‘political Siamese twins’,258 and wherever Brezhnev went, Chernenko certainly followed. The team of Trapeznikov and Chernenko gave Brezhnev the ideological and propaganda backing he needed, while Shchëlokov pulled the strings in the state apparatus and Tsvigun kept the MGB under control. Chernenko became Brezhnev’s right-hand man: when Khrushchev summoned him to Moscow in 1956, he installed Chernenko in the CC apparatus and when he himself became president of the Soviet Union in 1960, he put him in charge of his bureau.259 Moscow gives – and Moscow takes Together these five men set about stabilizing agriculture, sovietizing the people and the culture and industrializing the republic. In all their activities they were reliant on whatever measures Moscow prescribed, which projects it approved and the resources it provided. But the administrative structure of the Moldavian Republic had yet to be developed too. At Brezhnev’s request, in January 1952 the CC of the VKP(b) agreed to divide Moldavia into four districts (okrugi).260 Although Brezhnev had this decision applauded as ‘inestimable assistance and attentiveness’ on the part of the government and ‘Stalin himself ’,261 he had had to wait a year for approval. Additionally, they had not requested the approved okrugs, but ‘regions’ (oblasti) equipped with more authority and party positions. Brezhnev’s hope was that a further level of administration between the central authorities and the rayons would create greater scope for action in the development of the republic, as he explained to Malenkov in December 1950.262 Bodyul criticized the tendency for the new administrative structures to take the best people away from the centre, leaving them to do nothing but paperwork in the provinces.263 Ultimately, he argued, the rayons had more disadvantages than benefits from the new structure, since they now lacked direct contact with the centre.264 Regardless of how the benefit is assessed, the fundamental problems Brezhnev had to deal with are again quite apparent.

In Stalin’s Shadow

109

Not only was there a lack of functional administrative structures and employees, but Moldavia had virtually no industry either. Even if agriculture remained the more urgent crisis, Brezhnev also had to take care of the industry and construction sectors, which were to be developed in accordance with instructions from Moscow. He sent letters to Malenkov in Moscow on an almost daily basis requesting approval for housing construction, the release of 1.4 million roubles to build a party school, money for the construction of the Kishinev thermal power station, assignments of vehicles and fuel and many other projects and resources.265 Contrary to the rhetoric of ‘Moscow’s generosity and care’, the centre often failed to provide even the resources it had already promised. For instance, in 1950 the approved 500,000 tons of cement had been reduced to 150,000, of which only 20,000 actually reached Moldavia.266 Bodyul credits Brezhnev with ensuring that, despite these setbacks, the thermal power station became operational in November 1951 and the hydroelectric plant on the Dniester begun in 1950 could be completed in 1954, finally relieving the permanent energy shortage. As had been his wont in Ukraine, Brezhnev regularly visited the construction sites, asking what the problems were, and helping as much as he could.267 Given the reliance on Moscow’s plans and assignment of resources, Brezhnev’s room for manoeuvre as first secretary was limited and his successes or failures largely depended on the caprices of the centre. While Stalin had declared in 1950 that there would be no more seeds for Moldavia and the republic would now have to fend for itself, in early 1952 he changed his position and made considerable funds available for Moldavian agriculture and industry, especially for the expansion of viticulture, tobacco plantations and the food industry.268 Seedlings, presses and cultivation and irrigation systems were provided en masse. Around the same time, Moscow’s Council of Ministers sent Brezhnev and Rud’ the new, extremely ambitious plan targets outlining how much meat, milk, preserves, sugar, wine and clothing Moldavia had to deliver to the Union in 1952.269 In Stalin’s eyes, writes Bodyul, Moldavia was an agrarian country that had to supply Moscow with wine and fruit, and the produce it had to deliver far outweighed the resources it received.270 Indeed, while approving the new resources and providing the targets, the Moscow Politburo increased the pressure on Brezhnev. On 26 January 1952, he came under attack from Pravda: Moldavia was poorly prepared for the first sowing, only half of the tractors having been repaired.271 Brezhnev relayed this warning to his comrades at the party plenum the same day, saying those responsible were far too self-satisfied and preferred to keep quiet about difficulties than be concerned by Pravda’s criticism.272 While Moldavia was not the only republic to come under fire, Malenkov had sent inspectors to monitor the implementation of Moscow’s directives, and hence Brezhnev could expect further attacks and new intrigues.273 Heart attack and power struggles Given the arbitrary instructions, inspections and attacks from Moscow, it is hardly surprising that Brezhnev repeatedly demanded his comrades push themselves to exhaustion. At his first plenum in October 1950, he drilled into the assembled functionaries: ‘Under the circumstances here in Moldavia with these many difficulties

110

Brezhnev

we must work with a physical intensity that is probably unmatched by the leaders in the other republics. That is our duty, for the CC of the VKP(b) has sent us here and expects us to sort things out.’274 He repeated several times that he expected complete dedication to the task to the point of exhaustion, and told the heads of the rayons that he expected them too not to go home and lie down to sleep until everything had been done: ‘For five days and some hours no one answered the telephone. What is going on? Then we somehow woke the comrades up. […] I understand that it is difficult, but we haven’t slept a minute either, haven’t left the CC, none of us have gone home, all of us have stayed here in the party’s CC.’275 Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ relate that on his trips to the rayons, he ate ‘whatever, wherever’, since there were not any hotels yet, and usually spent the night at the homes of the rayon secretaries.276 These gruelling commitments came at a cost to his health. In 1951, he sought Stalin’s permission to take a month’s medical leave.277 Just one year later, in May 1952, at the age of only forty-five, he suffered a heart attack.278 He again had to ask Stalin’s permission to take a month off to receive treatment in a sanatorium,279 and thus missed the Sixth Plenum in early June and the seventh in late July.280 His long absence from mid-May to early August was not without repercussions. When he raised the ‘situation and the measures for improving ideological work in Moldavia’s party organizations’ at the Eighth Party Plenum in late August, he was attacked by the delegates with unusual vehemence for not having done enough about the ‘remaining kulaks, sectarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses and bourgeois nationalists’ even though he had said in his own speech that the rest of these groups were to be dealt with mercilessly.281 Brezhnev tried to deal with the criticism in his usual objective manner: ‘The issue now is not that I and other comrades have been criticized for having made a series of grave mistakes, that we reacted passively to a series of serious transgressions and lapses in the work of our most important area with its enormous educational significance for the workers of our Republic.’282 Rather, what was important was what Comrade Trapeznikov, who stood before them, had said about the ideological work. Accused of having been too lenient, in his defence he cited the Leningrad party leader murdered in 1934, Sergey Kirov, who had proclaimed ‘that there is no one in our party who is too weak, that we are in a position to rub ourselves up the wrong way’.283 But even after Brezhnev’s concluding remarks, the delegates would not stop animatedly arguing about the CC Secretary Artëm Markovich Lazarev, who was responsible for the selection of cadres and had recently come in for criticism.284 On 7 September 1952, Pravda reported on this party plenum in Moldavia, stressing that although Brezhnev could be credited with having done ‘some work’ in the field of culture and propaganda, in the main the CC members had underlined shortcomings in the ideological work of the party leadership.285 Lazarev came under attack for having allowed publishing activities by ‘bourgeois nationalists’ instead of forbidding them, and for keeping quiet about his mistakes. Brezhnev did not receive another mention by name, but it was clear that he was implied as one of the ‘leading staff ’ who had to prove that they were resolutely applying Marxist-Leninist theory and that it was he who was not dealing strictly enough with nationalists. Even if this was not the issue, Pravda’s criticism struck a nerve, since Brezhnev preferred to give the cadres a second chance than to immediately condemn them in the Stalinist fashion. According

In Stalin’s Shadow

111

to Murphy, Brezhnev was caught up in the power struggle between Malenkov and Khrushchev: each hoped to discredit the other in the eyes of Stalin by denigrating his respective protégé. It is quite possible that the attacks in the late January were born of this political intrigue. Brezhnev was thus by no means out of the woods; at the following plenum on 13 September, at which he presented his financial report for the impending Moldavian party congress, Second Secretary Gorban dared to criticize his portrayal of ideological work. But Gorban’s suggestion to move the section on Marxist-Leninist schooling from ‘cultural work’ to ‘party work’ found no support from the rest of the plenum.286 At the Fourth Party Congress that opened five days later, Brezhnev once again had to defend himself against harsh criticism for his ‘soft’ cadre policy. Some of the criticism was passed to him on pieces of paper. He went on the offensive: The second note begins by saying that ‘to spare the cadres is to spoil these cadres’, as Comrade Stalin teaches us. Why didn’t I (Comrade Brezhnev) refer to the mistakes in Lazarev’s work in my speech when I introduced the members of the CC. And further: ‘He is a good man, he must remain criticized and retained as a colleague, but sparing his ambition means spoiling him’.287

Quite in keeping with the ritual of criticism and self-criticism, Brezhnev said the note was justified, but he explained his wrongdoing in remarkable fashion: ‘I would like to explain to the delegates that this section on the work of the members of the CC and the members of the CC bureau was not finished, and because I presented it orally and was extremely tired, I missed it, although I later regretted it.’288 That the first secretary forgot to criticize a close colleague because he was tired sounded rather suspicious. On the other hand, it was only a few weeks since he had recovered from a heart attack, and hence these words might indeed have seemed plausible coming from him. It was in this critical situation that, clearly to secure his own position, he had Deputy Chairman of the KGB Tsvigun elected as a CC candidate, and went as far as to make the minister for state security a full member of the CC bureau. He also punished Gorban for his insubordination: he was not one of the seven delegates to the Eleventh Party Congress in Moscow, nor did Brezhnev propose him for re-election as second secretary at the following party plenum. This post went to Dmitriy Spiridonovich Gladkiy, who would succeed Brezhnev in the October.289 At the same time, Brezhnev held onto Lazarev, having him re-elected CC secretary with the comment that he was an able fellow and would draw the right conclusions from the criticism.290 But Brezhnev also hit back against his critics on another level, and with other means: in the September issue of the ideological magazine Bolshevik, he published an article entitled ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism – a Proven Method of Educating Cadres’,291 presumably not without the assistance of Chernenko and Trapeznikov, who most likely helped him write it, and Khrushchev, who will have ensured it appeared without delay and in a prominent position. Over nine pages, Brezhnev wrote himself into Stalin’s good books by praising the new party statute and the sacred duty to practise criticism and self-criticism. At the same time, this took the wind out

112

Brezhnev

of the sails of his critics, since he not only explained the duty to criticize in terms of party theory, but provided eight practical examples of how this method had helped good cadres overcome mistakes and prove themselves. Without having to elaborate on the accusations that had come his way, he demonstrated to his detractors that it was of greater benefit to the party to give the cadres a second chance. If they did not understand this criticism and did not improve, they could always still be dismissed and subjected to strict punishments, as also happened in Moldavia. The article was a great coup; Brezhnev used Stalin’s words and the latest propaganda leading up to the Eleventh Party Congress in order to portray his own practice as exemplary. Called to the Presidium Thus bolstered, Brezhnev travelled to Moscow on 23 September 1952 for the Eleventh Party Congress of the VKP(b) scheduled for 5 to 15 October.292 Roy Medvedev claims that when Brezhnev held his report on the fourth day – although in fact it was the second day – Stalin was very impressed with the ‘tall, well-dressed forty-six-year-old’: he is said to have commented, ‘What a handsome Moldavian.’293 That would suggest the congress was the first time he saw him and the legends concerning his Moldavian appointment are indeed just that. Biographer Mlechin also claims it was this congress where Stalin first encountered Brezhnev, who ‘stood out very favourably from the other party leaders’.294 Certainly, Brezhnev had been entrusted with announcing the candidates for the congress secretariat.295 He was also appointed a member of the Mandate Monitoring Commission, an honour bestowed on only fourteen other oblast secretaries.296 Hence Stalin must have been aware of him before the first day of the meeting; he must have approved the transfer of these functions to Brezhnev as part of the congress’s choreography. While it was hardly a leading role, it set him apart from the other leaders of the republics. Brezhnev’s speech during the evening session of the second day, 6 October 1952, was the predictable eulogy to Stalin, for whom Moldavia owed its liberation from the ‘yoke of colonialism’ in 1940 along with all its agricultural and industrial achievements.297 It was no surprise that as head of the Moldavian party, Brezhnev found himself on the list of CC members, which was expanded to 125. What did come as a surprise to him, however, was that Stalin made him a candidate for the Party Presidium, formerly the Politburo, which was enlarged to twenty-five members and eleven candidates, and that he received one of the ten CC secretary posts alongside Stalin’s.298 The anecdotes about Brezhnev’s good looks and his acquaintance with Stalin thus make sense: Stalin was not at all interested in Brezhnev; rather, he needed pawns for his power games who would blur the hierarchies within his entourage and unsettle supposed favourites like Malenkov or Beriya. While Stalin could have chosen any other party boss, he selected Brezhnev because as someone who placed great emphasis on his own self-presentation he was clearly impressed with Brezhnev’s appearance. Brezhnev, who was only just recovering from his heart attack and the broadsides in Pravda, first returned to Moldavia to hold his last plenum on October 25 along with the elections for his successor.299 Bodyul reports Brezhnev hardly had anything positive to say about Moldavia at their later meetings; he always focused on the great difficulties with which they had

In Stalin’s Shadow

113

had to contend and thought he had been unable to create better living conditions for an impoverished population plagued by collectivization, drought and deportation:300 He remembered well the hot winds with the dust storms, the fields covered in bittercress and the cows that were so emaciated and unable to stand on their own they had to be tied to the ceiling with ropes, along with other adversities. His memories were joyless, a smile only playing on his lips when he recalled the Moldavian dances of the Shok Ensemble with the virtuoso Mokana and the songs of Tamara Cheban …301

Here we have another indication that Brezhnev spent his stint in Moldavia striving to fulfil the plan not merely to spare himself and the republic the wrath of Stalin; rather, he was genuinely concerned about the lives of the common people. At the Third Party Congress of Moldavia, he had insisted, ‘The improvement of the workers’ material and cultural standard of living is an inviolable law of our Soviet socialist society.’302 This statement was partly official party logic, but it also sounded like a personal concern of Brezhnev’s that would later become his political programme. If Bodyul is to be believed that Brezhnev left Moldavia frustrated with his failure to significantly raise the standard of living, then this contradicts what Murphy, Medvedev and the official biographies report on the basis of the official plan figures: the mechanization of agriculture increased the harvest by 150 per cent; the three-year plan for cattle breeding saw a sevenfold increase in livestock; in 1951, 567 million roubles were paid to the kolkhoz farmers in comparison to 110 million in 1949; industrial production grew by forty-one per cent in 1951; illiteracy was eradicated and schools, colleges and universities were opened, the country’s students numbering 17,500 in October 1952.303 Interestingly, Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ barely mention successes, but focus on his concern for the standard of living: ‘I often went to the market or shops and saw that the people had it tough; then I sometimes rang my colleagues from the CC or the Council of Ministers to tell them what the situation was.’304 Even if the ‘memoirs’ were at pains to contribute to the official image of the caring general secretary, it is telling that successes were omitted – probably because there weren’t any. Another credible recollection relates that when a certain party instructor was to report to him, he first sent him a coupon for a suit so that he did not have to come to him in rags.305 It can also be assumed that Brezhnev was painfully aware of the huge discrepancy between the reports of success he sent to Moscow and the true conditions in the republic. Nevertheless, his wife Viktoriya claims they had a good life in Moldavia, even if she still barely saw her husband due to his constant travels. She went to the markets, buying and cooking fruit and vegetables, which Moldavia offered in abundance.306 She also looked after their son Yuriy, who had remained in Dnepropetrovsk to study engineering. She regularly travelled to their old homeland to cook and clean for him.307 Their daughter Galina, who had begun a history degree in Dnepropetrovsk, had gone to Kishinev with them, as had a niece of Viktoriya’s, who lived with them.308 But only a year later, in 1951, Galina, aged twenty-two, married the circus performer Egveniy Milayev, some nineteen years her senior. They had met in Dnepropetrovsk when Milayev’s company visited, the family watching many performances, since Brezhnev loved the

114

Brezhnev

circus. In interview, Viktoriya Petrovna attempted to counter the scandalous rumours that circulated after the marriage ended, insisting it was not a misalliance: she had held Milayev in high estimation as a responsible man and remained in contact with him for eleven years after the divorce. Galina broke off her studies and had a daughter, who was named Viktoriya after her grandmother and largely brought up by her, since the young couple toured the country with the circus.309 Due to Brezhnev’s influence, Milayev enjoyed a rapid rise, soon becoming director of the Moscow State Circus.310 Viktoriya Petrovna enjoyed her time in Moldavia: they were friends with the Rud’s and spent their holidays with the couple.311 She reports that when they left Moldavia, several people accompanied them to the railway station, so many friends had they made there.312

Stalin’s extra in Moscow In the autumn of 1952, Brezhnev left for Moscow with his wife and son, to live in a three-room apartment on Mozhayskoye shosse, in a section that would be renamed Kutuzovskiy prospekt in 1957. He would live there for the rest of his days.313 Moscow was terra incognita for Brezhnev. Mekhlis had been in retirement since suffering a heart attack in 1950. His only contact and supporter was Khrushchev. Brezhnev moved into an office at the CC headquarters on Staraya ploshchad’. On 18 October, two days after his appointment to the Party Presidium, he attended his first meeting of the highest organ of power. Here, not only did Stalin entrust him with ‘supervising the work of the chief political administration of the Ministry of the Fleet and the chief political administration of the Ministry of the Maritime Fleet’, but he also became a member of the Commission for Foreign Affairs and, a month later, the Commission for Defence Issues.314 Two days later, on 20 October, he was sitting in Stalin’s office together with the other secretaries; Stalin was dissatisfied with the propaganda effort.315 Hence Brezhnev once again found himself in the propaganda sector that was not entirely to his liking. The title also made it quite clear that it was an arbitrary construction born of Stalin’s intention to keep staff in check via increased observation and new authorities. Brezhnev was obliged not only to monitor the activities of the army’s political workers, but also to make decisions concerning their attitude, transfers and dismissal.316 On 7 November 1952 he first appeared together with Stalin and his entourage in the stand of the Lenin Mausoleum to witness the military parade on Red Square. And he now also regularly attended the meetings of Stalin’s cabinet, where he gained first-hand experience of how the dictator did politics. Brezhnev was also present at the Presidium meeting in early December 1952, when the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ – the arrest of all Jewish Kremlin physicians – was decided. At a work meeting on 26 January 1953, he met Stalin for the last time.317 Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Before the unconscious leader had expired, the nine former members of the Politburo met and decided to return the artificially expanded Presidium to its original size. Brezhnev thus lost his seat in the supreme wheelhouse of power along with his post as secretary; he was made head of the political administration of the Fleet instead. And when only a few days later the Fleet and Army Ministries were

In Stalin’s Shadow

115

merged, he was further demoted to deputy chief of the political administration in the Ministry of Defence.318 His time as an extra on Stalin’s stage had passed, and as such he was removed from the centre of power by the long-established members of the Presidium. He saw no other alternative than to write a grovelling letter to Malenkov in the May; formerly his nemesis, Malenkov was now the new chairman of the Council of Ministers and appeared to be asserting himself as the top man within the leadership collective: Now that I am approaching the age of fifty and my health has been ruined by two serious diseases (a heart attack and an arterial occlusive disease in my legs), it is difficult for me to adjust to other work or change professions. I ask you, Georgiy Maksimilianovich, to delegate me to work in the party organization of Ukraine […]. If I have allowed any mistakes or shortcomings in my work, I ask for forgiveness and the opportunity to make amends for them.319

Malenkov forwarded the letter to Khrushchev, who did not consider it opportune to go in to bat for Brezhnev at that point in time, however.320 Indeed, little is known about Brezhnev’s time in Moscow between March 1953 and his deployment to Kazakhstan in January 1954. Although he was banished from the inner circle of decision-makers, he was still close to the epicentre. He played the role of extra once more when the Presidium members, led by Khrushchev, Malenkov and Nikolay Bulganin, had Stalin’s hitman Beriya arrested on 26 June 1953. They shared their plan with Marshal Zhukov, who with the help of a few completely trustworthy individuals was to make sure the operation was successful, using armed force if necessary. These four armed military men included Brezhnev.321 As a regular CC candidate, he was also present at the CC plenum of 2–7 July when Khrushchev and Malenkov dealt with Beriya, accusing him of falsifying evidence, confessions and individual crimes. The Great Terror and the mass repressions remained hushed up, however. Brezhnev himself did not say a word during the six-day session.322 We can only speculate as to how he felt about Beriya’s arrest and the ensuing collective condemnation. It was his first experience of a coup against a leading member of the Presidium; more would follow. The fact that Brezhnev was involved in this extremely delicate mission demonstrates that he continued to enjoy Khrushchev’s full trust and was by no means a forgotten man. In other respects too, he does not seem to have had a bad time of it in Moscow. His agenda included representative meetings with delegations from the brother countries and the ceremonial opening of ‘Tank Day’,323 and together with Viktor Grishin, second secretary of the Moscow party committee, he organized the celebrations for ‘Navy Day’ in Gorki Park.324 The wait In terms of his rank, after six years of hard graft rebuilding Ukraine and Moldova, in 1953 Brezhnev found himself at the same level as in 1945. He was again a member of the army and a deputy leader of the propaganda effort. His only slight consolation was that in August 1953 he was made a lieutenant general.325

116

Brezhnev

Although this was a setback and a low point in his career, he had learnt important lessons and gained vital experience for his subsequent appointments: under the pressure of Stalin’s plans, he had become used to working at an extremely high pace. To avoid being suspected of sabotaging plans, he ruined his health and had suffered his first heart attack at the age of forty-five. He had further internalized the idea that given the high plan quotas Moscow demanded and the few resources it made available, his only hope was the team of cadres. He had to motivate them to roll their sleeves up instead of lapsing into apathy or fatalism. He eschewed Stalinist yelling and agitating, since it was unproductive, and instead tried to listen to people and take an interest in their concerns. He thereby spread undimmed calculated optimism that they could achieve anything by willpower alone – something he had proven to himself and the country time and again with the dam in Zaporozh’ye, the steelworks and everything that came in their wake. This was Brezhnev’s variation on the Stalinist slogan ‘The cadres decide everything’. Brezhnev was, then, a ‘strong leader’: he neither arbitrarily bullied his subordinates like a ‘little Stalin’, nor was he a ‘weak leader’ who let everyone do as they pleased. As far as we can tell, his modus operandi was to emphasize the facts, to search for solutions and to maintain transparency when punitive measures were called for. His room for manoeuvre within the corset of the Stalinist directives and the rhetoric that went with them was limited; he repeatedly had to make use of the official slogans. Yet it is striking that he adopted an objective, conciliatory tone when it was safe to do so. In Moldavia, at the very latest, he must have realized that this conciliatory attitude left him vulnerable to attack. But he was both willing and able to defend his style. His virtuous balancing act between precisely following Moscow’s directives and lending them his own interpretation was manifested not least in his article ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism’ in Bolshevik. On his untiring tours of the rayons of Ukraine and Moldavia, Brezhnev had gained plenty of first-hand impressions of the poverty besetting the population. At the same time, he had been confronted with the fact that he did not have the resources to decisively change the desolate situation. His only recourse had been to write begging letters to Malenkov in Moscow. That he demanded the kolkhoz chairmen pay the peasants was remarkable. If the sparse evidence and Bodyul’s memoirs are to be believed, it pained him that he was not able to create a better standard of living for the people. Brezhnev had also learnt decisive lessons concerning networking and political intrigue. He had succeeded in Ukraine because Khrushchev needed loyal men to take care of things for him. As the head of the Republic of Moldavia, he had built up his own network of loyal followers who ensured his political survival when he was under attack. Stalin had not taken him into his network as a client, but had used him to shake up his established entourage. After Stalin’s death, these players closed ranks again and ejected him as a ‘foreign element’. All three experiences demonstrated that promotion to a post, defence against attacks and securing one’s own position were only possible given a well-developed network, with powerful patrons above and influential clients below. In this sense too, the ‘cadres decided everything’. Brezhnev had no alternative than to wait until the new ‘collective leadership’ under Malenkov, Khrushchev and others became stable, or one of his earlier patrons remembered him.

Figure 15 Brezhnev as deputy party leader of Kazakhstan with a farmer on the ‘Taman Division’ sovkhoz in Bulayevskiy uyezd, Kazakhstan, 1954.

Figure 16 Honours ceremony to mark the successful space mission by Yuriy Gagarin; from right to left: Brezhnev, Academy President Mstislav Keldysh, Nikita Khrushchev and Second Party Secretary Frol Kozlov, Moscow, 19 June 1961.

117

4

Under Khrushchev, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship II

The ten years Brezhnev spent in Khrushchev’s service from 1954 to 1964 can be divided into three phases: almost two years leading the Republic of Kazakhstan, from 1954 to 1956; the period until 1960, when Khrushchev summoned him to Moscow once more, this time not as an extra but as one of his most important string-pullers; and 1960 to 1964, when he travelled around the world representing the Soviet Union as chairman of the Supreme Soviet – that is, as the formal head of state. The photographs of Brezhnev reflect these activities, in terms of both their sheer number and the impression they convey. Hardly any photographs from his time in Kazakhstan are documented: one of the few shows Brezhnev squatting in a field with the head of a kolkhoz. They appear to be examining the soil; both have their hands on or in the earth. The photo seems to be a snapshot, for Brezhnev is looking down, with most of his face covered by the brim of his hat. In the background we have ploughed arable land as far as the eye can see. The picture can be considered representative of these two years: his job in Kazakhstan, even more so than in Moldavia, was to take care of agriculture – he was entrusted with the successful cultivation of the steppe. There are many photographs of him as Khrushchev’s right-hand man in Moscow. After 1964, however, they ceased to be published in the Soviet Union and hence do not appear in a single official publication after Khrushchev’s ouster. They make it all too clear how close the two of them were and how well they got on. Khrushchev and Brezhnev can be seen side by side at the mausoleum, at state receptions, or hunting. In October 1962 they are shown jovially telephoning the cosmonauts in space. They are often shown laughing and joking and toasting one another. Finally, there are a whole series of images depicting Brezhnev in his role as state president. Press photos show him in the best of moods with Indira Gandhi in India, hunting with Yosip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, or embracing Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah. Several other photographs from this time depict him conferring honours and awards. Surprisingly, most of them do not portray the occasions as strict and sombre affairs; rather, Brezhnev clearly enjoyed these ceremonies. He is shown joking, laughing, embracing the recipients, and rarely with an earnest expression. His broad grin and quiff are more suggestive of a star showman than an apparatchik. Brezhnev’s years under Khrushchev represented both a rupture and continuity. His attempts to raise the standard of living, wages and pensions, to give the peasants 118

Under Khrushchev

119

their first ever prospects of earning a real wage and to promise everyone their own apartment must have been genuine. It must also have come as a great relief to him that he no longer had to make use of the Stalinist discourse of ‘enemies’ and ‘wreckers’ and no longer had to fear for his own career and safety and that of his comrades. Nevertheless, the years in Kazakhstan in particular were no less characterized by tensions: the people were still impoverished; there was still a shortage of literally everything; resources were still controlled by the centre in Moscow; and the plans still had to be fulfilled. The fear dissipated, but the enormous burden remained. Stalin was dead and intimidation tactics were passé, but the mechanisms of political struggle, the enforcement of political programmes and personnel, had barely changed. Talk of the Party Presidium’s ‘collective leadership’ was a façade for the familiar intrigue – mainly between the rivals Malenkov, as Chairman of the Council of Ministers the leading figure in the state, and Khrushchev, the leading figure in the party as of September 1953. As before, this meant backing certain issues and installing their clients in key positions.1 In doing so, they used a strategy cultivated by Stalin to secure power in the 1920s. By insisting on the themes of ‘revolution in one country’ (instead of world revolution) and ‘turning to the peasants’ (instead of rapid industrialization), he had managed to close out the competition to succeed Lenin. The tactic followed a simple pattern: (1) a theory was pushed through as the only true opinion and valid party line; (2) anyone claiming otherwise was discredited and removed from their post; (3) once this goal was achieved, the opposite of the established party line could then be disseminated as the new ‘one true’ doctrine. Malenkov and Khrushchev had chosen to do battle in the field of economy policy. Given the terrible poverty besetting the entire population of the Soviet Union, all party leaders were fully aware that this area required urgent attention. It was merely a question of how best to go about it. Malenkov insisted the best method was to promote light industry, which had hitherto been neglected across the Union. Khrushchev, on the other hand, favoured the promotion of heavy industry and argued that only expansion of arable farming could raise the standard of living.2 And hence the Virgin Lands campaign was launched, the cultivation of forty-three million hectares, primarily in northern Kazakhstan, but also in western Siberia, by the Volga, in the Urals, in Ukraine and in the Far East. From the very outset, the campaign was marked by the power struggle between Khrushchev and Malenkov, who fundamentally disagreed on economic issues. Khrushchev was able to push through the Virgin Lands campaign at the September Plenum of 1953, continuing the prior policy of extensive farming that spread resources rather than concentrating on their more economical, intensive use. During his own tenure, Brezhnev would preach the latter. Khrushchev’s campaign was accompanied by a new propaganda drive, a new founding myth and a new pioneering spirit: just as the Bolsheviks had tamed the Dnieper with the dam, built up the Magnitogorsk steelworks from nothing and brought the barren desert to bloom, they would conquer the vast Kazakh steppes and turn them into the new breadbasket of the Soviet Union. The Virgin Lands campaign thus mirrored the familiar mass campaigns of the Stalin era that were pushed by all media and purportedly had the support of every work collective. Initially, these campaigns had been a big success, albeit due more to the

120

Brezhnev

enthusiasm of young adventurers than to economical use of resources, and these successes were in turn exploited for propaganda purposes. With his campaign, Khrushchev had a propaganda advantage over Malenkov. For Brezhnev, who was largely responsible for the campaign’s implementation, it was another career milestone. He was now a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the resurrector of DneproGES and the father of the virgin lands. Accordingly, the third volume of his ‘memoirs’ is entitled The Virgin Lands. Noting his success and loyalty, in 1956 Khrushchev summoned him to Moscow, where he still required loyal supporters, even after Malenkov had been deposed in 1955. In 1957, Khrushchev’s rivals attempted a putsch against him. This probably taught Brezhnev his most important lessons on how to build strong, stable networks and how easily neglecting one’s clients could lead to a fall. As the man who helped thwart the first attempt to oust Khrushchev but led the second himself, he gained crucial experience for his own tenure with regard to the sensitivities, tolerance levels and weaknesses of the CC members. Brezhnev presumably felt his best years were as state president from 1960 onwards. Although this is merely an assumption, the photographs from this period and everything we know about his proclivities indicate that this was the role he was most comfortable playing: representing, shaking hands, travelling the world and presenting medals. This was a life free from need, poverty, dirt, poor clothing and intrigue, and it quite possibly came close to what his mother might have hoped for him in the days of the empire: a carefree existence in modest prosperity.

Virgin lands under the plough When it became clear that Kazakhstan’s incumbent leaders were not prepared to implement Khrushchev’s ambitious Virgin Lands programme, on 30 January 1954 the CC plenum decided to send one of Malenkov’s supporters and one of Khrushchev’s clients in tandem: Panteleymon Kondrat’yevich Ponomarenko would serve as party leader, with Brezhnev as his deputy.3 The nomination procedure remained the same a year after Stalin’s death: the CC in Moscow decided who the Party Congress in Kazakhstan was to elect as the new leaders, and in a second step the CC plenum ‘elected’ the new secretaries. Moscow’s practice of sending a ‘monitor’ to keep an eye on the election and ensure the candidates determined by the Party Presidium were actually elected was also retained. Ponomarenko claimed in his memoirs, however, that Khrushchev was worried whether they would really be elected, since they were not from Kazakhstan, unlike their predecessors Zhumabay Shayakhmetov and Ivan Afonov. In order to persuade the CC members that it was to their advantage they were outsiders, he dangled the prospect of annulling the old proportional representation that saw West Kazakhs collaborating with West Kazakhs while East Kazakhs only nominated their own.4 But he needn’t have been concerned. In the presence of the emissary from Moscow, party discipline was better than ever, and Ponomarenko and Brezhnev were unanimously elected by both the congress and the plenum.5 The ritual of releasing their predecessors also remained the same. Together with the inspector of the CC of the CPSU, Pëtr Pigalëv, Ponomarenko and Brezhnev

Under Khrushchev

121

attended the party plenum in Kazakhstan as early as 5 and 6 February. The incumbent leader, Shayakhmetov, held the self-critical speech, as was the practice in such situations, outlining his mistakes and shortcomings, and on behalf of the CC of the CPSU6 proposed Ponomarenko and Brezhnev as his successors. Brezhnev was introduced in his current capacity and as an ‘experienced party functionary’ – unlike in the Stalin era, however, he was not announced as a ‘strong hand’.7 Shayakhmetov’s self-criticism was followed by Pigalëv’s accusations, which opened the floor for criticism of all the other comrades. Both Pigalëv and Kazakh functionaries primarily addressed an issue that would become one of Khrushchev’s guiding themes: the ‘living connection’ to the masses. Instead of travelling to the countryside to meet the people and take care of their needs, Shayakhmetov had sat in his office writing paper after paper. Even after the harsh criticism of the CPSU CC’s September Plenum of 1953, he had only spent a few days touring the rayons.8 The following plenum, which discussed the financial report for the congress, and the congress itself were then led by Ponomarenko and Brezhnev, even though they had yet to be elected. For Shayakhmetov, the bitter criticism and self-criticism was far from over: Ponomarenko had decided that Shayakhmetov himself would present the report, so that the shortcomings could be ‘better revealed’.9 And so on 18 February, Shayakhmetov accused himself of failing to take the cultivation of the virgin lands seriously and only acting once he had been pressured to do so by Moscow, failing to show the necessary initiative and failing to provide the agricultural organizations with sufficient support. Hence only fifty per cent of the corn plan had been fulfilled in 1953.10 At the following party plenum on 19 February, at Pigalëv’s suggestion, the newly elected CC unanimously voted in Ponomarenko and Brezhnev by show of hands.11 Like Moldavia’s outgoing party secretary, Rud’, Shayakhmetov was not banished from the republic, but merely demoted to secretary of South Kazakhstan oblast. Just one year later, however, Ponomarenko drove him from this post, since he had ‘not done any work’, had not taken care of things and had attended the theatre instead of party meetings. Brezhnev noted self-critically that it had been a mistake to entrust him with an oblast like South Kazakhstan.12 There was clearly a serious reason for Shayakhmetov’s frequent absence, however: he suffered strong headaches and after years of pain died of a brain tumour in 1966.13 In Alma-Ata, Brezhnev first found a room in a holiday home in the foothills on the edge of the city until he was joined by his family. They had spent part of the war there and with Brezhnev they moved into a wooden house in Dzhambulskaya ulitsa. During their two-year stay, they changed abodes four times, their last home being on the corner of Furmanov ulitsa and ulitsa Kurmangazy.14 It is claimed this address housed a kindergarten until Brezhnev had it relocated so he could move in.15 Kazakhstan posed similar challenges to those Moldavia had presented four years earlier: it was a republic on the periphery of the empire without any infrastructure or industry to speak of and which had been burdened with an enormous agricultural programme – and not in order to develop the region, but because Moscow needed grain, cotton and feed for livestock. Just as the Romanian spoken in Moldavia had barely any relation to Russian, Kazakh was not a Slavic, but a Turkic language. Just as Brezhnev had had to deal with ‘religious sectarians’ in the form of Jehovah’s Witnesses, here he was

122

Brezhnev

confronted with a Muslim population. The Muslims observed the Islamic fasts, and hence were not always completely fit to work, and broke their fasts by slaughtering kolkhoz livestock, thus scuppering the plan.16 Moldavia was completely poverty-stricken in the wake of the war, the subsequent famine and the deportations, while the Kazakhs had seen the destruction of their traditional nomadic and pastoral way of life in the 1930s. A quarter of the population had perished between 1930 and 1934; over 1.5 million people died of starvation or diseases.17 The terror of collectivization, fresh in the memories of the Moldavians upon Brezhnev’s arrival, had occurred some twenty years earlier in Kazakhstan, a full generation away. Hence, at least in retrospect, some Kazakhs saw some benefit in the Virgin Lands campaign, since now Moscow was not only plundering, but for the first time ever it was also providing resources on a large scale. Nevertheless, the campaign brought about further russification of Kazakhstan; as in Moldavia, where the party and the government circumnavigated the language barrier primarily by deploying Moldavians from Transnistria, the Union-wide recruitment campaign for Kazakhstan resulted in the majority of posts being filled with Russians, who soon constituted over half the population.18 This repeatedly led to the situation that the rayon secretaries justified themselves by saying they could not respond to criticism in the national newspaper Socialistik Kazakhstan, since no one on the rayon committee understood Kazakh.19 But while Moldavia was a small strip of land roughly the size of Belgium, Kazakhstan, with its sixteen oblasts, was a territory as large as the whole of Western Europe.20 Its population of almost seven million included not only indigenous Kazakhs and the Russians who had remained after wartime evacuation, but many peoples that had been deported during the war, such as Germans and Chechens, along with several other stigmatized groups and ‘dekulakized’ peasants. These deportees were gradually released after the amnesties following 1953, but were often not permitted to return to their homelands.21 Working with Ponomarenko The joint leaders Ponomarenko and Brezhnev were very different characters. Ponomarenko was considered an old warhorse; unlike Brezhnev, he had not only been a political commissar behind the frontlines, but had also been supreme commander of the White Russian partisan units that came into direct contact with the enemy. He had also served as leader of the partisan movement in the general staff of the military supreme command. Ponomarenko claims Khrushchev had been envious of his position, suspecting favouritism towards White Russia over Ukraine, and had hated him ever since.22 Ponomarenko and Khrushchev had both been clients of Stalin and had jostled for favour and influence, but in 1953 Ponomarenko, like Brezhnev, had been removed from the Party Presidium. As a client of Malenkov’s, Ponomarenko now depended on his patron beating Khrushchev in the tussle to rule the Soviet Union. While Brezhnev’s appointment was a promotion, Ponomarenko’s meant the end of his career in Moscow, a career he had begun in 1947, a year earlier than Khrushchev, as CC secretary under Stalin.23 The dual appointment meant that Malenkov lost an important ally in the centre, but gained control over Khrushchev’s pet project. Murphy speculates that Malenkov

Under Khrushchev

123

perhaps instructed Ponomarenko to sabotage the programme or at least ensure it was a failure.24 For Khrushchev, this meant he could not initially support his man Brezhnev in Kazakhstan, but at the same time he had weakened Malenkov in Moscow.25 When Malenkov resigned from his position as chairman of the Council of Ministers a year later, on 8 February 1955, it was clear to all involved that Ponomarenko’s days in Kazakhstan were numbered.26 Three months later, on 8 May 1955, Khrushchev got him out of the way by appointing him ambassador to Warsaw.27 Since the Stalin era, it had been common practice to remove undesired or difficult party leaders by transferring them to the diplomatic service, thereby officially doing them no harm and avoiding accusations of ‘purges’ at home or abroad. However, Ponomarenko and Brezhnev were not only servants of two different masters, but also had very different styles of leadership, despite an age gap of only four years. While Brezhnev had only been a low-ranking functionary during the Great Terror, as a member of the CC in Moscow Ponomarenko had organized the purge of the White Russian party from 1937 onwards. Even after 1953, he was still considered one of the old guard and enjoyed telling people how well he had got on with Stalin, while denigrating Khrushchev for being ‘in a rush’ and an ‘old Trotskyite’.28 Ponomarenko’s coarse way of expressing himself was evident at the very first party plenum in Kazakhstan; when the outgoing first secretary of Alma-Ata’s party organization was transferred to the Women’s Pedagogic Institute, he gave him something of a send-off: ‘One must work and be less conceited. […] It’s not words that are needed here, but deeds. […] Lecturer – what sort of a job is that? It’s a job, you need a tougher one.’29 But contrary to Murphy’s claim that Brezhnev and Ponomarenko were enemies,30 they got on well together, at least according to an interview the latter gave the following year.31 He also pointed out the differences between them: while he tended to want to dismiss cadres as soon as they made a single mistake, Brezhnev often argued they should be given a second chance.32 This difference in priorities led de facto to a pragmatic division of responsibilities: while Brezhnev tirelessly travelled to the rayons as an agricultural specialist and Khrushchev’s representative elect for the Virgin Lands campaign, advising people and reporting to Alma-Ata, Ponomarenko remained in the capital and took care of all the other urgent problems.33 First of all, however, they both had to restructure the party and governing bodies. The extent of the new administrative structures and the number of posts the two of them created demonstrates how urgent the need for reform was following Stalin’s policy of only demanding resources and never providing anything in return. As it had done for Moldavia, the CC in Moscow had decided Kazakhstan would have five instead of the former three secretary’s posts, in both the Kazakh party CC and the affected oblasts, in order to spread the burden of the impending tasks: Comrade Fazil’ Karibzhanov was now responsible for agriculture, Mukhamedgali Suzhikov for the party, propaganda and agitation, and Ibragim Tazhiyev for industry, trade and finance.34 The entire work of the CC apparatus was restructured: the CC bureau would now convene every Tuesday at eleven, the Secretariat every Thursday at the same hour. Brezhnev would take care of the Secretariat, which was primarily concerned with cadre issues. The bureau was to be led alternately by the first secretary, the second secretary and the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nurtas Undasynov.35

124

Brezhnev

Ponomarenko and Brezhnev agreed that, contrary to the party statute, pragmatic division of responsibilities was called for. They also agreed the plan would follow a clear procedure: instead of the old system of reacting to the demands of the departments, which often cobbled together their requirements two or three days before the meetings, in future all the secretaries and members of the bureau would determine the items for the agenda, which the CC departments then had to prepare.36 To ensure sensible use of resources, the departments would no longer make unauthorized requests to the CC apparatus, freeing it up to respond to the genuinely important requests of the bureau members.37 The effectiveness of Ponomarenko and Brezhnev was somewhat reduced in that they were inundated with petitions and applications: they each received over a hundred submissions a day, and simply could not read all of them. Since fifty-five per cent of them concerned the housing shortage and thirty per cent were to complain about dismissals, a commission was set up to take care of these matters.38 To deal with correspondence, Brezhnev asked Moscow for fourteen further posts.39 In order to plan work efficiently, a year’s programme was determined in advance, stipulating which bureau member would hold a meeting on which subject.40 And there was more restructuring to come: they received permission from the CC of the CPSU to set up a department for sovkhozes with fourteen new permanent posts and a ministry for rural construction.41 In July 1954, the industrial department of the CC was split into four new departments and the department for administration and finance also became two separate bodies in order to increase efficiency in dealing with the impending tasks.42 The minutes reveal Ponomarenko and Brezhnev to have been a well-oiled team that pushed through reforms with great energy and got things done. In restructuring work in line with the spirit of the age, both placed great emphasis on ‘collegiality’ and the ‘leadership collective’.43 But the tone taken by Ponomarenko was markedly different: ‘We will help, support, pay attention to the cadres, but we will respond to failure to fulfil the decrees with mortal combat. And I advise you too to toe the line of the Soviet organs. You too must deal harshly with those people who do not implement the party’s decrees, who do not fulfil the party tasks.’44 Vasiliy Liventsov, leader of the newly formed CC Department for Sovkhozes, confirms that Ponomarenko was an old-school party leader ‘with a strong hand’: ‘[Ponomarenko] had a different style of giving orders, he had led the partisan movement in White Russia during the war, which I could tell during my first days under his leadership in my position as chief of the Department for Sovkhozes.’45 He shouted at Liventsov several times, feeling overburdened and looking for someone to blame for a seemingly hopeless situation.46 This was in complete contrast to Brezhnev, who was‘extremely active, uncomplicated and attentive in conversation. Unlike many, he didn’t slip into abusive language and was never loud.’47 Shafik Chokin, then a member of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences, also recalls, ‘Brezhnev resembled the type of the party organizer well known from the films in those days. He looks around, he listens, he smokes one cigarette after another and at the end of the film – puff, he restores justice.’48 This assessment is shared by Leonid Georgiyevich Zhukov, Minister for Road Construction and Transport in Kazakhstan: ‘L.I. Brezhnev was very close and accessible for us ministers […]. We were very willing to go to him. He won people over with his communicativeness, with

Under Khrushchev

125

his boundless energy, he listened patiently, asked questions, understood how to put his interlocutor at ease, gave advice and expressed wishes, and the leader left him inspired.’49 Mlechin too cites the view of Secretary of Uralskaya oblast50 Mikhail Shikharev: ‘He was a highly cultivated person back then. Even in unofficial situations he did not permit himself any coarseness or impoliteness. And he had a sense of humour, he loved to tell jokes. He always dressed immaculately.’51 It is striking that under Khrushchev, there was now a language with which to describe a style of leadership Brezhnev had already practised under Stalin. His approach was in line with the new age in which Khrushchev’s slogans were ‘collective leadership’, ‘collegiality’ and ‘intra-party democracy’, heralding the end of the Stalin era and his epigones and promoting greater co-determination and involvement. Not least of all, these terms also served to keep his enemies in the Malenkov camp in check. Under Khrushchev, then, Brezhnev’s style of leadership now had a name, the praise it deserved, and blanket promotion: CC member Liventsov notes, ‘In all important matters, Brezhnev usually consulted with the members of the CC bureau. His overall leadership practice was based on collective opinion and he was able to find the right decision within the various arguments.’52 And Dinmukhamed Kunayev, chairman of the Council of Ministers under Brezhnev from 1955 onwards, confirms, ‘He was a balanced, calm character and was benevolent towards his comrades. […] I would particularly like to emphasize that when criticizing mistakes that had been made, he never injured people’s dignity.’53 ‘Living connection to the masses’ One might gain the impression Brezhnev was in his element in Kazakhstan: he was an agricultural expert, he had the full attention of Khrushchev and several ministers in Moscow, could once again focus on catering to the needs of an entire republic, and his approach was propagated by Khrushchev as a panacea for the remnants of Stalinism. Roy Medvedev, who vilified Brezhnev for the ‘laziness’ of his later years, writes that he never worked harder than in Kazakhstan.54 He certainly travelled constantly, as he had in Moldavia. Because the country was so vast and the roads were so bad, many of his journeys were by plane.55 Since there were still few canteens in rural areas, he ate together with the sovkhoz directors and rural workers from the goulash cauldrons used to feed the workers in the fields.56 If he travelled by car, it often also served as a ‘hotel’.57 He not only became friends with his pilot Nikolay Moiseyev, with whom he spent over 100 hours in the air,58 but soon came to know every rayon secretary or sovkhoz director personally too.59 And he demanded the same thing of his comrades in the CC, the ministries and the departments: they were to travel to the countryside and help the people there. After all, in 1954/55, some 6.3 million hectares of virgin land had to be cultivated – more than had seen a plough in the previous forty years since 1913.60 Ninety new grain sovkhozes were to become operational in 1954.61 In 1955, a further 250 agricultural state enterprises were to be organized, mobilizing 170,000 new workers.62 It should be remembered that the process did not involve identifying suitable soil and then planning accordingly. Rather, Moscow decreed how much grain was required by the Union and

126

Brezhnev

hence how much virgin land was to be cultivated. Only then did the search begin for suitable farmland. As Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ put it, ‘Nearly one-third of the territory of Kazakhstan – 100 million hectares – had to be studied by the land-use surveyors. […] The first ninety state farms founded in 1954 had been sited on the more convenient lands, comparatively close to the railways and the available rivers. Now [1955] we had to drive deep into those boundless steppes.’63 On 16 March 1954, when Ponomarenko and Brezhnev announced the new approach of the Secretariat and the bureau, Brezhnev warned in the same breath: There is the issue of travel to the regions where new land is to be worked. The CC secretaries and all bureau members must travel there to clarify what is happening on site, to help the comrades and clear up questions, to see on what level it all takes place. All this is new to the oblast secretaries too, they also need helping.64

In June and again in August 1954, the bureau established which CC member should travel to which oblast.65 In the September, the CC decided to restructure the apparatus responsible for agriculture, permanently posting all but two functionaries to the oblasts so that they could take care of the situation on the farms, current problems, the cadres and their concerns on a daily basis.66 But not only did Brezhnev demand that the CC members and ministers should remain in the rayons themselves, he also told the rayon organizations that they too had to travel to the countryside and visit the farms to address the problems on site with the heads of the kolkhozes and sovkhozes. He passionately explained his idea of how a party organizer should work: It’s not about whether you hang a portrait or not, but if you’re not one of the people organizing the active work – that is the worst thing. A partorg has to travel, stay, spend the night with the tractor drivers, organize a banya,67 then hold a meeting, that shows his soul, he wins the people over, they will tell him everything. You mustn’t imagine life just as announcements and reports. You have to think about living people […].68

In 1954, less than a year after Stalin’s death, this was rather the exception, as Brezhnev was forced to recognize: ‘It seems none of the staff of the oblast committee, the rayon committee and the executive committee were present at the meetings of the kolkhoz farmers.’69 This was not only due to unwillingness or fatalism, however. Firstly, there was a lack of transport; in March 1954, Ponomarenko had to ask Khrushchev for 130 cars for the rayons and a further fourteen for the CC.70 Secondly, the oblast and rayon leaderships were overwhelmed by the many decrees and resolutions they received from Alma-Ata; papers often remained without a response, and ended up in the safe, ignored.71 The mountains of paperwork were clearly perceived to be as much of a problem in the rural areas as they were in Alma-Ata. In contrast to the Stalin era, Brezhnev could now use other methods. While he remained committed to motivation and encouragement, he could now request all the resources they required from Moscow without fear of punishment. He impressed on

Under Khrushchev

127

the CC secretaries that they should shamelessly demand anything they needed from Moscow: ‘There used to be a poor attitude towards Kazakhstan and less was allocated, but now you have to force them to give us as much as we need so that we don’t ruin the whole mission. Our staff should think it all through and present our rightful demands of Moscow, if necessary drive there and fight for budgets […].’72 After the first harvest yielded a meagre 5.9 hundredweight per hectare on the kolkhozes and 6.2 hundredweight on the sovkhozes in comparison to fifteen to twenty, in some cases even thirty hundredweight in Ukraine,73 in October 1954 Ponomarenko and Brezhnev decided to launch a systematic inquiry. They introduced a completely new form of ‘living connection to the masses’: the idea of learning from the local people, their needs and problems. Brezhnev thus assembled a team of comrades to collect data in the rural areas and illustrate them with photographs of the kolkhozes. The focus was on the issue of work discipline – specifically, how to motivate the peasants to do better: ‘It is not as simple as some people think, that we allegedly give poor orders, tighten the screws poorly, and thus they work poorly.’74 The ‘people’s consultants’ were to find out what wages the workers were paid, whether the units of work were appropriate, that is, whether there was sufficient motivation for the peasants to fulfil them: ‘Study what sort of people are not meeting the minimum requirements. We need analytical statistics on how many of them are women and how many of them are men […].’75 Brezhnev ordered his comrades to study the ethnic composition and its influence on the work ethic and the level of politicization: ‘The kolkhoz workers have very good knowledge of the political situation and everything surrounding it, but they don’t always have the same opportunity to criticize as factory workers, for instance.’76 On the one hand, the party leadership sought to gain an impression of the kolkhozes’ ethnic and social composition; on the other hand, Brezhnev made it clear that it was about educating people instead of punishing them. When he was asked whether the kolkhoz workers who failed to fulfil the minimum requirements should be tried in court, he replied, ‘You can do that, the law provides for criminal liability on the part of kolkhoz staff who don’t fulfil the minimum work units, but that doesn’t interest us, since that would be to replace the method of education with the method of repression.’77 But he left no one in any doubt that he was prepared to make examples of people in the interests of this ‘education’: We will hold meetings, plenums, actives and then send our people to the kolkhozes, we will dig our way to every individual, establish how he makes his living, and then put him up before the assembly. If he sees sense – good, if not, we will exclude him from the kolkhoz and make use of all the repressions. And then we will see how strong Soviet power is or isn’t.78

The day-to-day in the steppe Brezhnev repeatedly made it clear he did not think it was the kolkhoz workers who were to blame, but the kolkhoz directors and party organizers, who not only failed to look after the workers, but were also wont to bully them. What continued to annoy him most was the apathy of those party chiefs who did not care a jot about the plans or

128

Brezhnev

the people under them. He received a report from South Kazakhstan: ‘Many kolkhoz directors insult the people in every way imaginable, pay wages only irregularly, do not provide any meals etc.’79 There were constantly cases of kolkhoz directors drinking, exchanging sovkhoz property for vodka or embezzling several thousand roubles.80 The situation in Novocherkasskiy rayon in Akmolinskaya oblast was typical of many other agricultural enterprises: due to the lack of a bridge, tractors couldn’t be supplied with petrol and produce had to be delivered by boat. Most of the sovkhozes in the rayon lacked canteens: The food is prepared in field kitchens out in the open and often consists of just one course (soup). The people are also fed on the street in gross violation of the hygiene regulations. There is a lack of cutlery, especially knives, forks, teaspoons and plates. Construction of the canteens has yet to be begun in any of the twenty sovkhozes investigated.81

But that was not all: there was also a lack of water. There were no water pipes, and thus in places where there was no natural water supply, drinking water had to be brought in by tankers from up to forty kilometres away. ‘Because the water often arrives late, in the brigades on the Kirov, Bauman and other sovkhozes, breakfast and lunch are often not ready on time.’82 Accommodation was also poor. It was normal for most of the newcomers who arrived in Kazakhstan in order to cultivate the steppe to spend the first few months in caves they themselves dug in the earth, in tents or in railway carriages –‘accommodation’ that was far from suitable for the winter, to Brezhnev’s vexation.83 The drivers on the virgin lands slept in haylofts, power stations, attics or cowsheds.84 But even if they had a roof over their heads, several workers often had to share a bed. In many cases, there were no mattresses. Everyday life on the sovkhozes is badly organized. In the communal tents, especially those of the tractor brigades, it is filthy, boring and it is not uncommon for two to sleep on one plank bed. There are no tables, no stools. There is a lack of pillows, bed sheets, towels, blankets. There are no washing facilities. A bath day is seldom organized and when it is, then only in natural waterholes; as a result, twenty cases of lice have been discovered on the Bauman, Marinovskiy, Ostrovskiy and other sovkhozes.85

On Uzunkol’skiy sovkhoz in northern Kazakhstan, twenty-five workers shared two hand towels and one washbasin; because there were no mattresses, they slept on empty bed frames.86 That was by no means the full catalogue of shortages: there was a lack of clothing, the tractor drivers having to work in padded trousers in thirty-ninedegree heat in the absence of light cotton overalls; housing lagged far behind the plan, and there were no rudimentary tools people could use to build their own homes. The two CC members who reported to Brezhnev had not only requested delivery of 14,000 pairs of light underpants and 6,000 pairs of cotton trousers to the sovkhozes, but also suggested he send fifty new, experienced managers.87

Under Khrushchev

129

In the later summer of 1954, around the time Brezhnev sent his emissaries to discover more about life on the sovkhozes, the Union chairman of the Komsomol, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin, and his friend Komsomol Secretary Vladimir Efimovich Semichastnyy also embarked on a tour of Kazakhstan to form an impression of the 25,551 Komsomol members from throughout the entire Union who had been mobilized to live and work in Kazakhstan on 21 March 1954. Ten years later, the two men would be involved in the conspiracy Brezhnev led against Khrushchev. Their findings matched what Brezhnev himself saw and heard: in the winter, instead of simple warm clothing, the only thing that could be bought was expensive fur coats for 2,000 roubles; since there was no fuel for heating the sovkhozes, the workers used stolen construction materials instead; given the short supplies, all sovkhoz workers wanted money to buy their own animals and the right to use surplus grain to feed them.88 At the suggestion of Shelepin and Semichastnyy, a catalogue of measures was established on the all-Union level, ranging from self-help to permission to use straw as construction material, building windmills to produce electricity and turning waterholes into fishponds, allocating bricks and more staff, and extending holidays for pioneers of the virgin lands.89 New settlers Regardless of the many shortcomings and shortages, Khrushchev continued to insist on the campaign to cultivate the virgin lands and Brezhnev continued to recruit workers en masse throughout the Union. He travelled the length and breadth of the USSR – to Ukraine, to Leningrad, Minsk and Moscow – to organize the ‘brain drain’ to Kazakhstan, as head of the sovkhoz department Liventsov put it.90 Each sovkhoz required six management employees, from the director to the agronomists and a bookkeeper.91 In 1954 alone, some 8,000 specialist workers arrived in Kazakhstan.92 While the Soviet government obliged all republics to send experts, there was a lot of resistance to having to relinquish their best people.93 As Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ outline, ‘The Ministry of State Farms of the USSR set up a special headquarters for selecting personnel. Its offices reminded one of a railway station, there were so many people coming and going. I went to that headquarters and for weeks on end sat there from early morning till midnight interviewing candidates.’94 The academics were joined by workers and masses of demobilized soldiers; 40,000 former military men were announced in the late autumn of 1954 alone.95 Brezhnev must have been aware that the plan agreed for 1955 would involve some teething trouble; they were to organize 250 new kolkhozes and accommodate and employ 170,000 people in the steppe regions of Kazakhstan, regions completely lacking basic infrastructure.96 Hence on 30 November 1954 he called a meeting of the CC secretaries in order to discuss the new arrivals: There have been considerable problems this year. If we have had to put up with some difficulties and unpleasantness over the past year and have been forced to say many harsh things to each other in organizing ninety-two sovkhozes, then we can reckon with more unpleasantness and difficulties when it’s 250, you ask one

130

Brezhnev

question and there are 250, you take care of one unpleasant application and there are 250 applications.97

One of the biggest problems remained the lack of infrastructure for dealing with the new settlers: they got off the train and were left to fend for themselves. Nobody was there to welcome them, there were no information desks, no signs, no luggage rooms for their belongings, no canteens, no accommodation.98 Despite reminders, measures and aid from Moscow, in 1955 the situation became even worse. In late May 1955, Brezhnev had to concede that after five months they had only fulfilled ten per cent of the construction plan.99 M. Rosovskiy, an editor at the newspaper Trud who had spent a month travelling through West Kazakhstan, sent Khrushchev a long report documenting all the problems he had seen. This report, to which Brezhnev was also privy, concluded by noting that the only thing that was functional was the trading of vodka. Wherever you couldn’t buy anything, you could get hold of vodka in large quantities: ‘There are already cases of drunkenness in connection with rioting and violations of work discipline.’100 All the same, after the death of Stalin, the sovkhoz workers had the courage to openly complain to the party leadership, Brezhnev or Khrushchev, or Pravda. This was no longer an age of denunciations and finger-pointing. Rather, Ponomarenko and Brezhnev took such letters seriously, had the complaints investigated and ordered assistance. In the majority of cases, they had to acknowledge that the complaints were justified: the new arrivals were not being looked after.101 Some of them were even told that they were not welcome and should leave. S.N. Sergeyeva, for instance, wrote to Pravda: We have come to Alma-Ata to cultivate the virgin lands. No one was there to receive us at the station. We could not find anywhere to spend the night. […] In the morning, we went to the sovkhoz trust. There they told us they were not expecting us. They sent us to the Sovkhoz Ministry, but when the head of the economic department there learnt we had been delegated to the trust and not to him, he refused to speak to us. We went from one organization to another until the evening, asking to be put up for the second night.102

Brezhnev spent day after day inundated with such letters, forming his own impression or summoning the responsible rayon secretaries and directors to his office to explain themselves. Barely a CC bureau meeting passed without him rebuking a partorg or trust director. As much as it will have annoyed him that they had failed to organize the people’s arrival, accommodation and work, he must have been delighted he could now focus on such socioeconomic matters and no longer had to search for ‘enemies’ and ‘saboteurs’. Nevertheless, the argument remained the same in his dealings with the responsible heads of the rayons: it was always the party leaders who were to blame for the shortcomings; the poor infrastructure and the masses of new arrivals were no excuse, since in theory everything could be demanded now and everything was available. Brezhnev expected the party functionaries to use resources and people sensibly and got annoyed when he thought they hadn’t. In May 1955, for instance, he took the trust

Under Khrushchev

131

director and head of Bulayevskiy rayon to task for neglecting the difficult case of the ‘Taman Division’ sovkhoz. His task had been to sow 20,000 hectares even though the workers had only recently arrived and there was no machinery. As a result, they had only sown 2,800 hectares, which had to be written off.103 When Brezhnev flew to the sovkhoz, he was confronted not with the usual complaints, but with veritable uproar: The people virtually screamed at me: if you don’t sort things out we’ll travel to Comrade Khrushchev at our own expense, and if you don’t get rid of him here, the ‘greedy pig’, we’ll kill him. They were talking about the storeman. They said we, Comrade Brezhnev, have never seen anything like it, for Russian people to be weaned off bread. That’s how they put it. And what was it all about? They weren’t given any bread, it is brought from the rayon’s centre, sixty-eight kilometres away. The weather is changeable, there are no roads, bread did not come regularly. For two weeks, they didn’t have any meat because the livestock was not ready for slaughter.104

In contrast to the Stalin era, the rayon secretary had the opportunity to immediately deliver an entire bakery, twelve animals for slaughter and two trucks laden with commodities. Brezhnev surmised, ‘We must draw the conclusion that one can also ruin good people and a good thing.’105 It remained the case that all difficulties were explained away as a lack of party and propaganda work, including the ethnic conflicts that constantly erupted due to the tensions surrounding housing, supply and labour. When new arrivals vented their frustration with the miserable living and working conditions at the Chechens and Ingush who had been banished to the region by Stalin, the ethnicity of the persons in question was noted, but the outbreak of violence was traced back to poor party work on behalf of the responsible cadres. On 15 May 1955, such a case arose in the settlement of Ekivastus in Pavlodarskaya oblast. A mass brawl involving several hundred new arrivals – Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Uyghurs and others against Chechens and Ingush – cost three Caucasians their lives, while another five were injured.106 In the March, 1,500 demobilized soldiers had arrived and been left to their own devices. It had been six weeks before they were provided with mattresses and meals. Some of them had scurvy. They were supposed to build factories for the Irtysh coal-mining trust, but since there was neither cement nor water, the construction sites mostly stood idle. The new arrivals, who had been able to feed their families back home with their labour, suddenly found themselves reliant on assistance from relatives.107 Brezhnev summoned the trust’s director, Bobchenko, and his party organizer Ustimenko to the CC to explain what was going on: ‘How could it happen that such mature communists – the director of the trust and you – allowed such a situation? You knew they weren’t sending you slaves […].’108 Dumbfounded, he asked the party organizer, ‘Are you so inexperienced or is that your character?’109 The two leaders apologized and confessed they had been too late in starting the party work; they received a ‘party reprimand’.110 In order to manage the great staff crisis – or to counter the shortage of machinery and tractors with manpower, as was often the practice in the early years – the

132

Brezhnev

ministries and oblasts commanded thousands of pupils and students to assist with the harvest.111 The Kazakh Ministry of the Interior was also ordered to create sixteen new satellite labour camps in which around 10,000 prisoners were to be deployed in building sixteen new sovkhozes and 102 grain stores.112 Maize for Moscow At first glance, the reports about all the problems in Kazakhstan and the minutes of the corresponding meetings seem quite similar to those in Moldavia. But there was a huge difference: the ‘wrecker’ factor, the compulsion to ‘unveil the enemy’, was absent. Threats and punishments were replaced by conviction and admonition. Brezhnev must have been deeply satisfied that the new policy of encouraging and stretching people corresponded precisely with the very style he had already been practising. He seemed to represent Khrushchev’s directives with the utmost passion. That also meant, however, that he could not understand those who would not bend to Moscow’s policies. Particularly since agriculture was made the top priority under Khrushchev, cultivation methods were a political-ideological issue on which he agreed with the first secretary. He considered the Virgin Lands campaign to be bringing progress per se to a backward republic. The problem, however, was not only that that the recruited ‘newcomers’ often had no idea about arable farming and breeding livestock, having previously worked in urban construction or a factory,113 but also that most Kazakhs tended their cattle in the traditional fashion and were not open to industrialized farming. Hardly anyone had experience of growing sugar beet, tobacco or cotton, and the farmers didn’t know whether to plough the soil and, if so, how deep to go. Without tractors and petrol, seeds were repeatedly scattered on unploughed fields, to Brezhnev’s constant annoyance.114 In Kazakhstan too, head geneticist Lysenko was consulted. He warned that if the thin fertile layer were ploughed too deep, the fertile soil would only be mixed with the sand below it. Hence many advised not ploughing the virgin land at all.115 Brezhnev’s memoirs echo the reports of the time: the ploughs were unsuitable for the land, the ploughshares broke off, the frames became warped, and the tractors using them were useless. To inspect the problem, Ponomarenko, Brezhnev and Khrushchev travelled to Kustanayskaya oblast; the solution was ultimately to plough seven centimetres deep instead of the usual twenty-two.116 This ‘learning by doing’ was typical of the campaign. Just as Brezhnev didn’t begin to systematically collect data until the first harvest of 10 August 1954 had been unsatisfactory, producing only seventeen per cent of the stipulated maize yield,117 they didn’t decide to establish a Virgin Lands Institute under the aegis of the Academy of Agriculture until they had gained initial experience of sowing.118 The same held for the selection of seed stock; neither seeds from Ukraine nor seeds from Siberia proved suitable for the Kazakh climate.119 The harvest of 1954 didn’t yield enough to make seed available for the campaign’s expansion in 1955, and hence in November 1954 Ponomarenko requested 5.6 million hundredweight of seeds from the Union stocks.120 It was the same with maize. Regardless of whether the soil in Kazakhstan was suitable for growing it, Khrushchev was immovable: maize made the best animal feed

Under Khrushchev

133

and would provide more meat for the people. At a party meeting, Brezhnev explained Khrushchev’s maize policy by stating that because the crop had a higher yield than normal grain, it could be used to boost the harvest.121 Brezhnev swore by the cultivation technique of Terentiy Mal’tsev, who had developed a method of ploughing that did not turn the soil. Brezhnev made this method compulsory for everyone.122 He travelled throughout the country to advocate its use, advising the farmers and preaching maize,123 especially in the maize year of 1955: ‘There was nothing more important than maize. The entire country dealt only with maize […].’124 Brezhnev defended Khrushchev’s policy and left no one in any doubt that the directives from the centre offered no room for manoeuvre and that there would be no questioning the usefulness of large-scale maize cultivation in Kazakhstan: This year is the first time our republic has cultivated this valuable crop – maize – on such a large scale, but unfortunately not all leaders have understood this CC resolution. […] Comrades, we are experiencing the well-known process of the fight against the old. The new, the progressive, is fighting against the old, the ailing, the dying. But the old is putting up a struggle and with it some of our cadres too are clinging onto the old.125

Some rayon leaders had disobeyed instructions, permitting only fifty per cent to be sown using the new method in square clusters, while the other half continued to be sown in rows.126 In June 1955, the entire area of 700,000 hectares of maize was at risk, since the drought stopped it sprouting in the squares too. The situation was so dramatic that Brezhnev sent Liventsov to inspect the maize regions, announced they would discuss nothing else with the CC secretaries over the next two months, and threatened that legal action would be taken against anyone who neglectfully damaged maize crops with agricultural machinery.127 Death of livestock in the steppe There were similar problems with livestock breeding: instead of slowly developing it and trusting the Kazakh herdsmen, here too modernity was considered superior to tradition and the priority was to fulfil the plan. For Brezhnev, acceptance of the loss of several thousands of animals was not a problem inherent to the plan economy itself, but was due to the people implementing it. In May 1954 he complained that failure to produce feed was ‘systematic’; that is, although all the preconditions were in place, those responsible were not taking care of things. That winter, some 200,000 animals had perished in Ksyl-Ordinskaya oblast. Many of them had died of thirst, even though the pastures were right next to a river.128 On some kolkhozes the workers had simply neglected to secure 23,000 tonnes of hay from flooding. Some of the farms lost fifty per cent of their livestock.129 For Brezhnev, this showed indifference on the part of the local leadership, and it enraged him. When the secretary of Kazalinskiy rayon in KsylOrdinskaya oblast justified himself by saying he had made an effort, Brezhnev virtually exploded: ‘What sort of effort? […] How do the people live there? How can you behave like that towards the people? If 79,000 animals have died, then as a

134

Brezhnev

political leader you must be excluded from the party for allowing people to live in such circumstances. You have no soul.’130 Brezhnev was clearly merciless when it came to party discipline, even if he was presumably aware that these party leaders had yet to realize that the Stalin era had passed. The new assistance from Moscow had probably yet to arrive, and essentially everyone was now being punished for the lethargy the Stalinist system had produced with its disregard for and exploitation of the peasants. It seems typical of Brezhnev that on the one hand he was moved by the fate of the leader of the rayon, but on the other hand remained tough: ‘Of course it is not easy to see your tears, but the Bolsheviks cannot have any concern for that.’131 He dealt in similar fashion with the head of Chilikskiy rayon in Alma-Atinskaya oblast, Dzhamgarin, who was forced to admit that the rayon’s kolkhoz had only fulfilled fifty per cent of the plan and the livestock stood uncovered on pastures up to 120 kilometres away because they didn’t have enough stables.132 Liventsov, who had done his research there, revealed that Dzhamgarin had claimed they were equipped with all the necessary machinery for haymaking even though they were missing half of it. This is another indication that kolkhozes pretended to have fulfilled the plan in Stalinist fashion in order to escape sanctions. But Brezhnev insisted that a new age had dawned: ‘In the party, everything is based on mutual trust. That is above all honesty, commitment to the cause, but if someone deceives us in the bureau, what is the point in keeping such a secretary? […] For not speaking honestly, I suggest releasing you from your work.’133 Ponomarenko and Brezhnev continued to blame their predecessors for all these abuses. As far as they were concerned, ‘the fish stank from the head’; the rayon leaders could only be as good as those of the republic. And hence it was their predecessors who were responsible for the deaths of three million animals within the space of a few years: Everything outlined in the report suggests that because of the poor leadership of the CC bureau, the situation is bad this year too. We must explain why it is that to this day the republic has not been able to return livestock breeding to the levels of 1928, that this is due to the poor organization of overwintering, that not enough feed was prepared, that droving the animals from the pasture was badly organized, that all this led to the death of the animals. Unfortunately, this business continued this year too, as a result of poor leadership – from the top down.134

Wherever Brezhnev himself or his emissaries travelled in the spring of 1954, they were confronted with the same situation: many kolkhozes had received only a fraction of the feed they had been promised, emergency slaughter had begun as early as 1953, the majority of the livestock had perished during the winter and the emaciated animals that did survive could hardly stand.135 The only thing that pleased Brezhnev was that in remote regions they had begun to deliver feed to the pastures by plane.136 In order to avoid the same scenario in the winter of 1954/55, Kazakhstan’s CC and the Council of Ministers ordered all oblast secretaries to report on preparations for overwintering livestock by 1 November. But by 13 November, only two out of sixteen secretaries had sent their reports, and hence Brezhnev instructed CC Secretary of

Under Khrushchev

135

Agricultural Affairs Fazil’ Karibzhanov to make enquiries.137 The photographs Brezhnev received with the reports were shocking and had nothing to do with modern farming: they showed haystacks exposed to all weathers, ‘stables’ dug out of the earth and covered with hay and branches, and mud huts without windows and doors intended as ‘insemination stations’ for the animals.138 Despite all their efforts, Ponomarenko and Brezhnev were unable to take control of livestock breeding. In late May 1955, they received something of a ‘warning’ from the CC in Moscow noting ‘severe shortcomings in the work of the party organizations in the Kazakh SSR with the cadres in livestock breeding’.139 They were responsible for the deaths of 155,000 animals in the winter of 1954/55 and an average milk yield per cow that had dropped below the levels of 1953. The Moscow CC department for party organizations considered the main problem to be the lack of 56,000 animal keepers. The accusations Ponomarenko and Brezhnev had levelled at their predecessors were now made against them: inadequate organization of party work and inadequate care for the specialist workers, their education and further training and their wages and living conditions.140 For one thing, the situation remained tense. Secondly, Khrushchev used the situation to justify the demotion of Ponomarenko, who had already had to hand over the role of first party secretary of Kazakhstan to Brezhnev in the early May. Brezhnev was not threatened with consequences; he was merely ordered to deploy more cadres in livestock breeding, replace weak party leaders with able cadres, take care of training for livestock breeders, do more for mass employment and improve the living conditions.141 We do not know whether this made Brezhnev realize that strong party leadership, good organization of work and sufficient assistance from Moscow alone were not enough to fundamentally change the situation. It cannot be ruled out that Moscow’s assessment merely confirmed his assumption that the lower and mid-level party leaders were simply not making enough effort. At any rate, the day after receiving this letter, on 27 May 1955, he convened a CC meeting on the subject of agriculture, calling for them to ‘take stock’ of the situation: ‘We must uncover all shortcomings, all rocks beneath the water on which our ship could splinter in order to agree on a common line of behaviour and action for all party organizations to put right the shortcomings and mistakes that have been made in the economy.’142 The ‘year of desperation’ Brezhnev’s new call for a collective push to achieve breakthroughs in all sectors, from the cultivation of the virgin lands to haymaking to construction and livestock breeding, was not only motivated by the letter from Moscow, however, but was also due to the drought of 1955: ‘All summer, from May onwards not a single drop of rain fell.’143 It was called the ‘year of desperation’, as his ‘memoirs’ put it, since although Khrushchev had ushered in a new era, officially there was no drought, merely ‘difficult climatic conditions’. We do not know whether Brezhnev simply adopted the terminological strictures of Moscow or perceived things this way himself. It seems he was genuinely outraged by those who appeared deflated and wanted to give up. In contrast to the Stalin era, his speeches contain no implied criticism of official policy.

136

Brezhnev

At the meeting in late May 1955, he called all his comrades to account, and did not spare his own ministers either: ‘And you, Comrades [Minister for Agriculture] Mel’nik and [Minister for Sovkhozes] Vlasenko, obviously haven’t understood everything either. You have racked up many sins. Why did you not come to the CC and seek assistance?’144 His harsh words reveal a man under immense pressure. Perhaps he was uncertain whether Moscow’s displeasure, combined with the looming drought, might not mean the end of his career. Even in extremely arid times, one was held responsible for the conditions. Compounding matters, the June rains did not materialize.145 A correspondingly nervous Brezhnev adopted a harsh tone in warning the August Plenum not to panic: We had a climatically difficult year and will not receive the harvest we expected. […] That embitters all of us, but to despair and constantly moan about the difficulties caused, that is something else. Some of our comrades, instead of taking measures, have distinguished themselves by moaning: ‘No harvest, no nothing’. They do nothing but moan and cry. And some frail elements confuse the climatic problems with the idea of virgin land cultivation. I think that those people are not only not our companions, but our enemies. And in my opinion the misfortune is that many comrades come to the wrong assessment and think, why shouldn’t one talk about the failed harvest or the drought? They take the same tune without realizing the great harm they are doing to the cause.146

Brezhnev used the word ‘enemy’ – a term he had avoided during the Stalin era. He no longer had to fear for his post – the same party plenum had just elected him first secretary of Kazakhstan while Ponomarenko had been sent off to the embassy in Warsaw.147 But he was clearly afraid that the hot winds would ruin not only the arid soil, but also the delicate shoots of his party work, his appeal for trust and confidence. Faced with the failed harvests, sixteen sovkhoz directors had requested to be relieved of their posts. Brezhnev compared them to deserters: ‘These are self-mutilators at the front who see that the battle is getting hot and tough, and he sticks out his finger, they can shoot, then I’ll be sent to the medics, it’s peaceful there and I’ll stay alive.’148 He nevertheless made it clear that he also blamed the party organization and thus himself too: ‘We didn’t know these people, didn’t know who we were working with, didn’t see into their souls, didn’t look into them.’149 On the one hand, he warned that panicking could do great harm, since 15,000 people worked under these sixteen sovkhoz directors. On the other hand, he followed the line of criticism and self-criticism in explaining that anyone could make one mistake: it was possible for someone to panic, then think again and later have regrets and criticize himself.150 As always, the solution Brezhnev proposed was to call a meeting to discuss the matter. He openly confessed before the delegates, ‘I don’t think that I don’t make mistakes myself, and if I make mistakes, then I go to the organization and say that I have made a mistake. If we didn’t make mistakes, we’d be angels.’151 In this sense, Brezhnev seems to have acted out of ‘conviction’, believing that if people only tried hard enough, they would be successful irrespective of the conditions. At the bureau meetings he continued to criticize oblast leaders who he felt had not

Under Khrushchev

137

done enough faced with the drought. Only two days after the plenum, on 8 August 1955, he admonished the oblast leadership of Aktyubinsk, ‘I must tell you […], if you had told me and the members of the bureau that the soil is very dry, that the blades of the plough bounce out of the furrow, shatter, then we would have understood that the leaders understand their business. But the majority of the sovkhozes don’t plough the virgin land at all.’152 Brezhnev insisted that the virgin lands had been selected scientifically and had to deliver a good yield: When we posed the question about cultivating the virgin lands, we sent Academy members, conducted studies, held scientific debates. Ultimately we are now supposed to decide on the basis of an application that the wind has blown, everything is covered in sand and we can write off 120,000 hectares, that’s not on. We must agree that the plan remains the plan.153

But however much he chivvied the head of the oblasts, rayons and kolkhozes, called them to account and promised them assistance – the harvest of 1955 was mostly a lost cause, since the seeds were blown away by the wind or could not take root in the arid soil.154 In the end, the only option was to buy in fruit and vegetables from other republics and request more seed from Moscow.155 Networks Ponomarenko and Brezhnev were an effective team. Ponomarenko’s demotion on 8 May 1955 had nothing to do with his work in Kazakhstan or the precarious situation during the year of drought, but was clearly entirely due to deep-seated animosity between himself and Khrushchev and Malenkov’s dismissal in February 1955.156 The networks Brezhnev built up in Kazakhstan and the older ones he continued to cultivate were not as well developed as in Ukraine or Moldavia. Hardly any of the people he had surrounded himself with there followed him to the steppe. One exception was his loyal follower Golikov, who had worked for him in Moldavia and ran his office in Alma-Ata too, as his personal secretary.157 In Kazakhstan, it was less important for Brezhnev to build a powerful network to secure his own position, since in Khrushchev he had a patron at the very top. They were not only in constant contact by post and telephone; Khrushchev also frequently travelled to Kazakhstan – like many ministers and party functionaries at the peak of the Virgin Lands campaign – to form an impression of the farmland, meet with Brezhnev and lend him his support. In May 1954, he had undertaken his first tour of the Kustanayskaya, Akmolinskaya and Karagandiyskaya oblasts with Brezhnev and Ponomarenko.158 For his part, Brezhnev repeatedly referred to Khrushchev in his speeches at party meetings, reported on his meetings with him and passed on his advice concerning agriculture.159 Surrounded by his ministers and advisors, he is said to have enjoyed picking up the phone to keep Khrushchev abreast of the situation in a casual tone, demonstratively consulting with him.160 While Brezhnev enjoyed the patronage of Moscow, then, locally he needed people who were as dedicated to the Virgin Lands campaign as he was. His memoirs note

138

Brezhnev

that he surrounded himself with an ‘operational working group’ or an unofficial ‘virgin lands headquarters’. They included CC Secretary for Agriculture Fazil’ Karibzhanov, the director of the CC department of agriculture Andrey Morozov, the director of the CC Department for Sovkhozes Vasiliy Liventsov, Agriculture Minister Grigoriy Mel’nik and Minister for Sovkhozes Mikhail Vlasenko.161 However, he later broke with some of these men when he thought they were not up to the task. After Brezhnev’s heavy criticism in May 1955, Vlasenko was forced to leave a month later. Despite opposition from his advisors, Brezhnev managed to have him replaced by Mikhail Roginets; even though he did not formally qualify for a minister’s post, Roginets had led Chernigovskaya oblast in Ukraine with great success for several years. It also helped that he was one of Brezhnev’s countrymen.162 This switch was preceded by a reshuffle within the republic’s government and CC bureau. As clients of Malenkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Elubay Taybekov and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Nurtas Undasynov were deposed on 4 April 1955,163 again with Moscow’s blessing. Kunayev, then president of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan, reports how he was preparing to give a speech to the Supreme Soviet in Moscow in March 1955 when he was summoned by Ponomarenko and Brezhnev. To his complete surprise, they told him they would introduce him to Khrushchev there and then as Kazakhstan’s new chairman of the Council of Ministers.164 He became one of Brezhnev’s closest friends and allies,165 spending a great deal of time with him in the virgin lands. They undertook ‘hundreds of journeys’ together through North Kazakhstan, held ‘hundreds of meetings’ with the local people, experienced ‘turbulent consultations’ in the oblast and rayons centres or directly in the fields and made countless appearances before the rayon committees.166 When Khrushchev dismissed Kunayev in 1962, Brezhnev and Kunayev began plotting to oust him. When the putsch was completed in 1964, Brezhnev reinstalled Kunayev as first secretary of Kazakhstan.167 In 1955, Zhumabek Tashenev became the new chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Kazakhstan; he had made Brezhnev’s acquaintance and earned his admiration as secretary of Aktyubinskaya oblast.168 Only a few days later, Kunayev and Tashenev also took the posts of Taybekov and Undasynov in the CC bureau.169 As always, this reshuffle was first discussed in Moscow, then agreed by the CC bureau before it was finally legitimized by the body with formal powers to do so, the plenum, in this case on 18 April 1955.170 Although Ponomarenko had been demoted on 7 May 1955, Brezhnev didn’t call the next plenum until 2 August, after the CC plenum in Moscow had convened and agreed further guidelines. The Kazakh CC elected him first secretary of Kazakhstan and, at Moscow’s recommendation, appointed the Siberian Ivan Dmitriyevich Yakovlev second secretary.171 Characteristically, in Roginets and Yakovlev, Brezhnev chose two men who like him had acquired many years’ experience of the nuts and bolts of running an oblast and were used to speaking to people on the ground rather than sitting in an office. Kazakhstan was thus a ‘safe’ time for Brezhnev insofar as he did not have to battle for patronage and did not have to juggle with local clan rivalries. He could sit back and watch as Ponomarenko was demoted. We do not know what Brezhnev thought about his dismissal. They had very different leadership styles, but the only person who

Under Khrushchev

139

mentions tensions between them is Liventsov, if we disregard Murphy, who described them as ‘enemies’.172 Regardless of whether Brezhnev welcomed Ponomarenko’s departure, regretted it or reacted with indifference, this intrigue was another lesson in patron–client relationships: it was completely irrelevant how well you worked – if your own patron fell, you fell with him.

The ‘Year of Industry’ and a new era Brezhnev once again found himself head of a republic, with a strong team under him and a victorious patron above him, and could write off the harvest of 1955 without being reprimanded by Moscow. Since the pretext for deposing Malenkov had been that he had sought to neglect heavy industry, the Moscow CC’s July Plenum retroactively declared 1955 the ‘Year of Industry’. At the August Plenum in Kazakhstan, Brezhnev too then declared the dawning of a new industrial revolution.173 However, industry was not the country’s most urgent problem. That remained agriculture, housing the many newcomers, organizing the work in the virgin lands and developing infrastructure. The only large-scale industrial project was the hydroelectric power station on the confluence of the Irtysh and the Bukhtarma begun in 1953. Although there was no longer a shortage of resources, Moscow supplying everything that was required, construction progressed at a sluggish pace, with the result that industry faced the threat of a blackout.174 When the CC bureau convened in August 1955 to discuss the requests to be sent to Moscow for the next five-year plan (1956–1960), Brezhnev called for big investments and requests for the necessary funds: he argued that it was not enough to plan the construction of eleven cinemas in five years, and that the plan to lay five kilometres of new tramlines was also pathetic.175 He again insisted they only had to be determined enough in their dealings with Moscow to receive all they wanted: As far as the Ministries of the Union are concerned, it is scandalous. They have no plan; we take what the ministers give us. We were simply not combative enough. I agree with the comrades’ idea that a group of our staff travel to Moscow to push through our applications to build communal enterprises, tramlines, cinema theatres, recreation homes, jetties etc. At the moment we don’t know what the non-ferrous metallurgists, coalmen, construction people and railwaymen [i.e. the ministries] will give us.176

Industrialization also included providing housing, cultural offerings and ultimately nothing less than a ‘new Kazakhstan’. In 1954, funds had already been requested from Moscow to build seventy residential blocks for leading functionaries and a further twenty-four for lecturers at the party school.177 As in Kishinev, one problem in AlmaAta was that those who had an apartment in the capital did not relinquish it when they were deployed to the provinces, and hence a permanent housing shortage prevailed.178

140

Brezhnev

Not least of all, a cultural revival was required: Brezhnev wanted the people to be able to go to the cinema, and he was outraged that in some regions not a single film had been shown for four years.179 As a great admirer of film and theatre, he made his plane available to the greats of Soviet cinema, Lyubov’ Orlova, Marina Ladynina and Nikolay Kryuchkov, flying them to the steppe to give performances there.180 Also concerned about the quality of the daily press, he had a full editorial team replaced and eleven new papers founded. He ensured there were more young journalists and had a Kazakh satirical magazine published, entitled The Rasp.181 Especially after the Stalin era, culture was to receive new impulses and play a larger role in people’s lives. The same held for the culture of those deported to Kazakhstan. While they were rehabilitated, they were still not permitted to return to their homelands. Brezhnev decreed that the children of these ‘irregular settlers’ could study and had political work intensified among the 200,000 Chechens and a Chechen-language newspaper founded.182 The new era also opened up Kazakhstan to the world, the first state visits being attracted by the experiment of the Virgin Lands campaign. A three-man agricultural delegation arrived from Britain, and was supposed to be received by sixty experts and kolkhoz chairmen. Initially, the reception was to take place without ceremony, Brezhnev brusquely deciding, ‘No raising of flags, no orchestras playing’.183 But it was then decided to have pioneers present the British with flowers at the airport and to take them to the opera in the evening.184 India’s Prime Minister Nehru and Burma’s head of state U Nu received much greater attention. Brezhnev had to be seen with them. But he had difficulties finding a limousine fit for a state visit in Kazakhstan. He was finally able to get hold of an open-top car in Kirgizstan, enabling him, Kunayev and Nehru to ride through the streets of Alma-Ata on 16 June 1955 to the cheers of the people.185 Public discussion of Stalin’s terror would not begin until late 1955, ahead of the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in February 1956. In October 1955, the deputy chairman of Kazakhstan’s KGB, Bayzulda Sakenov, was dismissed for not ‘understanding’ the decision of the CC of the CPSU in March 1954 to reform the security ‘organs’, failing to restructure his organization and for sending people to their ruin by falsifying evidence as late as 1950. While Second Secretary Yakovlev sought to placate the party, saying exonerating evidence might yet be found, Brezhnev insisted he be expelled swiftly: There will be no exoneration, it’s all clear-cut and there were many such asses, please excuse the vulgar expression, they were all like that. Strictly speaking, we must expel him from the party. With such skeletons in his closet he felt uncomfortable and that’s why he worked like he did [i.e. badly]. If we reopen every case, then nothing happened without him, he signed here, he sanctioned there, he gave instructions there.186

In late January 1956, Brezhnev held the Sixth Congress of the Kazakh party in preparation for the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. In his report, he devoted only a single page to the issue of ‘socialist rule of law’ and ‘Beriya’s criminal gangs’

Under Khrushchev

141

whose false accusations had subjected innocent people to repressions, in the terms of the official discourse on the Stalinist Terror.187 The new slogans were ‘living connection to the masses’ and ‘less red tape’. An issue that was hotly debated at the congress, and criticized by many oblast secretaries, was that while they preached less red tape, the CC and the ministries did not adhere to it themselves. Pavel Delvin, first secretary of Aktyubinskaya oblast, complained they had to send so many reports to Alma-Ata, that those reports were obviously mislaid and that they were then requested to send them again. He added that the only person to visit them regularly, sometimes for several hours at a time, was Brezhnev – all the other CC secretaries only touched down at the airfields for a few minutes on their way to Moscow.188 Comrade Seytzhan Polimbetov, secretary of the Gur’yev oblast party committee, agreed: ‘The chiefs of the departments of the CC of Kazakhstan are very rarely with us in the oblasts, as the previous speaker said. Their connection to the oblast committees is entirely inadequate, although the CC of the CPSU and Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev himself have demanded that the connection between the higher organs and the local organizations be strengthened.’189 Brezhnev and the CC responded immediately: on 1 February 1956, the CC bureau decided to trim the apparatus. Nineteen per cent of functionaries – 193 including the oblast committees, forty-six of them in the CC – were to be released to avoid superfluous correspondence.190 But Brezhnev did not continue the war against ‘zealous meetings, red tape and pen-pushing’ in Kazakhstan:191 as the Kazakhstan delegate he travelled to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow, where he was elected as a candidate to the Party Presidium of the CC of the CPSU and once again made a CC secretary at the subsequent plenum.192 He said his goodbyes to his comrades in a room at the Moskva hotel on Red Square.193 Leaving Kazakhstan Aleksandr Gavrilyuk claims that Brezhnev found the work in Kazakhstan difficult and hence when his friend USSR Minister of Agriculture Vladimir Matskevich came to celebrate Brezhnev’s birthday in the mountains outside Alma-Ata on 19 December 1955, Brezhnev asked him to see if Khrushchev would relieve him of his duties.194 It is hard to assess if there is any truth in this. Objectively, Brezhnev had an easier time in Kazakhstan than in Moldavia and Ukraine under Stalin. He was, however, a long way from his Ukrainian homeland and the centre of power, Moscow, the only place one could enjoy a long-term career. While Alma-Ata itself was a nice city with a pleasant climate, the steppe regions to which he frequently travelled were inhospitable and harsh. Even without Stalin, there was great pressure to succeed in the Virgin Lands campaign so that Khrushchev could triumph. And Brezhnev demanded of himself that he be present to take care of things and speak with the people. His restlessness twice caused him to collapse: he had a heart attack in Semipalatinsk after not sleeping for three nights; in Tselinograd – later Astana, today Nur-Sultan – he lost consciousness and came round on a stretcher.195 When he was in the office, he went there early and stayed until one or two in the morning. We know this from Liventsov, who tried to adapt to this style of working and soon became so tired and

142

Brezhnev

weak he could barely stand. He added, however, that Brezhnev always gave himself a little time to rest during the day.196 Ponomarenko too relates that Brezhnev could always be persuaded to go hunting, fishing or on a trip ‘to the ladies’.197 Yet again, the subject of ‘Brezhnev and the ladies’ raises its head. At least here we have a second witness; the singer Roza Tazhіbayevna Baglanova also has a tale or two to tell. She says Brezhnev could not take his eyes off her during the state visit by U Nu she sang at, and later in Moscow he overtly winked at her during meetings: ‘He was always reserved, but it was clear he had words on his mind he could never say to me.’198 A telling anecdote, although an anecdote all the same, is that Brezhnev suggested having the young women wear ‘little skirts’ instead of tracksuit trousers at the 1954 sport parade: ‘It would look nicer.’199 Brezhnev retained his soft spot for the ladies, then, and in Kazakhstan too he was noted for always dressing immaculately.200 Kazakhstan probably taught him two things, even if this is, once again, speculation: firstly, he gained the impression that after Stalin, all the resources one required were available, and more than ever it was down to the people and the party’s organizing them if plans were not fulfilled, houses were not built and fields were not cultivated. In other words, the Stalinist slogan ‘The cadres decide everything’ became a matter of course and an unquestioned truth. In Brezhnev’s world view, economic systems, environmental conditions or other external influences were not the decisive factor; people alone were responsible for the success or failure of their work. Secondly, he grew confident that in Khrushchev he had found the right patron, while the example of Ponomarenko was a warning that the greatest successes were of no use if you lost patronage.

Khrushchev’s right-hand man On 15 February, the second day of the Twentieth Party Congress, Brezhnev held the speech that was expected of him as head of a republic. Indeed, it was very much like the speeches given by all the regional secretaries. He praised the party’s policy on the Union level and listed his party’s successes in developing industry and agriculture in Kazakhstan, without getting bogged down in the details.201 The congress lasted twelve days and twenty sessions, all the heads of the republics and the secretaries of important oblasts giving their prepared statements on the reports of the CC and the Revision Commission in set order. While Khrushchev had broached the issue of restoring ‘socialist rule of law’ and all the speakers dutifully recited their lines on the subject, there were no indications there would be any special developments or further revelations. But on 24 February, in what was supposed to be the last session, just before the conclusion, a further, closed session was announced.202 Roy Medvedev goes as far as to claim that the congress had been officially pronounced closed – although the official minutes contradict him – when the delegates were surprised to be called to another session in the evening. Over the four hours that ensued, well into the night, Khrushchev read his speech ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’: The shocked delegates listened to the speech in silence; now and again Khrushchev was interrupted by exclamations of surprise and outrage. Khrushchev spoke of

Under Khrushchev

143

the unlawful repressions, sanctioned by Stalin, of the cruel torture to which many of those arrested were subjected, including members of the Politburo, of their last letters and submissions. […] The speaker blamed Stalin in particular for the heavy defeats of the Red Army during the first stage of the war; he blamed Stalin for the occupation of enormous areas of our country by the foreign troops. In Khrushchev’s testimony, Stalin was also the initiator of the mass repressions of the post-war era. […] Khrushchev held Stalin liable for the deep crisis in Soviet agriculture and for many gross miscalculations in Soviet foreign policy.203

Khrushchev’s report, prepared by the Pospelov Commission from the autumn of 1955 onwards and sanctioned in its oral form by the entire Party Presidium, became renowned as the ‘Secret Speech’ – ‘secret’ because discussion and questions were not allowed and while the text was read at party meetings throughout the entire Union, comment was never permitted at these meetings either.204 We do not know how Brezhnev reacted to this speech. Nothing it contained could really have been new to him or most of the 1,400 attending the congress. Brezhnev himself had lived through the Terror of 1937/38 and the difficult war years, along with all the other consequences of the ‘cult of personality’ that were now under attack. And yet many of the delegates expressed shock at the extent of the horrors, even though the crimes of the dekulakization and the mass Terror of 1937/38 remained taboo. Again, it remains speculation whether this speech influenced Brezhnev’s attitude to his patron, whether it confirmed to him that he had backed the right horse not only pragmatically, but also in terms of ideology, or whether he was disappointed that the cruelty of the collectivization campaign remained hushed up, or indeed whether he thought the revelations went too far. However, on the basis of what we do know about him, it is unlikely that he internally disagreed with Khrushchev and thought Stalin was justified. Presumably, he would have preferred to hear more about the suffering of the common people. In June 1956, the Party Presidium held four meetings dealing with the difficult legacy of Stalin. Brezhnev listed all the indictments Khrushchev brought against Stalin, without comment.205 The ‘Secret Speech’ stood at the beginning of the collaboration between Khrushchev and Brezhnev in Moscow. After the arrest of Beriya, the Virgin Lands campaign and the removal of Malenkov, for Brezhnev this speech was another sign that Khrushchev would fight to keep his grip on power and for his reforms, and that these two aims were inseparable. But we know as little about his activities under Khrushchev from 1956 to 1964 as we do about his reaction to the ‘Secret Speech’. The paucity of sources, already a hurdle in general, is compounded for this era by several circumstances: while the oblast and republic archives are accessible for the period before 1956, the files for this phase are held in the State Archive for Contemporary History (RGANI), which continues to keep the holdings on the CC Department for Armament and the Aerospace Industry, for which Brezhnev was responsible, under lock and key. Since Brezhnev did his best to have anything connecting him to Khrushchev erased after 1964, there are no official ‘memoirs’ on the previous eight years either, if we disregard the brief fragment on the ‘Cosmic October’. And because during this time Brezhnev was just one of many secretaries and not the number one as in Zaporozh’ye, Dnepropetrovsk, Kishinev or

144

Brezhnev

Alma-Ata, he hardly features in anyone else’s memoirs either. His notebooks shed a little light on the situation, but they provide more keywords than context. The year 1956 A general impression of the political climate, the jostling for power in the Party Presidium and Brezhnev’s statements is only provided by the published ‘rough notes’ of the Presidium, themselves resembling keywords more than minutes. Both these ‘jottings’ and the minutes of the CC plenum meetings reveal that he hardly said anything between 1956 and 1964. He was clearly not a great speaker and preferred to leave the discussion to others while he listened. In the Presidium he nevertheless spoke occasionally, but the records of the CC plenums hardly include any speeches by him. This seems typical of his attitude towards speeches; when he became general secretary in 1964 and thus the main speaker, he was not the sole author, but set up a team of speech-writers. Furthermore, the ability to listen was considered one of his main qualities. These years demonstrate that he was not one to seek the limelight or push his opinion through, but someone who listened and waited. He was, then, the most reserved of the eight CC secretaries who prepared and supported Khrushchev’s policies and the Presidium meetings.206 1956 in particular was marked by great tensions and controversies – often only fought out between the lines – concerning policy. Consensus was largely found on economic expansion and developing infrastructure, cancelling construction of the Palace of the Soviets and reintroducing the Order of Lenin.207 Brezhnev helped reform the production norms in industry, draw up a production and test plan for new Tupolev aeroplanes and set the investment targets for 1957.208 He was thus involved in issues that would later become the main foci of his own politics: increasing productivity to promote intensive growth with fewer resources and workers, and providing material incentives for the latter, including higher wages.209 As a member of the investigation committee, he was also sent by Khrushchev to the various republics and oblasts to report on difficulties in developing new industrial giants or constructing the type Il-14 aircraft.210 Although he was now based in Moscow, he still saw the situation in many other parts of the country. The plants and factories that had been built from scratch in the steppe ran into supply shortages and the new construction sites lacked everything: building materials, accommodation for the workers, provisions, water, electricity and medical care.211 Meanwhile, the Party Presidium argued over political questions that would decide the direction taken in the post-Stalinist era. Brezhnev was involved in preparing the draft resolution to reform the penal code. While the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Kliment Voroshilov, defended the document and Foreign Minister Molotov backtracked by saying the political significance of this document was not clear to them, Khrushchev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Bulganin and Presidium member Lazar’ Kaganovich agreed that such a reform would lead to an increase in repressions. The decree was eventually rejected as ‘politically wrong and harmful’.212 The reform was not passed until 1960, after broad discussion among legal experts and in the Soviet public sphere.213 We do not know what role Brezhnev played in this dispute, but whenever he had anything to say, he always supported Khrushchev,

Under Khrushchev

145

praised him for his contribution and advocated adopting his solution. For instance, on 28 May 1956, he intervened in the argument over the Foreign Ministry. Khrushchev wished to dismiss the long-serving Foreign Minister Molotov, who had ultimately fallen out of favour with Stalin but was nevertheless associated with his rule; potential successors were Minister for Foreign Trade Mikoyan and the CC secretaries Mikhail Suslov and Dmitriy Shepilov. Brezhnev argued there was no way of knowing whether Molotov wouldn’t repeat his mistakes and that it made sense to appoint a new foreign minister. He recommended Mikoyan – although the position went to Shepilov.214 The very fact that three candidates were discussed demonstrates how shaky Khrushchev’s position was; it was very much an open race. It has always been claimed that Shepilov’s appointment was a case of Khrushchev installing his man.215 But it is unthinkable that Brezhnev would have praised a candidate who wasn’t Khrushchev’s own choice. While Mikoyan belonged to the old guard, in 1964 he was the only one to support Khrushchev to the last. Hence it is more plausible that the battle to appoint the foreign minister was one Khrushchev lost, despite Brezhnev’s support. This is also indicated by the fact that he replaced Shepilov as early as February 1957. In 1956, the Presidium not only argued over appointments and policy following the Twentieth Party Congress, but also had to deal with the consequences of the ‘Secret Speech’ in the ‘brother countries’. When a workers’ strike broke out in Poznań, Poland, on 28 June 1956, the Moscow Presidium approved large-scale economic aid only a few days later. This was a new strategy of attempting to keep the population in other socialist countries satisfied by supplying plenty of raw materials and foodstuffs: ‘If they want gold – then give them gold too.’216 Brezhnev thus had a ‘front row’ view of the new freedoms’ impact and was present at the sometimes heated or even panicked discussions on how to prevent the revelations about Stalin’s crimes from leading to the collapse of the socialist system. He also witnessed the Presidium meeting of 20 October 1956, when Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov, Kaganovich, General Konev and Zhukov reported on their one-day visit to Warsaw, where they had attempted to prevent the removal of Polish party chairman Konstantin Rokossowski. After his successor Władysław Gomułka promised not to leave the Warsaw Pact, the unwelcome intervention team returned to Moscow. Although Khrushchev had agreed to turn around the troops already heading for Warsaw, the minutes of the meeting succinctly note: ‘There is only one solution – putting an end to what is happening in Poland.’217 But the tanks indeed returned to their bases; the Polish party had given Khrushchev sufficient indication they did not question socialism and the alliance with Moscow. The same could not be said for the Hungarians and their reforms. At the same meeting on 20 October, the Presidium had considered sending Mikoyan to monitor the situation.218 Only three days later, the student protest in Budapest had morphed into an armed revolt. The Presidium unanimously agreed to send troops instead of Mikoyan and Suslov. Brezhnev said nothing.219 On 24 October, around 30,000 Soviet soldiers and 1,100 tanks entered Budapest. This only escalated the situation, the rebels defending themselves. Thus Brezhnev became acquainted with the full spectrum of instruments the party leadership had at its disposal, from economic aid to military intervention. This included consultation with the party leaders of the other brother countries to ensure

146

Brezhnev

they offered their support. Brezhnev was present when the GDR’s Walter Ulbricht, the CSSR’s Antonín Novotný and Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov were informed.220 In view of the danger of the Hungarian conflict developing into a civil war, on 28 and 30 October the Presidium intensively discussed its options and delegated a group including Brezhnev to prepare the relevant documents and declarations.221 Brezhnev was also in attendance when the Presidium was forced to negotiate with the reformer Imre Nagy.222 Together with Suslov, he was to compile a list of Hungarian cadres on whom Moscow could rely and determine how to use them.223 At the Moscow meeting of 2 November, also attended by the Hungarians János Kádár, Ferenc Münnich and István Bata, Brezhnev documented large sections of their reports on the situation in his notebook.224 On 3 November, the Presidium decided to send Mikoyan and Brezhnev to Budapest to hold further negotiations.225 But the Presidium recalled Brezhnev and Mikoyan on 4 November, once Nagy had announced the break with the Warsaw Pact, the Hungarian workers’ party had disbanded and Khrushchev thought Nagy was playing into the hands of France and Britain, who had just occupied the Suez Canal. Moscow launched a military operation that suppressed all resistance within a few days.226 Some 20,000 Hungarians and 1,500 Soviet troops died. Brezhnev stated on 6 November that he considered the declaration to the new provisional Hungarian government to be appropriate. The Presidium delegated him to convey this declaration and Moscow’s wishes, together with Suslov and Mikoyan.227 According to his later aide Aleksandr Bovin, Brezhnev was the author of the address Hungary’s new chairman of the Council of Ministers, János Kádár, gave to his people.228 Brezhnev thus experienced 1956 as an extremely turbulent year, from the awakening and liberation of the Twentieth Party Congress to the bloody suppression of the reform movement in Hungary. Like Khrushchev, he too seemed to be in no doubt that reform, self-determination and the independence of the brother parties were to be stopped wherever they represented a threat to the Warsaw Pact as an alliance and the strategic influence of the Soviet Union. Since he rarely spoke, it remains unclear how he arrived at this stance, whether it seemed obvious to him or was a difficult learning process in the course of which he gradually abandoned all his scruples. Nevertheless, what he experienced in 1956 was not dissimilar to what he had to go through as party chairman during the Prague Spring of 1968. One might presume that he learnt from and with Khrushchev that invasion could only be the last resort, but one from which the leader of the party could not shy away. The decisive battle of June 1957 After the turbulence of 1956, 1957 promised to be a year of calm. The Presidium’s main focus was on economic reform and its large-scale housing programme. Together with CC secretaries Ekaterina Furtseva and Averkiy Aristov, Brezhnev helped Khrushchev disband the central industrial ministries, replacing them with regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy), a far-reaching structural reform which he would later reverse himself.229 In 1957, however, it was an attractive idea to give the factory directors greater freedom in decision-making instead of insisting on centralized control from Moscow.230 It was this ousting of many ministers together with Khrushchev’s style of doing politics

Under Khrushchev

147

and the prospect of further revelations about Stalin’s accomplices that moved the longserving members of the Presidium and Stalin’s former allies to hold secret discussions about overthrowing the leader. The plotters included Stalin’s close ally Kaganovich, Malenkov and Molotov, both of whom Khrushchev had dismissed, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Bulganin, his first deputy Mikhail Pervukhin, President Voroshilov and the deposed foreign minister, Shepilov.231 Their plan was to abolish the post of first secretary entirely and to demote Khrushchev to minister of agriculture.232 Purporting to wish to discuss their speeches for the 250th anniversary of the city of Leningrad, they called for Khrushchev to attend a Presidium session on 18 June 1957.233 But before the meeting, Mikoyan was able to warn the young Presidium members Furtseva and Brezhnev that trouble was brewing and that they simply had to assemble everyone who was absent. While the Presidium held a question-and-answer session with Hungarian journalists at 3.00 pm and Furtseva recalled Marshal Zhukov from a manoeuvre, according to Khrushchev’s son Sergey Brezhnev immediately phoned Major General Aleksandr Saburov, whom they mistakenly believed to be a Khrushchev supporter, and other members of the Presidium.234 Brezhnev’s notebooks record Zhukov’s telephone number under this date along with two other government numbers, and hence it is possible that he also summoned Zhukov.235 Kaganovich had noticed Brezhnev’s absence and brusquely demanded to know where he had been; Brezhnev lied to him, saying he had gone to the toilet feeling unwell.236 When the meeting finally reconvened in the late afternoon, Malenkov immediately opened with strong criticism of Khrushchev, in the presence of Khrushchev himself and those seven full members who advocated his dismissal, as well as three candidates without voting rights: Brezhnev, Furtseva and Zhukov, who had arrived in the meantime. There were no official minutes,237 but Brezhnev made a note of the plotters’ accusations. They said Khrushchev was an ‘eccentric’ person and was developing his own cult of personality.238 Although the rebels could have deposed Khrushchev by majority vote, Bulganin, chairing the meeting, was persuaded to adjourn the decision until the next day.239 Brezhnev responded to the crisis in characteristic fashion: on the one hand, he and Furtseva were among those who immediately attempted to gather the other members of the Presidium in the Khrushchev camp.240 On the other hand, he obviously couldn’t stand the tension, since after lying to Kaganovich, he is said to have genuinely felt ill and dashed to the toilet.241 After Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov and Bulganin had presented their accusations and demanded that Khrushchev be deposed, mostly very aggressively, and Zhukov, Nikolay Shvernik and Mikoyan had defended him, it was Brezhnev’s turn to speak. He tried to counter the plotters’ arguments objectively, pointing to a long list of home and foreign policy successes.242 The rebels responded with furious shouting, led by Kaganovich, who threatened, ‘Together with him you are a discredit to the party. We will send you to the desert. Have you forgotten how you were in the military political administration? Now you’re going back there!’243 Brezhnev is said to have collapsed and been carried out unconscious, and to have stayed away from further Presidium meetings.244 According to the Presidium candidate Nuritdin Mukhitdinov, who discussed how to proceed together with Suslov, Zhukov and Furtseva in Khrushchev’s office that evening, Khrushchev had serious doubts about whether Brezhnev’s breakdown was genuine:

148

Brezhnev

It’s worrying how Brezhnev carried on. A cowardly man without principles! No sooner does Kaganovich aim a few harsh words in his direction than he turns away from us and is totally capable of switching camps. It would be good to know if he really is sick. I’m sure he’s faking it, wants to keep out of it and save his skin.245

But during the turbulent Presidium meeting the following day, when regular CC members stormed the session to demand a plenum, Khrushchev received a message from Brezhnev expressing his deep regret that he had become ill then of all moments and ensured him he had his full support, insisting he had to remain first secretary while the plotters should be expelled from the party and severely punished.246 In Khrushchev’s eyes, he was completely rehabilitated. At the same time, Brezhnev had clearly showed the weak nerves that would be a burden to him as general secretary. He had suffered breakdowns in Moldavia and Kazakhstan because he had abused his health; this time, however, it was obviously due to nervous tension. Seven years later, he claimed it had been a heart attack.247 But at the extraordinary CC plenum of 22 to 29 June, attended by 266 members who had rushed to Moscow not to depose Khrushchev but to deal with the ‘Anti-Party Group’, Brezhnev was also in attendance. Moreover, he launched a blazing indictment of the plotters in which he depicted the full drama of the moment: Georgiy Konstantinovich [Zhukov] arrived; before he entered the room I told him that a treacherous matter was clearly going to be discussed. I asked him which side are you on, theirs or ours? That’s what the decision will depend on. We agreed to hold out to the last. The meeting began. […] We declared that we did not agree to discuss this issue in the Presidium, that we demanded a plenum, but our insistence was no use.248

Brezhnev not only accused Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich of being henchmen to the secret police chiefs Ezhov and Beriya; he also took his personal revenge on Kaganovich for his intrigue in Ukraine, for the murder of the Ukrainian party leadership during the Great Terror and his actions in Dnepropetrovsk during the famine of the post-war years: I must say to you, Comrade Kaganovich, straight to your face: what do you know about the villages? Remember how you came to Ukraine with spring wheat and maltreated the Ukrainian party organization. […] You forced us to abolish winter wheat, you terrorized us, abusing political slogans in doing so. […] We, the oblast committee secretaries, could not show our faces from the 15th or the 20th of every month. We telephoned, sent telegrams, begged for an advance […], for 100 grams of bread for the workers.249

On the one hand, it was a cheap shot to vilify the Terror when it was already clear Khrushchev’s supporters had won and the only remaining issue might have been how they were to be punished. On the other hand, Brezhnev’s speech certainly gives the

Under Khrushchev

149

impression he was venting his rage and despair from the years 1937/38 and 1947– 1950 when he called: You, Kaganovich, were the most unrelenting organizer of the hunt of party and independent cadres. […] You wrote verbatim: ‘remove from work all persons who are capable of diversion within a month’. (Noise, laughter in the room) ‘Capable’, that means everybody. And how you persecuted Postyshev [deputy secretary of Ukraine, shot in 1939], how you persecuted him.250

The attempted putsch and the June Plenum had serious repercussions: the plotters were expelled from the Presidium and Khrushchev emerged as the clear victor.251 Along with Furtseva, Zhukov and others who had saved the first secretary, Brezhnev was made a full member of the Presidium. At the same time, he must have learnt a lesson in politics that would appear to have shaped his actions seven years later, when he himself ousted Khrushchev: he had learnt that it was not enough to keep those who weren’t in on it away from the Presidium meeting; they all had to be convinced. And the plotters also had to have the CC plenum on their side. In 1957, however, he will not have had such thoughts; the putsch merely demonstrated how unstable the political situation was at that point in time and how quickly the wind could change. The expulsion of the others After his passionate speech at the plenum, Brezhnev continued to serve as Khrushchev’s echo at the Presidium meetings. He usually opened with the assurance that he supported Khrushchev’s speech entirely, praising it as superb.252 Until 1964, he gave only one more big speech at the CC party plenums that matched his attack on Kaganovich for passion, structure and significance: just a few months after the events in June, at the October Plenum Marshal Zhukov was expelled from the Party Presidium and the CC and lost his minister’s post. The two-day plenum dealt solely with the minister of defence, who in the June had offered to arrest the Anti-Party Group to save Khrushchev. Contemporaries presume that this very offer made him appear too powerful and independent to Khrushchev. On the pretext that he had removed the army from the control of the party and established his own dictatorship, first the Presidium, then the plenum went to work on him.253 In both the Presidium meeting and the plenum, Brezhnev gave a fierce speech blasting Zhukov’s ‘cult of personality’.254 This time, he seemed sovereign, confident and categorical, as Mukhitdinov reported.255 It is unclear, however, whether Brezhnev actually despised Zhukov. While he had history with Kaganovich, he had not had any dealings with the marshal. He nevertheless said that when he had visited the troops, officers had complained to him about the regime of terror Zhukov had established in the army: ‘Almost everyone […] told me that in such an atmosphere they didn’t know what the next day would bring, they didn’t know – will I be working or roasting rusks [in a camp]’.256 Zhukov, he claimed, had dismissed fifty per cent of the army’s political workers, insulted the officers and threatened to try them for criticism and self-criticism, and had declared that the Military Council and the

150

Brezhnev

political administration should be abolished.257 Outraged, Brezhnev asked him, ‘I believed you [when you said] we would implement the decrees of the Twentieth Party Congress together, but you? Now I don’t believe you any more!’258 In other words, Zhukov was attacked for a style of leadership rooted in the Stalin era and was now being instrumentalized by Khrushchev to depose a powerful potential rival. It is beyond doubt that Brezhnev disliked a leadership style based on shouting, fear and intimidation. To what extent he recognized the issue here was less to do with the army than a power struggle within the Presidium, and simply played along, is a question that must remain unanswered. Brezhnev loyally stood by Khrushchev whenever the latter got rid of (supposed) competitors or opponents. Another example was 25 March 1958, when Bulganin was forced out of his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers so that Khrushchev could also take control of the government. Brezhnev reported to the Presidium, ‘Khrushchev’s accession to office will incomparably strengthen the authority of the Council of Ministers. He will contribute to foreign policy with his genius.’259 He also lent his support when Khrushchev had reprimands issued to Voroshilov in 1958, for careless remarks, and Aleksey Kirichenko in 1959, for excessive independence, before they were banned from the Presidium in 1960.260 We do not know what Brezhnev’s motives were. Presumably he acted out of a combination of general party discipline, personal loyalty to Khrushchev and political conviction. He certainly succeeded in showing himself to be Khrushchev’s most faithful supporter. And Khrushchev rewarded him correspondingly: when the CC of the CPSU founded a bureau responsible for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in early 1958, Khrushchev was formally the chairman, but made Brezhnev his deputy and entrusted him with its leadership in practice.261 After the tumultuous year of 1956 and the coup of 1957, 1958 and 1959 saw the political situation stabilize. In the RSFSR bureau, Brezhnev was responsible for cadre selection and industrial policy and used this role to expand his networks or to transfer existing contacts to Moscow. He had been able to bring Chernenko from Moldavia to Moscow to serve on the CC’s propaganda department in 1956. In 1958, he sent for Trapeznikov, whom he was also able to install as an instructor in the same department. His personal assistant in Kazakhstan, Golikov, also followed him to Moscow, where he continued to serve as his ‘right-hand man’.262 Secretary for armament and rocket science Brezhnev was deputy chairman of the Russian bureau for just under four months, however; on 29 March 1958 Khrushchev entrusted him with another key position: he was placed in charge of the armament industry, including space travel, as well as heavy industry and construction.263 This sector was important not only because of its economic power, but also because it allowed him to develop further crucial networks in the ‘military-industrial complex’ and bestowed upon him the glory of being the man under whom the Soviet Union became world leaders in rocket science.264 Even Semichastnyy, who was dismissed by Brezhnev from his post as chief of the KGB and whose writings were otherwise not short of criticism and bitterness towards him, had to concede that

Under Khrushchev

151

the first successes in space travel, nuclear weapon development, the hydrogen bomb and the modernization of Soviet weapons systems were ‘somehow’ down to Brezhnev.265 At the same time, Brezhnev was also made a member of the Defence Council; he now headed the Commission for the Armament Industry of the CC Presidium and served as Khrushchev’s deputy on the Defence Council’s Committee for Nuclear, Hydrogen and Missile Weapons.266 Brezhnev was now one of the top decision-makers when it came to the development and production of defence and missile systems.267 His extremely detailed notes from these years consist largely of technical data on missile ranges and fuels and the names of the builders, the rockets and their production sites.268 To an extent, he was already familiar with the material, since Mikhail Yangel’s construction bureau and its missile production were based in his adopted home city of Dnepropetrovsk.269 As party leader in Kazakhstan, he was not only involved in the selection of Baikonur as a rocket launch site in 1954, but monitored its construction from mid-1955 onwards, paying several visits to the site.270 He was now in charge of the production sites in the cities of Kuybyshev, Perm’, Omsk and Orenburg too.271 This new activity also presented him with his first visit to the West, to the international exhibition in Brussels. He took his wife and son with him.272 In this new role, in the spring of 1958 he also became acquainted with Andrey Sakharov, the ‘father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb’ and later dissident, who certainly formed a positive impression of Brezhnev:273 Brezhnev received us in his new little office in the building where I had once also met Beriya. When we entered, Brezhnev called, ‘Ah, the bombers have come!’ While we sat down and became familiar with the situation, Brezhnev told us that his father, a pure-blooded worker, considered all those who manufactured the new weapons for the annihilation of people to be the real criminals and thought all these evil inventors should be taken up a mountain and hanged as a warning for all the world to see. ‘Now I myself am concerned with this infernal stuff, just like you and likewise for a good cause.’274

Sakharov and his colleague had come to oppose the passing of a new directive being prepared by Brezhnev’s Committee for Armament Technology: ‘He listened to us attentively, made a note of something and then said, “I have understood you entirely. I will consult with my comrades. You will be informed of our decision.” He stood up and pleasantly accompanied us to the door, where he shook hands with everyone. The directive was not passed.’275 Sakharov’s experience is echoed by many in this period: they found Brezhnev to be friendly, approachable, understanding, without conceit and ready to help. The rocket engineer Boris Chertok also relates how although he and his colleagues were initially disappointed to hear ‘only’ Brezhnev, not Khrushchev, would be visiting their office and production plant in February 1960, they were very taken with his performance: ‘Brezhnev walked around observing attentively and listening without interrupting and asking questions. Sometimes he raised his unusually bushy eyebrows in surprise.’276 Brezhnev also regaled them with an anecdote to loosen the atmosphere,277 but spoilt the good impression by flippantly closing, in his typically jovial manner: ‘ “It

152

Brezhnev

wouldn’t hurt if you could launch some sort of bigger ‘beetle’ to make even more noise.” […] Everyone was insulted by such an attitude to cosmic technology.’278 Despite these minor gaffes, the greats of the aerospace industry were keen to have Brezhnev’s ear, since all their plans and constructions had to be passed by his commission. Be it lead rocket engineer Sergey Korolëv, the cosmodrome site manager Georgiy Shubnikov or Deputy Minister of Defence Mitrofan Nedelin, head of the rocket programme – he listened to all of them and tried to be of assistance.279 The ‘memoir’ ‘Cosmic October’, published as a fragment after his death, stressed his dealings with all the big names in space travel and aeronautics. Brezhnev, it claimed, also met with Korolëv without reason, simply to chat and joke; in 1958 he occasionally made late-night visits to the factory where they were building the ‘Vostok’, the craft that would take Gagarin into space, to drink tea with him and ask if he was getting enough sleep.280 In fact, however, Brezhnev’s notes show that Korolëv sometimes annoyed him, for instance when he told him that all other rocket engineers were useless and only he really knew what he was doing, and when he insisted on continuing development of the R-9A rocket instead of the R-16.281 Brezhnev’s memoirs continue: ‘As secretary of the CC I was responsible for matters concerning the further development of our country’s defence capacity and for civil aviation; I often spoke with Tupolev, Il’yushin, A.I. Mikoyan, P.O. Sukhoy, A.S. Yakovlev, O.K. Antonov and others.’282 But Brezhnev was not only linked to famous engineers and cosmonauts, with whom he did actually have dealings; his ghostwriters also attempted to imply it was Brezhnev who gave the green light for the launch of Sputnik,283 despite the fact that Khrushchev had commissioned ‘Earth’s artificial satellite’ in 1955.284 Nevertheless, great triumphs of Soviet spaceflight took place on his watch: after the first Sputnik on 4 October 1957, the first satellite, Luna-1, orbited the sun in 1959, the probe Luna-2 reached the moon and Luna-3 photographed its dark side, and finally, on 12 April 1961, Yuriy Gagarin became the first man in space. By then, Brezhnev was president of the Soviet Union and did not miss the opportunity to decorate Gagarin for his achievements. But aerospace crises and catastrophes were also Brezhnev’s responsibility. On 6 March 1958, the Presidium delegated him, along with some others, to develop measures to impede spying missions the USA was regularly conducting with its U2 planes over Soviet territory. On 1 May 1960, one was shot down. While the American ‘spy’ survived, the pilot of a Soviet interceptor was killed by ‘friendly fire’.285 Brezhnev also headed the commission investigating the cause of the rocket explosion in Baikonur on 24 October 1960, in which 126 people, including the commander Nedelin, lost their lives.286 Khrushchev’s son recalls, ‘Brezhnev immediately went to the [launch site]. He drove around and looked at everything. The picture of destruction made a strong impression even on Grechko and Brezhnev with their experience of the war. […] Upon his return to Moscow, Brezhnev reported to my father: it was an unanticipated accident due to a tragic chain of events.’287 In rocket engineering circles, Brezhnev was greatly respected for advising Khrushchev that no one was to be held responsible and that they should steadfastly continue to build rockets.288 The engineer Yangel’ blamed himself for the disaster and insisted he should be punished; instead, Brezhnev arranged for him to have a better apartment in Moscow.289

Under Khrushchev

153

Given the Soviet successes in spaceflight that amazed the world, upstaging the USA and their purported technological superiority, it was not just Khrushchev who thought he had secured his power with a survived putsch attempt and this new international status. Brezhnev too basked in the success and would later be able to use it to his advantage. The two years he spent as secretary for armament and rockets perhaps had another consequence, proposes the journalist Vladimir Kuznechevskiy. No limits were imposed on the armament and rocket sector; all resources and technologies requested by the rocket and weapons manufacturers were approved. Hence Brezhnev mistakenly assumed that all the other areas of the economy enjoyed the same health.290 While this seems a logical conclusion, it overlooks the fact that Brezhnev was thoroughly familiar with conditions in other economic sectors and agriculture due to his activity in Ukraine, Moldavia and Kazakhstan. It is likelier, albeit just as speculative, that his years as armament secretary gave Brezhnev the engineer faith in the economic strength of the USSR and its potential as a technological superpower. Like many other Soviet people, in the late 1950s and early 1960s he will have thought the Soviet Union was finally on the right path. Supplies improved, the impetus had been given for huge housing programmes, relations with the USA relaxed and even promised to become friendly in 1959, and the successes in spaceflight earned respect and recognition throughout the world. All this seemed to prove that the path taken by Stalin and corrected by Khrushchev, as painful and costly as it was, was nevertheless the correct one.

President of the Soviet Union On 4 May 1960, the Party Presidium agreed to Khrushchev’s suggestion that it propose Brezhnev as the new chairman of the Presidium to the Supreme Soviet.291 And so Brezhnev was elected president of the USSR on 7 May 1960. He relinquished his post as CC secretary and was now charged with representing his country abroad and approving laws and petitions at home. What for a long time was considered to have been a demotion by the West was in fact a tactical manoeuvre by Khrushchev,292 who wanted rid of the old, now somewhat doddery President Voroshilov. As was the practice in such cases, Voroshilov was asked to request his release on ‘health grounds’.293 Khrushchev’s aim was to fill this position with a reliable acolyte.294 Hence Brezhnev was by no means deposed or shunted – on the contrary: he became a full member of the Party Presidium, sat on the Defence Council and continued to oversee developments in rocket science. As president, he now had the additional task of representing the Soviet Union abroad. Particularly in retrospect, it seems this was the best position for Brezhnev, given his abilities and predilections. He clearly loved handing out decorations and accepting certificates of accreditation. He was in his element representing the state, dressing well for the occasion, conducting small talk, joking with his interlocutors, visiting foreign countries, shaking hands with people and telling them about the wonderful Soviet Union.295 This was clearly a promotion in terms of prestige and renown: Brezhnev was now given the honour otherwise reserved for the head of the party and

154

Brezhnev

the head of state: at the airport he was seen off upon his departure and welcomed upon his return by the entire Party Presidium and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.296 His name became known abroad and he received almost as much press coverage as Khrushchev, the better quality of his suits also receiving a mention.297 As a candidate for the Supreme Soviet, Brezhnev was assigned to the Bauman constituency in Moscow, an old workers’ district whose delegate he remained for the rest of his days.298 He installed his closest aides Tsukanov and Chernenko in the Secretariat of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, where they continued to provide loyal service, and showed himself to be a pleasant, amiable boss who liked to join his subordinates on the landing for a smoke.299 He tried to get to know all of his staff and their respective roles, as one of them, E.T. Yurchik, reported: ‘Comrade Brezhnev took a very close interest and often attended the meetings of the editorial commission when we compiled the minutes; he was interested in how we did it.’300 In April 1961, he also summoned the secretaries of all the republics’ Supreme Soviets to Moscow so that they could discuss their work in law-making and the publication of legislative texts in the languages of the republics as well as issues pertaining to the workers, foreign delegations, citizenship and honours.301 His ability to win people over and the extent to which this owed to his good looks and – relatively – youthful temperament were described by his later interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, who first encountered him at an embassy reception in 1956: ‘Above average height, powerful, youthful, with his hair combed back, he radiated health and strength. He got out of the car and bounded up the steps.’ When he was introduced to the group of available interpreters, he offered the only woman, Tat’yana Sirotina, his arm: ‘ “Excellent, I definitely need a female interpreter,” he said in his pleasant bass. Tatyana was a feisty woman, she took his arm and Brezhnev disappeared with her into the room, striding just as energetically. We were very taken with that.’302 His foreign interlocutors also liked his straightforward, warm manner, even if it might have seemed somewhat unconventional at first. The Indian ambassador Triloki Nath Kaul recalled, ‘He gave me the impression of an affable, gentle, pleasant and good-natured person. After our conversation he offered me three chocolates: “Eat one to your country, the second to yourself and the third to your children.” I later discovered that was his opening gambit in conversation with most foreign representatives.’303 Medals and certificates One of Brezhnev’s tasks as president was to present newly appointed ambassadors with their certificates, and he went about it with great dignity. The diplomat Boris Kolokolov remembered how Brezhnev lent this bureaucratic, administrative act a special air of ceremony with his performance and stately appearance. He shook hands with everyone, gave everyone an attentive smile and gave off the aura of a hospitable landowner.304 Brezhnev performed the president’s duty of awarding state honours with great diligence but also great enjoyment. This is particularly evident in the photographs taken at the many awards ceremonies, only a few of which show him sombre and statesmanlike; many record Brezhnev and the Presidium secretary, Mikhail Georgadze, exuberantly joking, grinning and enjoying

Under Khrushchev

Figure 17 Brezhnev presents Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva with a medal, 17 December 1960.

Figure 18 Brezhnev pins a medal to the lapel of the head of the Georgian party, Vasiliy Mzhavanadze; between them is Mikhail Georgadze, 22 September 1962.

155

156

Brezhnev

themselves. It was not only with Georgadze that Brezhnev had a markedly friendly relationship. He still appeared to get along with Voroshilov too, despite having attacked him in the Presidium in 1958 and having forced him out of office in 1960. Brezhnev presented him with medals in November 1960 and March 1961; the photos show the two men laughing, gesticulating and kissing each other.305 Brezhnev visibly took great delight in decorating the heads of the republics, such as Georgia’s First Secretary Vasiliy Mzhavanadze, White Russian First Secretary Kirill Mazurov, or his colleague, Culture Minister Ekaterina Furtseva.306 This activity not only put him in touch with everyone who was important, but also clearly gave him the opportunity to meet them on enjoyable, relaxed occasions and thus leave them with fond memories of him. A highlight was certainly decorating Gagarin for his voyage into space; he also presented the Marshal’s Star to leading military figures and had his photograph taken with them.307 On 16 June 1961, he himself was honoured as a ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’ for the successful spaceflight, together with Khrushchev and the chairman of the Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh.308 The photo taken of the occasion not only depicts a group of high-ranking politicians and scientists relaxed and smiling, but also shows how close Khrushchev and Brezhnev were as they grin for the camera, separated only by Keldysh.309 Brezhnev represented Khrushchev’s policies with great verve and it would seem with great conviction too. In May 1964, he presented the Moscow Chief Building Authority with Orders of Lenin, stressing that Stalin’s cult of personality had ruined the construction industry and that it was thanks to Khrushchev that half of the Soviet population had been able to move into new accommodation since 1954. As was his wont, he ended his speech in the Luzhniki sports stadium with a strophe by the avantgarde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom he had adored since his youth: I know there will be a city I know a garden will bloom when there are people like this in our Soviet land!310

Constitutional reform Khrushchev and Brezhnev remained a close-knit team: together they basked in the glory of the cosmonauts, pressed on with further de-Stalinization and worked on modernizing the party and the state. The reform to the Party Statute of 1962 was followed by constitutional reform. Brezhnev has repeatedly been accused of never

Under Khrushchev

157

having personally condemned Stalin.311 The accusation is incorrect, for following the Twenty-Second Party Congress of October 1961, at which Khrushchev had Stalin removed from the mausoleum, Brezhnev also held a speech at the party assembly of the Supreme Soviet in December 1961 which could not be any clearer: The cult of personality had severe consequences for the entire economy, the political and intellectual life of the country. Stalin seriously violated Lenin’s principles of party and state leadership, abused his power. […] One dire consequence of the cult of personality was serious violation of the rule of law, which led to mass repressions and the persecution of party, state and military cadres. The cult of personality crippled the activity and initiatives of the masses, suffocated lively, vigorous ideas, bore submissiveness, evasiveness, mistrust and mutual suspicion.312

But, he continued, this era had been overcome. The Anti-Party Group had been defeated, socialist rule of law had been reinstated, socialist democracy was now in the phase of the developed construction of communism. It was for this very reason that the party had passed the new statute at the Twenty-Second Party Congress and the Supreme Soviet would now set about preparing a new constitution.313 Work on a new constitution that would have replaced the one established under Stalin in 1936 and would thus have served as yet another marker of the end of Stalinism was extremely intensive; it took over three years, and then, just before it was completed in 1964, Khrushchev was ousted. It was not until 1977 that Brezhnev had his own constitution passed – it largely built on the drafts of 1962–1964. Between 1962 and 1964, Brezhnev personally headed the subcommittee tasked with the ‘issues of state administration, the activities of the Soviets and societal organizations’. For him, one of the core ideas was that the people were all-powerful, which was manifested on the one hand in the party and the societal organizations, and on the other hand was to be supported by elements of grassroots democracy.314 Hence he advocated that the soviets be not so much executive organs of state power as self-governing bodies for the local population. Local self-governance was to be restored and would build on the revived citizens’ assemblies.315 Instead of the executive committees – that is, the town or district councils – presidiums of the local soviets were to be elected. Between meetings of the soviets, these presidiums would take over their functions, so that ‘officials’ would be replaced by deputies from the people.316 The reform Brezhnev presented in July 1964 also provided for popular referenda, and discussion of lawmaking by the people, who would also have the right to propose laws themselves.317 The constitutional reform also established what was already the practice under Khrushchev: limitations on terms of office. No one could be elected to the soviets for more than three terms.318 At the same time, Brezhnev advocated that it be written into the constitution that the party was society’s leading and guiding force.319 His commission had held long discussions on whether the party was an organ of the people deployed from below, or a societal force that controlled things from above.320 Brezhnev ultimately had the latter written into the constitution of 1977. It is unclear why he did not continue to pursue or implement the constitutional reform, which was

158

Brezhnev

obviously important to him, after Khrushchev was deposed. We can only assume that firstly he already had his hands full trying to cement his power, and that secondly he did not want to pass a constitution bearing Khrushchev’s name. The reform of 1977 became a highlight of his career and self-presentation: he used it to be re-elected president and thus the foremost figure in the party and the state. Globetrotter As president, Brezhnev began to travel abroad. In 1961 he made Andrey AleksandrovAgentov his advisor on international affairs; he openly confided in him that he knew about agriculture, industry and the army, but not foreign policy and needed someone who would show him the ropes. Aleksandrov-Agentov remained one of the architects of Brezhnev’s foreign policy until 1982.321 Brezhnev redefined the position of president. While for his predecessors it had been a sort of ‘pre-retirement arrangement’, Brezhnev, under instructions from Khrushchev, made it a key role in foreign policy. This was also noted by the Foreign Office in Bonn.322 Admittedly, he rarely visited the Western, capitalist countries with which he would negotiate years later; this he had to leave to Khrushchev. His total of fifteen foreign assignments took him to Africa, emerging countries such as India, Iran and Afghanistan, but also to Finland, to forge new friendships in the West, and Yugoslavia, to revive old ones that had broken down under Stalin.323 He not only paid visits, but as an ambassador for his country promoted the Soviet Union and the socialist path, enticing state representatives with money and technology, and in some cases weapons too. It was certainly not only about geostrategic considerations or the hope of securing sources of raw materials in the ‘Third World’. Rather, against the backdrop of the Cold War the Party Presidium placed great emphasis on selling the Soviet Union as the de facto better state and economic system. If socialism stood for a dignified life without exploitation, then the seventeen African states granted independence in 1960 would surely recognize that.324 Soviet foreign policy counted on the fact that, unlike the West, Russia had never had colonies in Africa and was not involved in any of the bloody wars of independence. Brezhnev recommended the Soviet Union to Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah as a selfless aide in the struggle for freedom: On the unshakeable basis of complete equality, non-intervention in other countries’ internal affairs and strict observance of sovereignty and mutual trust, good relations are being developed between the Soviet Union and the Republic of Mali, Ethiopia, the Somali Republic, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, the Republic of Sudan and a number of other independent African states.325

On the one hand, Brezhnev could point to the fact that the Soviet Union had never attempted to forcibly impose European civilization on the African peoples. On the other hand, the recent achievements in space flight made it an easy and enjoyable task for him to promote the Soviet Union as the most advanced country in the world. For instance, in his speech to the Iranian parliament in November 1963 he said, ‘We are

Under Khrushchev

159

proud that the Soviet Union is a strong driving force of scientific progress for the whole world. The wealth of human knowledge has been enormously enriched by the key discoveries of our space researchers – the Soviet cosmonauts.’326 While Brezhnev only praised the Soviet Union’s technological progress and economic achievements when speaking to the non-socialist countries, in the socialist ‘brother states’, of course, he did not refrain from mentioning who they had to thank: It is no coincidence that the imperialists see their defeat in this achievement of the socialist camp. They understand that the voice of a Soviet person from the cosmos sounds like the triumph of the intellect and the equity of communism. In this great victory of the human genius lies the triumph of Lenin’s ideas, the proof of the great successes of our people.327

The restraint shown towards the African states was part of a new Soviet doctrine developed at the World Congress of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow in 1960 that adapted the ideological arsenal to the particular situation in the decolonized countries.328 Since they lacked the body of workers required for revolutionary development, ethnic, pan-African movements were no longer considered a threat to class warfare; rather, they were now a permissible intermediate stage on the path to socialism. Just as the Soviet Union had skipped the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in 1917, Africa too could take its own route – a route leading to ‘national democracy’ allowing collaboration between communist and nationalist forces.329 Brezhnev’s very first foreign tour, in early 1961, took him to Africa for ten days to offer non-intervention in internal affairs, economic aid, trade agreements and weapons. The journey began with an incident that ultimately brought him greater attention and popularity: on 9 February, his plane came under fire from French fighter jets before it reached Algeria. France claimed his plane had deviated from the flight path and that they had only been warning shots; the Soviet Union and Morocco, however, suspected it was a deliberate act of sabotage with the aim of preventing the Union making overtures to the former French colonies.330 Against this backdrop, Pravda celebrated Brezhnev’s arrival in Morocco as a ‘symbol of freedom’. Brezhnev regaled the Moroccan heir Hassan so persuasively with Soviet successes – from economic planning to housing construction and the health system – that the neutral country accepted Soviet aid and weapons.331 His success in Morocco alarmed the West, since King Mohammed V promised to push for the dissolution of the US air base and was prepared to allow transit of arms to the Algerian rebels.332 After Morocco, Brezhnev continued his tour, moving on to Guinea, where he was also welcomed with open arms by President Sékou Touré and enthusiastic crowds. Sékou Touré praised him as a defender of human rights and an ally of the oppressed peoples, awarding him a medal as a ‘Fighter for Independence’.333 Brezhnev first spoke to an audience of 20,000 in the capital Conakry before touring the country for five days; in the cities of Labé and Kankan he told the crowds that Africa and the Soviet Union were joined in the struggle for peace and freedom.334 Brezhnev assured them, ‘We do not distinguish between people on the basis of the colour of their skin. There are oppressors and the oppressed, colonizers and the exploited. We are against the

160

Brezhnev

colonizers and exploiters. We stand entirely on the side of the oppressed and the exploited.’335 His hosts rewarded him with speeches stressing the importance of the October Revolution for Africa: ‘The Great October Revolution that was brought about by the workers was a decisive turning point in world history greatly appreciated by the African peoples.’336 This was accompanied by a trade agreement for a period of five years.337 Brezhnev and Sékou Touré published a joint communiqué condemning the recent murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba as a treacherous act by the colonial powers, calling for the withdrawal of Belgian troops and demanding an end to the Algerian War: Lumumba was dead, but the struggle for freedom would be victorious.338 The American ambassador to Guinea, William Attwood, had to concede that Brezhnev’s visit had been a triumph and the prospects of greater US influence had vanished.339 From Guinea, Brezhnev flew on to Ghana, where he registered another triumph, Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah proving most open to the Soviet overtures and unhesitatingly accepting a return invitation to visit the Soviet Union in the summer of 1961.340 In Ghana, Brezhnev celebrated how successfully the Soviet Union had overcome its backwardness since the October Revolution and had transformed itself into a powerful industrial nation.341 Kwame Nkrumah needed no further convincing: Brezhnev promised him 80 million dollars in loans along with technological and military assistance.342 With these successes, but also commitments, Brezhnev left Africa after a final, second visit to King Mohammed V in Morocco.343 With charm and a tie Following his African debut, in September 1961 Brezhnev spent eight days in Finland. In 1955, Khrushchev had signed an agreement on scientific-technological exchange, and now Finland was interested in having the Soviet Union build a nuclear power station.344 From day one, Brezhnev made an impression with his charm, humour and affability. The Finnish media were most taken with this young, relaxed Soviet leader who greeted everyone with a kiss: ‘Brezhnev steps off the train, smiles and greets the assembled throng: “Look what nice weather I’ve brought you. Even the weather is happy about our meeting, and quite rightly too!” ’345 After his first meeting with Finland’s President Urho Kekkonen, the newspapers remarked, ‘The head of state of our neighbouring country transformed the brief reception ceremony into a laid-back event.’346 The Finnish media repeatedly emphasized Brezhnev’s casual and languid style: ‘At the palace in the evening, President Brezhnev was in good spirits and seemed to be enjoying himself. He entered the room, on his arm the President’s wife, Silvi Kekkonen. Then he took two fire-red roses from the table and offered them to Mrs Kekkonen.’347 Irrespective of whom he was talking to, be it the president of the parliament, the workers in a factory, a family in their home or children in a school, everywhere he seemed to be in a good mood, humorous and able to win over his interlocutors. On 29 September 1961, the seventh day of his tour, the newspaper Maakansa noted: ‘The president’s popularity increases with every new place or thing he visits.’348 Concluding the tour, Brezhnev took a walk with the Finnish president through the town of Kajaani, where they also visited a tie shop. Here Brezhnev allowed

Under Khrushchev

161

his charm to come to the fore once more, declaring a tie was the most important accessory to a suit, and responded to Kekkonen’s offer to give him one as a gift by asking ‘Just one?’ – and would there now be gifts in every shop they visited?349 After his visit, the Finnish gazettes considered its great success to have mainly been due to Brezhnev himself: ‘His direct, warm manner, bubbling with jokes, has conquered our hearts.’350 Wooing with economic aid Brezhnev’s travels in 1961 were by no means over. In the November he went to Sudan, which did not portend the same success as the African tour in the January. Sudan made blatant use of a tactic employed by many African countries to benefit from the competition between the superpowers: immediately before Brezhnev’s arrival, the Sudanese media reported the successful conclusion of a US aid package guaranteeing delivery of 4.6 million US dollars’ worth of grain and flour and the construction of radio stations costing 567,000 US dollars.351 In this way, the developing countries forced the Soviet Union into vying with the USA to prove who was the more generous and able to deliver more aid. The assistance Brezhnev’s delegation was to negotiate over involved building a factory to preserve fish, fruits and vegetables.352 The advantage of the trade agreements with the Soviet Union, the newspapers argued, was that Soviet aid was ‘unconditional and untainted’ and that the Soviet Union had supported Sudanese self-determination since 1945.353 Meanwhile, West Germany had opened a consumer goods fair in Khartum, and it was clear that Sudan would accept aid from everyone.354 Brezhnev ended the year with a fourteen-day tour of India, accompanied by his wife. As in Sudan, the Soviet aid – some 720 million roubles – was welcomed for being connected neither to ‘participation in company management or profit-sharing, nor to any restrictions or conditions’.355 Here too, Brezhnev also praised the ‘struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America against the colonial and semi-colonial whip, for the reinforcement of their national liberty and independence’.356 He travelled from Bombay to Madras via Calcutta, shaking hands, accepting flowers, giving speeches and visiting construction sites financed by the Soviet Union.357 Brezhnev had begun to woo allies in Asia in the summer of 1961 with a reception for Indonesia’s President Sukarno. Not only were various receptions and speeches arranged in Sukarno’s honour, but Khrushchev also had an entire sports stadium built in Jakarta to prevent losing him to the USA.358 In 1963, there followed visits to Afghanistan and Iran. Since the establishment of the Afghan monarchy, a close and stable friendship had existed with the Soviet Union, reflected in a good deal of cooperation.359 The five days in October 1963 were correspondingly cordial and relaxed.360 The programme included not only hunting with the king, but also a speech to students at the University of Kabul, in which Brezhnev told of his hard but happy years as a student. He praised the Soviet Union as a ‘bastion of peace’ and the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova as an example to Afghan women.361 Relations with Iran were trickier: while Iran had been one of the first nations to recognize the young Soviet Union, during the Second World War the Red Army had

162

Brezhnev

occupied the country and the Shah’s empire had since become dependent on the USA. But in 1962 Shah Reza Pahlavi launched a reform programme that also benefited the Soviet Union. Along with a border treaty, new economic and technological collaboration and the construction of a hydroelectric power station on the border river Atrak were agreed.362 In view of the special competition with the USA over Iran, in a speech to the Iranian parliament Brezhnev declared that the Soviet Union manufactured more cement, work benches, electric engines etc. than the USA and that in the next seven years it would produce twice as much as America.363 He praised the Soviet Union’s great projects in reshaping nature; as a neighbour on the Caspian Sea, Iran too would benefit from the plan to divert the Siberian rivers south: ‘Soviet man changed the face of nature for a better life, for people’s happiness.’364 The newspapers were quite ambivalent in their reporting: Iran was not a ripe apple that was ready to fall into the hands of communism; they were friends of the West, but in the interests of a better life for the people they should not reject assistance from the Soviet Union either.365 Brezhnev, visiting the old royal cities of Isfahan and Shiraz with his wife, displayed great recognition and reverence for Persian culture: ‘In our “Hermitage” Museum in Leningrad we have many historical cultural monuments from Iran, but here I have seen such things I must admit that what we have in the Hermitage is in no way comparable to the magnificence and splendour of this piece.’366 Much more straightforward, if somewhat less glamorous visits took in the brother states Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. In September 1962, he visited Yugoslav head of state Tito, with whom he would continue to get on very well as general secretary. They stood together in an open-top car to receive the ovations of the citizens of Belgrade, and went hunting together.367 He also went hunting with Czechoslovak president Antonín Novotný, and paid another visit to Czechoslovakia for five days in December 1963 to celebrate twenty years of Soviet–Czechoslovak friendship. He received a festive reception at Prague Castle, placed wreaths, attended the festive session of the CC, took in several factories and also paid a visit to Bratislava,368 where he recalled common experiences during the war and his own wartime years: in 1943 the Czechoslovakians signed a treaty pledging to fight for Kiev as though it were Prague or Bratislava. ‘And when the liberation of Czechoslovak soil began, our soldiers and officers outside Prague and Bratislava fought as they had done for Kiev, for Soviet towns and villages!’369 It seems Brezhnev enjoyed travelling and representing the Union. He did not have to deal with the real negotiations for economic agreements, technological assistance, loans and weapons; a large delegation and the relevant ministers took care of all that. He had the luxury of promoting the Soviet Union’s achievements and being shown the sights in foreign countries relatively unburdened.370 Entrusted with selling the Soviet Union as a model to be emulated and underlining its attraction with charm and wit, he played an important role in Khrushchev’s foreign policy. As a member of the Party Presidium, he remained involved in all other important foreign policy issues. For instance, he was present when the party leadership decided to station missiles in Cuba in 1962, and was also in attendance in the tense days of October, when they determined to withdraw them rather than risk escalating the conflict with the USA.371

Under Khrushchev

163

Such crises notwithstanding, Brezhnev, it can at least be assumed, enjoyed three of his best years as president. In a later interview, his wife too insisted they had led an interesting life.372 They did not have a close relationship with the Khrushchevs, but it was a good one, according to Viktoriya Petrovna. Nina Petrovna always invited them round on Women’s Day on 8 March, and Nikita Sergeyevich regularly organized large parties at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, to which he invited actors and writers along with the members of the Presidium. The men went fishing and hunting together – her husband, however, had stuck solely to hunting.373 But these interesting years were also marked by private worries: after eleven years of marriage, in 1962 their daughter Galina divorced from her husband Milayev and withdrew to her parents on Kutuzovskiy prospekt. Brezhnev arranged for her to move into the apartment next to theirs, and had the wall between them knocked through and the entrance bricked up. His wife Viktoria explained that from now on, he wanted to know who was going in and out and whose company his daughter was keeping. ‘Enough roaming!’ Viktoriya quotes him as saying.374 Galina lived under the same roof as them for eight years.375 Viktoriya Petrovna does not mention, however, that the reason for the divorce was the thirty-two-year-old Galina’s new, even more ‘scandalous’ relationship with the eighteen-year-old magician Igor’ Kio.376 In the autumn of 1962, Brezhnev personally ensured Galina’s marriage to Kio, which she had kept from her parents, was annulled after just nine days.377 And yet the relationship endured for four years. The bricked-up door to the apartment was most likely intended to keep out Kio.

Khrushchev ousted For Brezhnev, the ‘good times’ ended due to two developments. In April 1963, Frol Kozlov (1908–1965), Khrushchev’s closest confidant, his deputy as both chairman of the Council of Ministers and party chairman and also his potential successor, suffered a heart attack from which he would not recover. Hence in June 1963 Khrushchev was forced to redistribute the power within the Party Presidium. He recalled Nikolai Podgorny from his post as first secretary of Ukraine and made him joint CC secretary together with Brezhnev.378 As the new CC secretary, Brezhnev was supposed to relinquish his post as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, but was not removed from the role until a year later, in July 1964.379 This shake-up went hand in hand with a second development: the leading party cadres were increasingly dissatisfied with Khrushchev’s practice of recalling or appointing them as he pleased – and without asking them. Podgorny had not wanted to leave Ukraine,380 nor had Brezhnev wanted to give up his role as president. Georgia’s First Secretary Vasiliy Mzhavanadze, whom Khrushchev also wanted to make CC secretary, was the only one who had been able to resist being transferred to Moscow.381 The Presidium reshuffles were explained as ‘strengthening the economic cadres’, since both Podgorny and Brezhnev had engineering degrees and some experience of economic management. Brezhnev was once again put in charge of the armament industry and spaceflight.382

164

Brezhnev

Careers ruined These enforced transfers were the last straw in a development that increasingly gave Khrushchev’s entourage the impression he moved them around according to however he was feeling at the time.383 He had already dismissed many of Brezhnev’s protégés in the republics:384 Shchëlokov lost his post as deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of Moldavia in 1962, Kunayev had to leave his position as first party secretary of Kazakhstan in December 1962, and in 1963 Shcherbitskiy was removed as Ukrainian premier and lost his status a candidate for the Party Presidium.385 But it was not only Brezhnev’s acolytes who were affected: members of all the political networks were frustrated by having their careers ruined or fearing it could happen to them. Khrushchev had gone over from ‘de-Stalinization’ to ‘socialist democracy’, which for him meant permeability of office, rotation of electable positions and decentralization. In doing so, he seemed to be ignoring the established system of patron–client alliances. In 1957 he had dissolved a series of ministries, transferring their responsibilities to the new regional economic councils and thereby robbing several former allies of their power bases.386 In 1961 he had introduced the principle of rotation; a third of all cadres had to be replaced after every election. Irrespective of the party committee, now everyone could only stand for two terms in office.387 In 1962 he began to split the party committees too, so that some now dealt with agriculture and some with industry.388 He had also abolished the monthly ‘envelopes’ in which deserving cadres received a bonus, along with further privileges like chauffeured cars.389 However, it wasn’t just the party that felt the impact of his restructuring drive; he also reduced the army and sought to reform and reorganize the KGB and the Foreign Office.390 He not only stopped pending promotions in the KGB, but also publicly baited KGB chairman Semichastnyy by insinuating he dearly longed for a general’s uniform.391 The undignified dismissal of national heroes Voroshilov and Zhukov was a further cause of unrest. His acolytes were not only disturbed by arbitrary transfers and dismantled networks, however, but also by the fact that Khrushchev no longer even kept up appearances and showed he had little respect left for the party institutions with his disrespectful comments. For instance, he opened a meeting of the CC plenum by joking: Allow me to take over the responsible role of suggesting the persons [for election], for it is not easy to pick someone from this crowd – whoever you choose, not everyone will be satisfied (laughter, animated response in the room). And that is quite natural. Every soldier wants to become a marshal. But if everyone were a marshal, there wouldn’t be any soldiers left, there would no longer be an army.392

It was only during his first years in office that Khrushchev had spoken on behalf of the collective and referred to exchange of opinion with others to lend legitimacy to his speeches.393 From 1960 onwards, he increasingly spoke only of himself (‘I think …’, ‘I suggest …’, ‘I appoint …’).394 His displeasure at the use of editorial commissions

Under Khrushchev

165

to develop the resolutions at the CC plenums also became increasingly blatant: ‘So let us go [through the text] page by page to speed things up. That’s clearly a proven method. Are there any remarks on the first page? No. Are there are remarks on the second page? No.’395 Khrushchev also developed the same tricks Stalin had used: in the Party Presidium he would insist he was old and overworked, and if someone agreed, as Leningrad’s inexperienced party secretary Ivan Spiridonov did in 1962, it sealed the end of his career.396 A broken relationship Ultimately, Brezhnev and his comrades found Khrushchev’s indomitable urge to bait, aggravate and humiliate others to be utterly unreasonable. In order to prevent all his irrelevant mocking from being documented, Khrushchev increasingly had to have the minutes of the CC plenums rewritten. His sparring with his comrades was presented to him in files specially kept for that purpose, which he then ‘sanitized’.397 For the CC plenum of February 1964 alone, Khrushchev was presented with eighty-six pages of his verbal digressions to self-censor. They included disrespectful remarks about scientists, whom he thought should be decorated for their practical work and not for their reputations and honour: ‘You must show some initiative yourself here and sort things out, otherwise they will say once again that the Council of Ministers is insulting the scholars. (Animated response in the room)’.398 He accused the oblast secretaries of promising the construction of five-storey buildings but only building three storeys, or bigger harvests and failing to meet the plan: ‘I say that here in order to find out whether the Krasnodarans haven’t swindled us? They committed to delivering thirty hundredweight per hectare. I think they have swindled. (Animated response in the room)’.399 Or he spoke over the head of an oblast: ‘We’ve heard plenty of such assurances. But we need the harvest. Give us the harvest – that’s the best assurance.’400 Nor was he afraid to unmask requests for assistance as rhetorical manoeuvres: No no. Let’s make it clear. That is a wily rhetorical attempt (animated response in the room) – to say, I accept the obligations but help me if I haven’t kept to them, to say: no one helped me. You’re not getting away with that! […] You have all the means of production. That is the crucial help, and everything else is down to this part of the body (pointing to his head). (Animated response in the room, laughter)401

The last plenum of the Central Committee he called on 11 July 1964 in order to suggest that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet finally replace Brezhnev with Anastas Mikoyan was probably the zenith, or the nadir, of his verbal excesses. While the official protocol documents a far from eventful meeting,402 the original minutes record the diatribes Khrushchev indulged in towards Brezhnev, but also towards the Academy of Sciences. He held the entire meeting in a familiar, bluntly ridiculing tone: Instead of Comrade Brezhnev, Comrade Mikoyan is proposed as a candidate. I think you will have heard of him. (Laughter) Who would like to give him a

166

Brezhnev

working over, as [the writer] Comrade Sholokhov said, that is, not Sholokhov, but Shchukar’ [a character in one of his novels]. When has anyone given him a working over, Anastas Ivanovich [Mikoyan]? That’s a test. He doesn’t know. Perhaps we should give you a working over? […] I see, the plenum is in the mood for tomfoolery. That is clearly a good sign, and perhaps there aren’t any objections?403

After first antagonizing Mikoyan, Khrushchev then made fun of Brezhnev. When his question as to whether no one was against the change was met with applause, he turned to Brezhnev and said, ‘Why are they applauding? They’re pleased you’re being removed.’404 Khrushchev parried Brezhnev’s meek retort that the applause was to be understood as thanks for the work he had done by announcing, ‘I think no one is calling for a vote, since we assume that some of them are applauding in support of the proposal and the others to thank you.’405 There then followed a furious speech on the condition of the economy and agriculture that turned into a tirade about the atomic physicist Andrey Sakharov and a threat issued to the Academy of Sciences: ‘Comrades, for political leadership, I think we have our party and the CC, and if the Academy of Sciences gets involved, we will tell them to go to hell [literally: send them to the devil’s grandmother], for if they want to do that, we don’t need the Academy of Sciences, we need science in the production sectors […].’406 Khrushchev thereby not only finally caused the world of scholarship to turn against him, but also documented a low point in his relationship with Brezhnev, whom he ridiculed once more by saying he had to be replaced because in the new constitution the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was of greater importance. In other words, Brezhnev was not up to the new role. Khrushchev praised his removal itself as an act of democracy: ‘so that everything becomes more democratic, one must overcome resistance, remove one and appoint another.’407 Although they continued to make appearances together, there had clearly been a split. The loyalty Khrushchev had received from Brezhnev and which he also commanded with his behaviour seemed increasingly to disgust him. He put it about that Brezhnev was a ‘phrasemonger’, a ‘cavalier’ and a ‘big sychophant’.408 He also taunted him in the Presidium by saying he was constantly being presented with invoices for state banquets he had not held: ‘It says there was a dinner with the Indian parliamentary delegation for such and such a sum, but I didn’t eat with them, didn’t receive them. I think Brezhnev spent it on them.’409 Accordingly, Brezhnev feared Khrushchev’s tantrums. After Khrushchev had once again raged about the incompetence of the head of the Ukrainian party, Petro Shelest, in Brezhnev’s presence,410 he told him: ‘Khrushchev does not respect us, he is uncouth, gives us nicknames and all sort of labels; he makes all the decisions himself. He recently declared that our leadership was obsolete and had to be rejuvenated. He is collecting “keys” to see off the lot of us.’411 Indeed, at the CC plenum of 11 July, Khrushchev declared that the country had many young, talented, well-educated people – just not in the CC: ‘But we don’t give them a chance because they haven’t got beards.’412 He announced he would be calling a plenum in November 1964 at which the cadres would be revitalized accordingly.413

Under Khrushchev

167

At the CC Presidium meeting of 17 September he confirmed this by stating that upon returning from his holidays he would also dismantle the Party Presidium,414 spreading fear among the seasoned party cadres that they would lose their positions and networks. He told Ukraine’s party leader Shelest, ‘ “Our Presidium is a bunch of old men […], it is full of people who love to talk but don’t want to work.” He then made an extremely disparaging remark about Brezhnev and called him a dimwit.’415 Khrushchev continued, ‘We will call a plenum, give them all a piece of our minds, and show everyone how and where he has to work.’416 It seems he also wanted to remove Kosygin, Suslov and Podgorny from the Presidium along with Brezhnev.417 Khrushchev’s entourage were no longer in any doubt: their one-time patron, a reformer and de-Stalinizer, was clearly turning into a tyrant. They felt that after the failed putsch attempt of 1957, the reshuffle in the Party Presidium and the triumph of Sputnik, Khrushchev was taking his success for granted to the extent that he no longer considered their sensibilities. However, it would be too simplistic to put this development solely down to Khrushchev’s character and personality. Since the party leadership no longer offered any resistance to speak of following the expulsion of the Anti-Party Group in 1957, or at least ended every discussion in agreement with him, a cult of personality emerged that was not dissimilar to the absolute obedience under Stalin. It is remarkable, however, that the CC members set this cult of personality in motion with their own servility even though they knew there was no threat of imprisonment or torture. Clearly there were a number of factors at play here: the residual fear, even if it had been overcome on the cognitive level; the party discipline, well established since the Lenin years, that demanded a party leader and his general line were not to be contradicted; the feeling following the collective victory over Stalin’s old retinue in June 1957 that they were a group of conspirators who could not afford any controversy; and finally Khrushchev’s ‘punitive measures’ in demoting and ousting fractious comrades or potential rivals. Hence it is also remarkable that Khrushchev, who should have known better, snubbed his loyal clients who had enabled his political survival in 1957 in the manner he did. He must have thought it was sufficient to oust potentially competing patrons like Zhukov. The fact that in 1964 a flabbergasted Khrushchev asked the conspirators why, if they were dissatisfied with him, they had not said anything earlier418 shows a lack of knowledge of both his own character and the party culture. Conspiracy Although we don’t know exactly when or how it happened, Podgorny and Brezhnev, who got on well despite competing as CC secretaries,419 must have agreed that Khrushchev could no longer be tolerated. There are no documents, since the plotters were extremely cautious and went about it purely by mouth.420 Years of experience under Stalin had taught them this, and even under Khrushchev they feared they would immediately be arrested,421 even though he had allowed the Anti-Party Group of 1957 to get away with lenient punishment. Hence there is, or for a long time was, disagreement concerning who had led and masterminded the putsch. Fëdor Burlatskiy, loyal to Khrushchev, writes that Brezhnev

168

Brezhnev

played a very minor role.422 He asserts many thought Suslov was the driving force, as a party ideologue and strategic thinker, and it seems Khrushchev had also said ‘scathing’ things about him.423 But for Burlatskiy, the real pullers of strings were Aleksandr Shelepin, Vladimir Semichastnyy and Petro Shelest;424 it was a rebellion of the ‘Young Turks’ against the older generation, for Shelepin and Semichastnyy had begun their careers as leaders of the Komsomol. In 1961, Semichastnyy had taken over from Shelepin as head of the KGB, the latter becoming CC secretary. Burlatskiy thinks they met and conspired in sports stadia during football matches.425 But while Burlatskiy says Khrushchev’s son Sergey was wrong to claim Brezhnev led the conspiracy against his father,426 this interpretation is confirmed by everyone who was involved.427 Both the first secretary of Ukraine, Shelest, and Semichastnyy left detailed records in which they credibly document how Brezhnev incited them.428 While Burlatskiy caustically asserts that power fell to Brezhnev like a ‘gift from God’,429 Semichastnyy explains that, formally, there was no alternative: neither Shelepin nor Shelest nor Semichastnyy were members of the Presidium.430 Sergey Khrushchev is also correct when he says that Shelepin, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Dmitriy Polyanskiy and others had no reason to support the putsch, since a ‘rejuvenation’ of the Presidium would have accelerated their careers and Khrushchev had earmarked them as replacements for Brezhnev, Suslov and others.431 Those who feared losing their posts, however, divided up the leading positions between themselves: Brezhnev himself became party chairman, Kosygin premier and Podgorny president. And so the conspiracy took its course. Shelest writes in his diaries that he had had the impression since early 1964 that something was afoot at the top of the party, that there was unrest and that a power struggle was brewing. He arrived at this view because since the beginning of the year Brezhnev and Podgorny had constantly been asking what mood Khrushchev was in and whether he had said anything about them. Whatever the occasion, it was always the same; be it when Khrushchev visited Ukraine with Fidel Castro and Podgorny in January 1964 to go hunting or called by en route when leaving on vacation, or when Shelest celebrated his birthday or travelled to Moscow for the CC plenum, he always felt he could sense a ‘nervousness’, he heard insinuations about how intolerable the situation was within the leadership, and Brezhnev bombarded him with questions about what Khrushchev had said about him.432 ‘I began to notice that Brezhnev somehow seemed deeply disturbed by my meetings with Khrushchev; that he had a panicked, deadly fear of Khrushchev seemed quite evident.’433 On 17 April 1964, Khrushchev celebrated his seventieth birthday, and the party elite travelled to toast him in the Lenin Hills. But this day too, Shelest believes, was marked by an underlying nervousness. Claiming they did not wish to wear Khrushchev out, Brezhnev soon urged the comrades to leave, even though Khrushchev clearly wanted the celebrations to continue.434 But it was not until July 1964 that Brezhnev and Podgorny took Shelest into their confidence and gave him the task of speaking with all the Ukrainian CC secretaries.435 In this fashion, Brezhnev and Podgorny went about gaining the support of the cadres one by one. For a long time, however, it was unclear how they were going to oust him. The former KGB chairman Semichastnyy claims Brezhnev asked him whether the KGB

Under Khrushchev

169

could arrest Khrushchev en route from his visit to Sweden in June 1964 and ‘physically liquidate’ him.436 The journalist Tomáš Sniegoň, who helped Semichastnyy write his memoirs, considers this claim to be entirely believable. Semichastnyy asserts Brezhnev was clearly looking for an option that meant he would not have to look Khrushchev in the eye afterwards,437 and claims he immediately rejected the proposal, since even in the KGB no one was prepared to commit murder, and because such an illegal act would have caused a sensation the world over.438 Shelest at least confirms that arresting him was mooted.439 But the plotters opted to play by the rules, namely by calling a CC plenum, which was officially entitled to change the party leader. In the early September, they had met at Podgorny’s dacha and discussed the procedure. They did not really know what to do. Shelest himself had even suggested, in his ‘enthusiasm’, that they begin in Ukraine by inviting Khrushchev to a plenum of the Ukrainian party, confronting him with the accusations there and thus insisting on a plenum, in Moscow, to discuss his style of leadership. But Brezhnev was against this Kiev option and insisted it had to happen in Moscow.440 But the Presidium’s regular work meeting of 25/26 September 1964 passed without incident.441 According to Shelest, most of them already knew about the plans, but everyone continued to praise Khrushchev as he had come to expect from them.442 The CC delegated a group led by Shelepin and Polyanskiy to prepare the upcoming CC plenum on agriculture scheduled for the November; he had no idea that Shelepin and Polyanskiy would use this group to prepare the putsch.443 Shelest and Semichastnyy both write that in the September, Brezhnev urged the two of them to finally make a move: too many people already knew what they were up to and it was becoming dangerous.444 Semichastnyy even warned Brezhnev that if Khrushchev caught wind of it, as KGB chairman he would be ordered to arrest Brezhnev, and that he would do so.445 Khrushchev did indeed receive a warning that a plot was underway. Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolay Ignatov clearly sought to keep his options open and informed Khrushchev’s son Sergey via his bodyguard, a member of the KGB. On 27 September, Sergey related this to his father, but seems not to have taken the warning all that seriously himself.446 Khrushchev too refused to believe it; in particular, he thought it impossible that Shelepin and Semichastnyy could be involved.447 Mikoyan, who was staying with him on holiday in Pitsunda and as one of his closest confidants had also been kept out of the picture, reinforced the leader’s belief that the information was not to be taken seriously.448 Meanwhile, if Semichastnyy is to be believed, Brezhnev was scared to talk to Minister of Defence Rodion Malinovskiy, putting it off till the last minute; he travelled to East Berlin to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the GDR and did not return to Moscow until 11 October, after Malinovskiy had voiced his agreement.449 On 12 October 1964, the plotters met in Brezhnev’s apartment: Khrushchev was to be lured to Moscow on the pretext that a plenum was urgently required to discuss the state of agriculture.450 ‘We literally had to drag the trembling Brezhnev to the telephone, such was the fear that gripped him when he realized it was down to him to begin the whole business’, Semichastnyy recalls.451 A blustering Khrushchev bluntly replied that it could wait; it was only at Brezhnev’s insistence that he promised to

170

Brezhnev

discuss it with Mikoyan. According to Semichastnyy, it was not until midnight that they learnt Khrushchev had indeed arranged a plane for the following day.452 Mikoyan relates that at this point, Khrushchev realized what it was all about: ‘Agriculture is just a pretext. They want to decide about me. Well, if they are all against me, I won’t put up any resistance.’453 On 13 October, Khrushchev and Mikoyan arrived at the airport in Moscow, without the usual reception by the entire Presidium; they were picked up by Brezhnev on his own. They immediately drove to the Kremlin, where all the others were already assembled for the Presidium meeting and had been waiting for Khrushchev since 3.00 pm.454 Khrushchev took his seat as chairman and asked,‘Well, what has happened? […] Who’s going to tell me what’s going on?’455

Figure 19 Brezhnev, second left, surrounded by his aides at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, 1970.

171

5

The Caring General Secretary, or Collective Leadership as Theatre

Trust and care: Brezhnev’s scenario of power Our photograph shows Brezhnev surrounded by his advisors at the Zavidovo hunting lodge in March 1970. Sitting around him at the table are Аleksandr Bovin, Boris Ponomarëv, Pëtr Demichev, Viktor Afanas’yev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Pëtr Fedoseyev, Andrey Aleksandrov-Agentov, Konstantin Rusakov, Georgiy Arbatov and Anatoliy Chernyayev. All of them worked in various CC departments and formed the staff Brezhnev regularly took with him to his dacha to work on pending reports and speeches for the CC plenums, party congresses and other such occasions. The picture is typical of Brezhnev’s way of working and his leadership style, which were fundamentally different to Khrushchev’s: Brezhnev tried to involve as many people in his work as possible, from both the CC apparatus and the Party Presidium, or the Politburo, as it was renamed in 1966, so that he could legitimately claim that unlike his predecessors, he really did practise collective leadership. Khrushchev’s dismissal Western historians have long speculated that Khrushchev was deposed because he embarrassed the country with his foreign policy during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or because he was blamed for the home-made food shortage culminating in the Novocherkassk uprising in 1962.1 While these were certainly points levelled against him by the members of the Presidium,2 they were principally angered by his tendency to decide everything by himself and ride roughshod over the principle of collective leadership.3 In a word, the majority of the plotters were not old Stalinists who wanted to turn back the clock. It was less about specific policies than about a style of doing politics they not only felt to be unbecoming, but also regarded as a threat to their own influence. They objected he was establishing a ‘personal dictatorship and ruling with the tools of the cult of personality’.4 It took them two days to deal with him, since every single member was to make accusations against him in order to underscore that they were acting as a collective.5 On 13 October, the Presidium met behind closed doors, long into the evening. 172

The Caring General Secretary

173

Brezhnev was the first to present the accusations; all of the remaining twenty-two followed suit.6 He no longer adheres to even the basic rules of polite behaviour and swears so coarsely that, as they say, not only does one want to shut one’s ears to it, but even the bluntest boors blush. ‘Idiot, good-for-nothing, idle bugger, stench, filth, wet blanket, pile of manure, shit, arse’ – these are only the ‘printable’ slurs he uses.7

They allowed Khrushchev to go home for the night. To be on the safe side, KGB chairman Semichastnyy had replaced his personal bodyguards and had his phones tapped.8 The Presidium reconvened on 14 October. The previous day, Brezhnev had spoken on behalf of everyone in attendance by describing how Khrushchev had ignored and disregarded the party organs and detailing the damage he had done to agriculture and the national economy as a whole.9 Now he made a second, personal statement explaining how difficult it was for him to depose his mentor, whom he had known and valued since 1938 and whom he had defended in 1957. He said he had thought long and hard about it and the problem was clearly Khrushchev’s hunger for power, his self-delusion and his belief in his own infallibility: ‘If you had even a grain of modesty, you would not have allowed a cult to be created around your person – but on the contrary, you did everything to expand this cult.’10 The last to speak was Khrushchev, who seemed weary and crestfallen, as Shelest recalls. He conceded defeat, admitted to most of the charges levelled at him, and apologized for much of it – in his own crude manner: ‘I ask for mercy – the business is done. I told Comrade Mikoyan I wouldn’t fight. […] And I am glad – finally the party has matured and is in a position to control people whoever they are. You have assembled and thrown shit at me and I cannot contradict you.’11 It is unclear whether he really requested not to have to speak at the next CC plenum because he was frightened he might burst into tears;12 the fact is that he did not speak at it. Khrushchev consented to asking to be released from his duties ‘due to advanced age’ and the ‘state of his health’.13 And so at 6.00 pm on 14 October 1964, Brezhnev opened the plenum in the Kremlin’s Sverdlov Hall and gave the floor to Suslov, who repeated the accusations against Khrushchev before the 329 members of the plenum: ‘Comrade Khrushchev literally had the urge to constantly reorganize and restructure, and had blind faith in some sort of magic, secret power.’14 This wasn’t leadership, but a ‘merry-go-round’.15 Notably, the plenum followed Brezhnev’s proposal to forgo discussion.16 Firstly, most of those present had been informed in advance, secondly, Suslov had already read out the Presidium’s decision to respect Khrushchev’s request to be released, and thirdly, it was not the practice to entertain open and controversial discussion of such issues. Party discipline manifested itself again, then. Semichastnyy claims Shelepin told him some opportunists had shouted ‘Expel him from the party!’ and ‘Put him on trial!’ but if they did, it was certainly not recorded in the minutes.17 Khrushchev became a pensioner; the CC asked him never to show his face in Moscow again and to live in his dacha. He died there in 1971. The Presidium determined ‘charitable’ arrangements for him: a dacha; a pension of 500 roubles; groceries supplied by the Kremlin canteen; medical care via the Kremlin leadership’s

174

Brezhnev

polyclinic and a chauffeur-driven Volga.18 Khrushchev did their bidding and retreated to his dacha, where Zeiss binoculars once presented to him by West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer helped him ‘broaden my horizon a little, since it gives me the opportunity to look at the expansive fields, forests and other charms of Moscow’s suburban landscape’.19 Allocating posts Deposing Khrushchev was only the first, albeit the most difficult, part of the putsch. The CC members also voted in favour of another of the Presidium’s suggestions: that the posts of first secretary of the CPSU CC and chairman of the Council of Ministers should never again be occupied by one and the same person.20 After Stalin and Khrushchev, the aim was to prevent a third leader taking up the two most important positions in the party and the state and ruling unchecked. Hence two people now had to be elected Khrushchev’s successors. Tellingly, the minutes of the plenum were clearly tweaked: they claim that the proposal Brezhnev become first secretary and Kosygin chairman of the Council of Ministers came from the ranks. The unedited minutes suggest a more likely scenario: Podgorny proposed Brezhnev and Brezhnev proposed Kosygin.21 Brezhnev was so nervous that he misspoke when it came to voting in Kosygin; although the appointment was the task of the Supreme Soviet,22 Brezhnev referred to him as their ‘elected’ rather than their ‘recommended’ candidate; he was promptly corrected. His response: ‘I’m so nervous. Perhaps in future we will learn to speak without crib sheets, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.’23 He was obviously determined the plenum would go exactly according to the script the plotters had agreed upon. When after the vote delegate Mikhail Lesechko objected that they used to elect a second secretary together with the first, Brezhnev gruffly cut him off, saying that hadn’t been an option; rather it was one of Khrushchev’s whims that had been arbitrarily put in place, and there would be no discussion of the question.24 His brusque response indicates Lesechko had struck a nerve: it is likely that the plotters had discussed the question of a second secretary, which Brezhnev had probably vehemently rejected. The November Plenum that followed one month later served purely to undo the division of the oblast and rayon committees and to reward the plotters with promotions. Brezhnev proposed his accomplices, the first secretary of Ukraine, Shelest, and the chairman of the Control Commission, Shelepin, as full members of the Party Presidium; the plenum elected CC Secretary Demichev as a Presidium candidate, again at Brezhnev’s proposal. KGB chairman Semichastnyy became a candidate to the Central Committee.25 Although Podgorny and Brezhnev had presumably agreed that the former would become state president, the plotters waited another year before dismissing Mikoyan.26 Mikoyan himself writes in his memoirs that he could no longer tolerate it under ‘Brezhnev’s crew’ and asked to be released after his seventieth birthday in November 1965 ‘on health grounds’.27 The truth presumably lies somewhere in between: it can be assumed that Mikoyan did not wish to publicly acknowledge the shame of being dismissed by Brezhnev after less than a year in office. For Brezhnev, it was revenge for

The Caring General Secretary

175

having to hand over the post of president to him in 1964. There was no question, however, of his becoming president this time round. Podgorny received Brezhnev’s beloved position, but this meant he had to make way as CC secretary for Ivan Kapitonov, Brezhnev’s choice as the man to deal with party affairs.28 While Podgorny thus lost control of the party apparatus, Brezhnev expanded his own power. A little earlier, at the September Plenum of 1965, he had secured approval for two new CC secretaries. Dmitriy Ustinov became CC secretary for armament and Fëdor Kulakov became CC secretary for agriculture, guaranteeing Brezhnev’s influence over these two important sectors.29 In 1966, there followed the appointments of Andrey Kirilenko as CC secretary for industry and Mikhail Solomentsev as CC secretary CC for heavy industry.30 In 1967, Brezhnev relieved Andropov of his duties in the Secretariat, which were incompatible with his position as chairman of the KGB, and in April 1968 appointed Konstantin Katushev CC secretary31 with the brief of overseeing relations with other socialist countries. Now Brezhnev had an unreservedly loyal Secretariat with control over every sector. Restoring collective rule But Brezhnev had promised to restore ‘collective rule’. Now he had to prove he was as good as his word. This was all the more important if he wanted to avoid a putsch like those against Khrushchev in 1957 or 1964.32 His long experience as an administrator under Stalin and his work alongside Khrushchev had taught him plenty about the mechanisms of power and the sensibilities within the Presidium. As the man who had organized the putsch, he knew better than anyone that Khrushchev had not been deposed due to political differences, but because of his style of leadership. But Brezhnev saw himself as an alternative not only to Khrushchev, but also to Stalin. Both had plunged able men into ruin, one with murders and arrests, the other with humiliation and dismissals. Brezhnev declared, ‘Under Stalin, everyone feared repressions, under Khrushchev, they feared constant changes and transfers. People didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. Hence the Soviet people should now be able to live a peaceful life so that they can work successfully.’33 Brezhnev thus developed ‘trust and care’ as his ‘scenario of power’, a term coined by the American historian Richard S. Wortman to describe the power of the Russian tsars. This power was based less on physical violence than on the myth that the tsars were foreign beings sent by God to save and protect Russia. Ceremonies, rituals and parades, painting, coins and fairytales not only maintained this myth, but transformed it into an unquestioned truth.34 While the myth of the divine saviour remained the same, individual tsars and tsarinas chose their own scenarios of power, adapting the myth to their own person: Catherine the Great chose ‘love and science’ as the leitmotiv of her reign, while Nicholas I stylized himself as the ‘devoted paterfamilias’ etc.35 A ‘theatre of power’ was staged, became canonized by its ‘acts’, texts and cast, and was never questioned. Crucially, the aristocratic elite was involved in this staging, itself becoming part of the scenario: members of the upper nobility attended the ceremonies, parades and rituals, thereby not only supporting the rule of the tsar, but also feeling sublime and ordained themselves.

176

Brezhnev

As violent as power was in the Soviet Union under Stalin, it was nevertheless also based on a myth embodied by the party leaders and supported by the party elite. The party, headed by the Politburo, was considered an avant-garde fighting for progress, enlightenment and a flourishing future,36 and insisted its battles and victories were based on historical imperatives and scientific laws.37 Faced with the constant threat of ‘imperialist’ forces, the backwardness of the country as a legacy of the tsars, and the immaturity of its own population, it was the party’s duty, so went the myth, to act as a strong, cohesive unit.38 Thus Lenin had banned the formation of factions in 1921 and from 1922 onwards, and Stalin had cultivated the position of general secretary as the leadership collective’s one true voice.39 Karen Brutents, one of Brezhnev’s staff, explains: ‘The absolute power of the general secretary was not only supported by the power relations, but also by the party’s tradition of absolute obedience. It was rooted deep in the party’s practices, in the psychology of the cadres, and crippled their independence and ability to act autonomously.’40 In other words, the myth of the threatening, battling avant-garde on the one hand ensured that the party was obliged to blindly follow the leader, but on the other hand it meant that the general secretary had to convince everyone he was representing the will of the collective. ‘Collective leadership’ thus had nothing to do with Western ideas of democracy; rather it was based on the myth of a party avant-garde radiating unity and cohesion. The general secretaries each had different ways of ensuring the party leadership stood behind them. As Wortman might put it, each party leader chose a different scenario of power with which to present himself as the heir to Lenin and distinguish himself from his predecessors. Stalin presented himself as a restless pursuer of omnipresent enemies, making the party obedient through terror. Khrushchev gave himself the aura of a reformer and for a long time was able to convince the party organs that he stood for a fresh start. Brezhnev, on the other hand, chose a scenario of power based on ‘trust and care’: the party was to follow him in the belief that, unlike Stalin, he was not a threat to their lives, and unlike Khrushchev, he was not a threat to their careers.41 He publicly announced this promise at the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, proclaiming ‘trust in the cadres’ and ‘cadre stability’ as the new principles guiding his policies.42 To great applause, he promised that in future there would be no more rotation or limitations on terms of office, nor should any party cadre fear arbitrary reforms and transfers.43 Brezhnev explained these changes were for the further development of ‘socialist democracy’ and also legitimized renaming the Party Presidium the ‘Politburo’ as a return to Leninist traditions.44 He presented himself at the Party Congress as the ‘true Khrushchev’, as the man who would take the call for more ‘democracy’ and ‘socialist rule of law’ seriously and would respect the rights of each and every cadre: ‘Complete democracy and freedom of opinion in discussing any question and iron discipline once a majority decision has been reached – that is the irrevocable law of our party.’45 How is it helpful for our focus to speak of a ‘scenario of power’? Firstly, it shows that, like his predecessors, Brezhnev was under great pressure to legitimize his rule. Secondly, it draws our attention to the many small rituals and practices underpinning it. He too staged a ‘theatre of power’ that was canonized in its ‘acts’, texts and cast and went unquestioned. Set roles were allocated to the members of the Politburo and the

The Caring General Secretary

177

CC, via which they became actors on the stage, obtaining power themselves while supporting Brezhnev’s rule. Thirdly, the ‘scenario of power’ reveals structures that have mostly been overlooked hitherto: Brezhnev was not a weak leader, as was often claimed,46 and he was also more than a ‘mediator’ between competing groups, as political scientists have long held.47 He was the director of the performance, and it was down to him that the members of the Politburo followed him in his ‘scenario of power’ and played the roles they were allocated. Rituals of blind trust The Polish sociologist Barbara Misztal has advanced the theory that trust is largely based on habit.48 She explains that trust and habits are structurally almost identical, since both allow the world to appear simple, bring stability to daily life and distinguish between the ‘familiar’ and the ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘them’ and ‘us’.49 Trust thus need not be based on risk assessment, but can be created by sheer repetition, especially through ritual acts. Trust thus has a strong performative dimension, since it occurs via constantly perpetuated acts. It seems Brezhnev was also aware of this when he established the rituals of his rule. Since the Stalin era, the CC plenums had followed the same ritual that purported to uphold freedom of speech and opinion, but ultimately prescribed everyone a role or framework in which open disagreement or no-votes were taboo. Brezhnev launched a charm offensive: he infused the established rituals that had left the party members trembling under Stalin and had become unbearable in the face of Khrushchev’s ridiculing tirades with friendliness, cheeriness and honest respect for his comrades. He restored to the same old procedures the seriousness and dignity the CC members had missed under Khrushchev. He opened each plenum by reading out how many were present and how many were absent due to illness or official trips, and then asked whether the plenum should still go ahead. This was affirmed by acclamation. He then read out the rules of the meeting, how much time was allocated for the principal address and the speeches, and when and for how long they would take a break. This too had to be confirmed by the acclamation of the CC members.50 The procedure always followed the same script: the speeches were held back to back, an innovation, however, being that Brezhnev often presided over the meeting, but seldom spoke first. Instead, he reserved the closing speech for himself and always asked if there were questions or comments afterwards. The response was always ‘no’. This was also the case when decisions were made on ‘organizational matters’, that is, dismissals and new appointments. Formally, everyone had the opportunity to make an alternative suggestion or vote ‘no’. In practice, however, party discipline demanded that no one requested discussion, nominated an alternative candidate or voted differently, and so no one did.51 However, according to Shelepin, Brezhnev occasionally very clearly demanded that the Politburo members weren’t to respond to speeches with their own, since their opinion was, after all, reflected in the principal address decided upon by the Politburo.52 For the TwentyThird Party Congress in 1966, it was agreed that no one would speak except for the leadership troika from the Party Presidium in order to show cohesion and avoid

178

Brezhnev

publicizing potential differences of opinion. This practice was then retained for subsequent party congresses.53 As Wortman might put it, everyone played along with the ‘theatre of power’ since they felt committed to the myth of the strong party that spoke with one voice or succumbed to Brezhnev’s pressure to maintain that myth. They had done Khrushchev’s bidding because they feared becoming targets for his biting criticism themselves; Brezhnev seemed to persuade them with his friendliness and commitment. He made it clear from day one that he would treat his comrades with nothing but respect. At his first plenum in November 1964, he gave them a taste of this by dealing with those who had been dismissed just as politely as with the newly appointed. When he released former second party secretary Frol Kozlov, who had remained a member of the Presidium following a stroke, it was not with the vulgarity that would have been expected of Khrushchev, but with his best wishes for his recovery and the acknowledgement that it was only ‘human’ that he be given leave.54 He introduced Shelest, whom he nominated as a full member of the Presidium, in what would become his trademark fashion as general secretary: Shelest was a deserving, excellent party leader and since everyone knew him, nothing more needed to be said about him.55 The first party plenum under Brezhnev came as a great relief to all the members of the CC: he even handled controversial issues, such as the dismissal of long-serving cadres, in a dignified fashion. Unlike under Khrushchev, the minutes to Brezhnev’s plenums did not need to be toned down. Since Brezhnev never adopted the wrong tone throughout his entire career, there were only minimal differences between the published minutes and the original copies. And there were other slight but important differences: while by the end Khrushchev had only spoken in his own name,56 Brezhnev returned to speaking on behalf of the entire Presidium or Politburo, an approach he would retain up to his death in 1982. All of his speeches also included a reference to the ‘exchange of views’ among his comrades,57 something that was considered a guarantee of collective rule or at least a mark of respect for it, and which Khrushchev had soon done away with.58 Collective editing The CC members in the editorial commissions usually entrusted with editing the resolutions must have felt the difference between Khrushchev and Brezhnev even more keenly. These commissions were not small working parties of subordinate members, but large bodies with up to seventy members, and always included the entire Party Presidium or Politburo and the most powerful members of the CC. Stalin had abolished the practice in 1947; Khrushchev had revived it, but from the early 1960s onwards he made it increasingly clear how much of a waste of time he considered it and how annoying he found the painstaking process of collective editing. Brezhnev, in contrast, turned the first such meeting after the March Plenum of 1965 into a veritable discussion forum, adopting a completely different tone. He limited his own role to that of a moderator, withholding his own opinion completely and encouraging the others to take part in the discussion. When the first contributor suggested cutting the entire second page of the resolution, Brezhnev simply asked, cheerfully, what everyone

The Caring General Secretary

179

thought of it.59 A lively debate developed on the resolution’s structure and how much criticism of the situation in agriculture it should contain. Such discussions often involved arguments over individual words, as for instance at the meeting to discuss the September Plenum of 1965. Chief ideologue Mikhail Suslov advocated replacing ‘the plenum commissions’ with ‘the plenum proposes’, whereupon Chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin asserted he found ‘commission’ better. Brezhnev initially supported Suslov, but once Podgorny had preferred ‘commission’, Brezhnev decided, ‘Then let us write “commission” if the majority is for it.’60 It was always noted that Brezhnev didn’t force his opinion on the commission, or even express it or urge the assembled to hurry up. This did not even change in 1968, when the commission met at the April Plenum to discuss a resolution on the situation in the CSSR and spent minutes considering how best to phrase the role of the CPSU in relation to the other brother parties. After CC Secretary Ponomarëv had read out the draft, which stressed ‘the importance of the action of our party’, Brezhnev suggested, ‘Perhaps we should say: “together with the communist brother parties of the socialist countries”?’ Premier Kosygin was of the opinion that ‘We should not claim for ourselves the function of leader.’ Brezhnev agreed: ‘We must express that we are acting together with them.’ Ponomarëv’s new suggestion was: ‘the importance of the action of the brother countries and the parties of Europe’; Foreign Minister Gromyko responded, ‘Why “of Europe”?’ Brezhnev supported him, telling Ponomarëv: ‘You understand, Boris Nikolayevich, not to emphasize the CPSU, but to stress that all the brother parties are working together.’ After further suggestions and comments, they finally agreed on: ‘the importance of joint action by all the brother parties of the socialist countries in the struggle against German imperialism’. KGB Chairman Andropov remarked, ‘That’s a good suggestion.’61 The Western reader may find it odd that the liveliest debate concerned mere phrasing. Seventy party leaders argued over individual words and commas. It seems that the unity of the party and collective leadership was underlined by arguing only about phrasing but never about content. At the same time, propositions were established from which no one could depart, since they had all voted for them. Brezhnev found an arena in which he could demonstrate that he wasn’t forcing his opinion on anyone, that he listened to everyone and let them have their say. This was easier to achieve in the editorial commissions than in the formalized and heavily ritualized plenums. He clearly needed to demonstrate this particularly in the early years of his rule, for after 1970 such editorial commissions ceased without any indication why. Nevertheless, he did not make any changes to the practice of putting all decisions to the collective. He even had his holidays approved by the Politburo, a symbolic gesture emphasizing he was subject to the will of his comrades. For instance, on 22 June 1979 he informed the Politburo he would like to take a holiday in Crimea from 25 June and, if his comrades did not object, would leave the next day. Their unanimous response was, ‘Correct, Leonid Il’ich, you must regenerate, it is about time you took a holiday.’62 This was not so much about actually voting or discussing whether it was a good idea to have a summer break; the important thing was the ritual of Brezhnev’s submitting to the will of the collective. In line with Wortman’s model, the CC members thus became part of his rule, rising above the masses. Brezhnev never tired of emphasizing that they

180

Brezhnev

were a team and that he valued every single one of them. He closed the February Plenum of 1981 by thanking everyone for everything that had been achieved in the previous five years: ‘It seems to me that we haven’t worked badly – friendlily, collectively, oriented around the cause. Allow me to express my warm thanks to all members and candidates of the CC and the Revision Commission for the good collaboration, for the contribution each of you, comrades, has made during these years to the common cause of our party.’63 Collective speech-writing After ‘re-launching’ the editorial commissions, Brezhnev established a new practice of collective speech-writing, which he would retain until the end of his life. While Stalin wrote his own speeches and Khrushchev employed professional speech-writers but chose the subjects himself, worked his own jokes in and usually ended up improvizing,64 Brezhnev turned speech-writing into a collective ritual. Every speech he held was discussed in advance by the CC apparatus staff and also criticized by the Politburo and powerful members of the CC.65 Khrushchev’s ally Fëdor Burlatskiy complained, ‘Under [Brezhnev] the practice of work-intensive agreement blossomed in full splendour, requiring dozens of signatures for drafts, which ultimately twisted or distorted the entire meaning of the resolution taken.’66 Brezhnev’s aide AleksandrovAgentov also described this collective writing process as an agonizing experience: I once had to attend a meeting where a total of ca. fifteen men (members and candidates of the Politburo, CC secretaries, one or two heads of CC departments) collectively drafted the text of a letter intended to make the leadership of the CP of the Czechoslovakia see sense. What a terrible drama! They worked on the text for several hours on end, each attempting to incorporate his opinion, which often contradicted the others.67

But what Burlatskiy and others branded a lack of ideas and initiative68 was ultimately a well-thought-out manoeuvre as part of his scenario of power, involving as many people as possible in the formulation of policies in order to imply: see, I don’t force my issues or directives on anyone, we do everything together. Aleksandr Bovin, a member of the International Department of the CC, says of Brezhnev that in the run-up to the Twenty-Third Party Congress, his first, he was not entirely sure how he should prepare for it. And so in the autumn of 1965 he invited the heads of all the CC departments to Stalin’s former dacha, Volynskoye I, but without giving them clear instructions as to what he wanted from them. ‘Frankly, Brezhnev should have put a team together and given them clear instructions determining the direction of his text. But he didn’t do that. Perhaps because he was not sure himself what his speech should look like – not any speech, but a Brezhnev speech. That wasn’t easy following Stalin and Khrushchev.’69 But Bovin understood that Brezhnev hadn’t invited all these heads of departments and their deputies because he was clueless, but for tactical reasons. Old Stalinists sat together with advocates of the reform process and were not allowed to leave until they had found a common, middle ground.70

The Caring General Secretary

181

Brutents, Bovin’s colleague at the International Department, also thought that the twenty people Brezhnev summoned to Volynskoye were far too many and that the process seemed completely disorganized. But this group became embroiled in one of the biggest political battles under Brezhnev’s rule. Brutents reports that, of all people, Brezhnev’s two confidants and long-serving aides Trapeznikov and Golikov revealed themselves to be genuine old Stalinists, openly telling their reform-oriented colleagues from the International Department, ‘You will have to be shot’ or ‘You need arresting’.71 Crucial intervention came from Suslov, who would have the last word on ideological matters under Brezhnev too. While it tried the patience of others, for Brezhnev it was a triumph; after a heated exchange they found a common line of policy that was binding for all. It was not until the general orientation had been established that Brezhnev himself got involved, adding the nuances that mattered to him.72 CC aide Bovin thus praises his approach as ‘maximally democratic’: ‘During the discussion, one could argue, defend one’s standpoint and one’s position. Others were permitted to shout and wave their arms about. Brezhnev listened attentively and kept his unwavering countenance. Sometimes he joked too.’73 After this experience, Brezhnev established a practice he retained for the rest of his life: in order to prepare the reports to the CC plenum or speeches for the party congresses, he retired with select CC staff to one of the state dachas, usually the Zavidovo hunting lodge, to work on the script. Bovin relates: First he sent the first draft to a small circle of people whose opinions mattered to him. Together with him we then went through the notes [received], working some of them in, but not others. It was only then that the official version was sent to all members and candidates of the Politburo and the CC secretaries. Work on the documents concluded with the adoption (or rejection) of their notes. Hence everything the general secretary said was not only his opinion, but the position of the CC.74

Since this was a new procedure, it was important to Brezhnev that it be publicized. On 16 September 1965, he sent the draft of his speech for the forthcoming plenum to all CC members, explaining,‘I send you a draft of my speech. I request comments. I continue to work on it. L. Brezhnev’.75 Just as he constantly referred to ‘exchange of opinion’ in the Politburo, he underlined collective work on the speeches at the very outset of his term in office. At the March Plenum of 1966, he offered up the report to the forthcoming party congress for discussion, saying, ‘Comrades, the report for the Twenty-Third Party Congress placed here before the Plenum for its inspection is the result of the collective work of all members, candidates and secretaries of the Central Committee, who were directly involved in its composition. The draft was inspected in its entirety by the Presidium of the CC and unanimously approved.’76 In June 1967, he urged the assembled party plenum to send him more comments and ideas for the speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution: ‘We would be delighted to receive even more comments, since that would only improve, only perfect our text.’77 Brezhnev adhered to this practice of collective speech-writing resolutely. Even when a new cult of personality developed in 1973 and when he became president in

182

Brezhnev

1977, he continued to collect the opinions of others, which were then worked into the scripts of his speeches.78 As late as November 1978, he asked all those present at the CC plenum: ‘The draft resolution […] has been distributed. All comments received have been worked into the text of the draft. Are there any other comments on the draft resolution?’ It wasn’t until calls of ‘no’ and ‘conclude’ rang out that he put the resolution to the vote.79 Embodying the collective The new practice seemed unusual even to outside observers. The political advisor to Egypt’s President Nasser, Mohammed Heikal, witnessed such an act of collective rule during a state visit to Moscow in June 1970. Discussions were interrupted when the door opened and an official from the Foreign Office entered the room and handed Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Vinogradov a piece of paper, triggering a bizarre spectacle: Vinogradov gave the paper to Gromyko, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who read it, got up, and took it to Kosygin; Kosygin read it, and gave it to Brezhnev. Brezhnev read it, and gave it back to Kosygin. Kosygin then gave it to Podgornyi. Podgornyi read it, and gave it back to Kosygin, who gave it back to Brezhnev. Then Brezhnev signed it, and gave it to Kosygin, who signed it too. Then Podgornyi signed. Then Podgornyi gave it to Gromyko, who gave it to Vinogradov, who gave it back to the Foreign Office official. The official then left the room. The whole transaction took, I suppose, about five minutes.80

Brezhnev explained to the puzzled Egyptians that they had just signed a telegram warning Somali General Siad of an assassination attempt. When they left the room, Nasser said to Heikal, ‘Did you see what happened? […] If a telegram to General Siad in Somalia needs the signature of all those three, then we are in trouble!’81 The West German Foreign Office also noted this trait of always foregrounding the collective in 1973: ‘Brezhnev constantly seems determined to stress collective leadership, in contrast to the one-man rule of his predecessors Stalin and Khrushchev, and appears undemonstrative and reserved, albeit firm.’82 But it wasn’t just through collective speech-writing and authorization that Brezhnev stressed he valued everyone’s opinion. Much more than this, he styled himself as the embodiment of collective rule by giving speeches full of pathos and wit. His experience as an amateur thespian probably came to the fore here; he certainly attached great importance to the sound of the spoken word. It was not without good reason that he had his aides read out the scripts of speeches to him. What his critics interpreted as a sign of laziness and a limited intellect83 was a question of performance, according to his assistants.84 Brezhnev first explained how he wanted to speak;85 he wanted to hear what the speech sounded like so he could decide what needed changing or where the dramaturgy wasn’t quite right. He rejected all stilted ‘academisms’ and demanded an ‘oratorical approach’ to the text.86 His aide Georgiy Shakhnazarov called his runthroughs ‘Hyde Park’.87 Brutents confirms: ‘As it turned out, he had a much better feeling

The Caring General Secretary

183

for oral speech and its peculiarities than many others and responded very keenly to everything that didn’t fit the style. As an experienced propagandist and political worker, Brezhnev knew how he had to speak to people, with the masses, and he sensed what he had to say.’88 And Bovin adds, ‘Brezhnev paid no less attention to the form of his appearances than to the content. Applause was a drug to him. Hence he untiringly demanded more climaxes and more pathos be added to the text to entertain the audience.’89 One might say that Brezhnev saw himself as an entertainer and that he succeeded in presenting himself as such from the early years until the mid-1970s. At least initially, this involved instructing his speech-writing aides to keep the Lenin quotations to a minimum. On the one hand, they were not conducive to his performance, and on the other hand he asserted that no one would believe he had read Lenin’s works anyway.90 This was another gesture of humility towards the other party leaders, demonstrating he would not presume to present himself as the foremost party theoretician or an infallible Lenin exegete. Brezhnev succeeded, then, in presenting himself as the ‘spokesman’ of the party, as the embodiment of the collective will and the entertainer of the masses. By adhering to the rituals, emphasis of the collective and a respectful manner, he persuaded them he wouldn’t become a tyrant like Stalin or Khrushchev. ‘Considerate transfers’ Convincing the party he was a trustworthy leader with humble gestures, the revival of collective leadership rituals and joint speech-writing was one thing. Presenting himself as a considerate patron who would not plunge his comrades into ruin was another. At his very first plenum in November 1964, Brezhnev had asserted that the most important issue for the party was the careful selection and appointment of cadres. He had promised to run personnel policy along collective lines too.91 Nevertheless, the most important tool of every party leader was the power to appoint and dismiss people, thereby removing rivals and installing one’s own followers.92 Brezhnev had to deal with five competing networks and the same number of fellow plotters, all of whom had to be controlled and, of course, ideally sidelined.93 The dominance of the patron–client networks was historically and culturally rooted in Soviet rule and the Stalinist Terror, although it also had other origins. In the empire, the Bolsheviks had developed underground and in exile, and only survived thanks to conspirative structures. When Lenin moved into the Kremlin along with the families of the other party leaders, they lived there like a large clan: personal ties and trust that had developed over many years still counted more than ability and formal rank. This culture was compounded in the years of the Terror, as we have seen in chapters 2 and 3. Even if the patronage of a powerful party secretary or economic leader no longer guaranteed one would not be arrested, there was a greater chance of not being denounced within a familiar network. The imposition of overambitious plans also made collaboration in networks a necessity. They offered mutual assistance with material and machines that were not available through official channels, and economic and party leaders covered for each other by tweaking production figures. The patron– client networks thus worked both ‘negatively’ and ‘positively’, providing protection

184

Brezhnev

from despotism and arrest as well as access to rare materials, but also to posts, accommodation and vehicles. Brezhnev was thus faced with a double legacy: distrust, fear and suspicion in the emotional sphere, and a dominant mesh of personal networks the comrades – and he himself – had built up for their own protection. Getting rid of these ‘strongholds’ to afford personnel and cadres opportunities on the basis of their qualifications instead of clan allegiance seems to have been out of the question. On the contrary: was this not what Khrushchev had tried to do with his rotation system, capped terms of office and decentralization? And was it not this that had led to his fall? Hence it seems that for Brezhnev, ruling via personal networks was a fact of life he did not wish to alter; indeed it was the foundation on which he established himself. He would install his retinue from Dnepropetrovsk and Moldavia as the key power-holders. This way, if he was unable to marginalize his potential rivals Suslov, Shelepin, Semichastnyy, Shelest, Podgorny and Kosygin, he could at least keep them in check. Brezhnev thus had to perform a balancing act between expanding his power by installing his clients in important positions and avoiding creating the impression that in doing so he was going against the will of the collective and thereby ruining careers.94 On the contrary, he had to present himself as a ‘carer’ who looked after the cadres and only made decisions for their benefit.95 He is said to have told Fëdor Burlatskiy, ‘My strengths are organization and psychology.’96 Aleksandr Yakovlev, one of the intellectual fathers of perestroika, confirms, albeit derisorily, that Brezhnev only had one talent: the ability to recognize precisely who was his friend and who was his enemy.97 And Mikhail Gorbachеv describes in his memoirs how skilfully Brezhnev developed his network, first placing political competitors under supervision before removing them.98 It was not without good reason the joke went that Russian history was divided into three phases: the pre-Petrine (before Peter the Great), the Petrine (under Peter the Great) and the Dnepro-Petrine – when Brezhnev filled all positions with his retinue from Dnepropetrovsk.99 But he went about it very cautiously: he didn’t rush things, taking his time until he was certain his decisions would be met not only without resistance, but with consensus.100 Those he could not replace were surrounded with his followers from Dnepropetrovsk. Chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin alone was given five deputies from Brezhnev’s homeland.101 Actual loss of power often came in the guise of formal promotion: Brezhnev removed members of the Politburo by making them deputy ministers, made ministers party secretaries of influential oblast committees, and appointed deposed CC members ambassadors to Denmark, Belgium or Norway.102 Georgiy Arbatov remarks, ‘One of his merits was that he was not malevolent or cruel. When he removed people as ambassador or retired them – it was neither prison nor torture nor execution, nor was it expulsion from the party and the cruel public humiliation with which Khrushchev had tormented his opponents.’103 Brezhnev always remained polite and obliging and made sure that those who had been ousted wanted for nothing afterwards. When in 1967 he removed Moscow party leader Nikolay Egorychev, a follower of Shelepin’s,104 he rang him to say, ‘You must please forgive me, it had to be done … But don’t you have any worries, of a family or other nature?’105 Indeed, Egorychev’s daughter had just got married – Brezhnev

The Caring General Secretary

185

promptly allocated her an apartment. Egorychev himself would become a deputy minister and later ambassador to Denmark. In this way, Brezhnev painstakingly avoided a build-up of serious aggression towards himself.106 However, especially in the early years, there remained party members who hoped for a different leader and would have preferred to have seen Shelepin in the role or saw in him the true first secretary.107 Indeed, in the summer of 1965, the Party Presidium entrusted him with leading the sessions in Brezhnev’s absence.108 He thus became a kind of second secretary, a position Brezhnev had so strongly rejected. It was rumoured that Shelepin would replace Brezhnev and that the latter would return to his old position as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.109 Shelepin was also dangerous in that he held three important posts: he was CC secretary, a member of the Presidium and chairman of the committee for party-state control.110 It would take Brezhnev ten years to remove him from all offices, something he did with such dignity that no one could complain. He dealt the first blow at the December Plenum of 1965: unannounced, he suddenly added ‘reorganization of state and party control’ to the agenda and declared the Soviet Union no longer needed state control; an advanced society required people’s control. But since the chairman of the people’s control could not also be the CC secretary, the Presidium proposed relieving Shelepin from his post as chairman of the Control Commission: ‘If the members of the plenum do not disagree, then we need not even pass a resolution, since Shelepin is CC secretary.’111 Calls of ‘Correct!’ rang out from the audience. It was important that Brezhnev spoke on behalf of the Presidium and said ‘we’, that there were apparently compelling objective reasons for Shelepin’s release that no one could object to, and that the members of the plenum actually went along with it and called out ‘correct’, thereby forgoing a vote. We do not know what had gone on prior to this in the Presidium and whether the issue had been discussed in Shelepin’s presence; presumably Brezhnev simply ambushed him at the plenum. Brezhnev had a great talent for cautiously but doggedly finding consensus for his opinion even if he was initially in the minority. What Stalin and Khrushchev had achieved with terror and humiliation, Brezhnev pushed through with his joviality and conviviality. In 1966 he won his first test of strength with Shelepin and his friend KGB chief Semichastnyy over the position of minister of the interior. Brezhnev acted as if he were happy with their candidate, but then invited the members of the Politburo to go hunting at his lodge and drank and talked with them as long as it took for them all to approve his own, Nikolay Shchëlokov, with whom he had worked in Dnepropetrovsk before the war and later in Moldavia.112 He considered it essential to have a minister of the interior who would serve as a counterbalance to the KGB. In 1967 he was then able to force Semichastnyy and Shelepin out of office completely. The escape of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva to the US embassy in India was a welcome opportunity to replace KGB chief Semichastnyy with Andropov and transfer the former to Ukraine. He was nevertheless at pains to ensure Semichastnyy was neither reprimanded nor insulted; instead, a dignified transfer was prepared. Here too, achieving a majority required a good deal of tactical manoeuvring. If Semichastnyy is to be believed, Brezhnev first convinced Podgorny that Semichastnyy could no longer remain head of the KGB since there were

186

Brezhnev

indications he was organizing a shadow cabinet together with Shelepin.113 Suslov had then immediately joined them, since he did not like Semichastnyy. When the Politburo convened, Semichastnyy’s closest ally, Shelepin, was in hospital. Brezhnev had prudently sent Politburo member Gennadiy Voronov, who might have defended Semichastnyy, away on business. He had also recalled Arvid Pel’she, of whose loyalty he was certain, from such a trip.114 Other members of the Politburo whose opinions he was unsure of were summoned to his office immediately before the meeting on 18 May 1967 so that he could amicably persuade them.115 In this way, he prepared ‘consensus’ and attempted to avoid an argument with an uncertain outcome within the Politburo. The completely unprepared Semichastnyy, thinking he had been summoned to report to the Politburo, was met with Brezhnev’s opening, ‘We, i.e. Podgorny, Kosygin and Suslov, suggest releasing Comrade Semichastnyy from his position as KGB chairman. He has worked in this position for a long time, there are no objections to him, but to bind the KGB more closely to the CC, we propose Andropov for this post.’116 It was in keeping with Brezhnev’s style not to rise to an enraged Semichastnyy’s call for an investigation committee to be set up; he calmly insisted that he was not being punished. Semichastnyy felt he was being banished to Ukraine; Brezhnev succeeded in portraying it as a harmless change of workplaces to which the Politburo collectively agreed. In 1967, Shelepin was simply dismissed with praise. Unlike Semichastnyy, he did not object, but played the role Brezhnev assigned to him. Brezhnev won out through a combination of ambush tactics, unwavering friendliness and party discipline. Shelepin reports that before a meeting of the Politburo, Brezhnev summoned him to his office, where he also found Suslov, in whose presence Brezhnev told him, ‘You know, we have to strengthen the trade unions. There is a proposal to release you from the duties of a CC secretary and make you chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions. What do you think?’117 Shelepin responded, in the manner of a good party soldier, that he had never sought a job and never declined one.118 At the party plenum of 26 September 1967, Brezhnev explained Shelepin had been released from his duties as CC secretary because they were not compatible with his new role.119 In 1975, Shelepin also lost his post as chairman of the trade unions and his seat in the Politburo. He reports that Brezhnev had continued to jealously monitor his activity as head of the trade unions, while he himself had found working under such conditions increasingly difficult. The Western press had continued to discuss him as a potential successor, which had not gone down well with Brezhnev.120 There was another conversation between the two that followed the old pattern: Brezhnev asked him to call by before the April Plenum and then told him he had worked a long time, had achieved a great deal, and was now exhausted and needed a change: ‘There is the suggestion to relieve you of membership of the Politburo. Don’t worry, it will all be very dignified.’121 Shelepin responded the same way he had done eight years previously, ‘I am a party soldier. You must decide.’122 At Brezhnev’s request, he wrote seeking his release, which Brezhnev put to the vote at the CC plenum and was of course unanimously accepted.123 This was a skilful staging in which the demoted functionary played along in exemplary fashion; Brezhnev once again gave the CC plenum the impression he had done the weary party cadre a favour by relieving him of his tiring duties.

The Caring General Secretary

187

It was a similar story when Shelest was removed from his post as first secretary of Ukraine in 1972. Shelest too went along with it. He relates that during the CC plenum of 19 May 1972, everyone spent the lunch break skulking in Brezhnev’s office. Shelest was the only one not invited. Finally, Brezhnev called him in too and said he had been in Ukraine for ten years and now it was time for a change; if you worked in one place for a long time, you lost the feel for it, began to get on people’s nerves, and the people got on your nerves too. In short: he would be given a job in Moscow; he was needed as deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers.124 Shelest’s request to retire instead was rejected by Brezhnev. ‘With great pain in my heart, I said, “Well then, if I have no choice, then do what you want.” He stood up, kissed me and said, “Thank you!” ’125 Ousting the chairman of the Council of Ministers and the president Brezhnev’s preferred scenario for removing the two men with whom he shared power or who represented state power called for a different dramaturgy, especially since Brezhnev could not expect Chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin and State President Podgorny to play along. As chairman of the Council of Ministers, Kosygin was essentially sacrosanct, since in 1964 the party had decided it would never again combine the post of general secretary with that of premier. According to Shelest, Brezhnev wanted to succeed Kosygin but allowed himself to be persuaded by Podgorny that it was out of the question.126 Hence he first relied on his tried and tested tactic and appointed five deputies to Kosygin at once, all of them from Dnepropetrovsk.127 Then fate smiled on Brezhnev: on 31 July 1976, Kosygin had a boating accident. His physician reports that on this calm Sunday, Kosygin was rowing a skiff, a one-man racing boat, on the Moskva River, when he suffered a brain haemorrhage, fell unconscious and was rescued from the water by his bodyguards following in a separate boat.128 It was several days before he returned to consciousness and another seventy before he was discharged from hospital.129 His health remained critical after that; in autumn 1979 and October 1980 he suffered two heart attacks.130 Brezhnev, who received constant updates on Kosygin’s condition while holidaying in Crimea,131 took his opportunity: in September 1976 he appointed his friend from his Dnepropetrovsk days, Nikolay Tikhonov, as first deputy to the premier.132 The Foreign Office in Bonn reported that Tikhonov’s appointment came as a great surprise and indicated that they were preparing to remove Kosygin: ‘Tikhonov is an old comrade of Brezhnev’s and a member of what is known as the Dnepropetrovsk clan, a group of influential friends close to Brezhnev. Brezhnev has once again been able to place one of his trusted followers in a key position.’133 Kosygin’s first deputy had hitherto been Kirill Mazurov.134 Brezhnev wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible. In 1978, he sent him on his way from the Politburo in the familiar fashion: after a conversation with Brezhnev, Mazurov requested to be relieved of his duties due to ‘bad health’.135 Brezhnev explained the situation to the CC members in his typical jovial way: ‘We have had a chat with Comrade Kosygin for half an hour. Comrade Mazurov has written an application himself, he realizes he is ill. You know, he has been off work fifty to sixty days, sometimes he works for just an hour, but his sector, group “B”,136 is a complex area, hence after our conversation he

188

Brezhnev

wrote his application [for his release].’137 The November party plenum unanimously voted Mazurvov out and Tikhonov in as a candidate.138 Brezhnev thanked Mazurov for the work he had done and wished him a good recovery.139 But it wasn’t until two years later, before the CC plenum of 21 October 1980, that Brezhnev received the long-awaited letter from Kosygin requesting his release on ‘health grounds’.140 Remarkably, the original minutes do not include the point at which Brezhnev must have read the letter to the plenum and asked for its approval.141 Only the official minutes and the resolutions of the CC plenum, which were presumably doctored, document his release ‘due to the condition of his health and at his own request’.142 Two days later, Brezhnev read out Kosygin’s ‘request’ to be released from his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers before the Supreme Soviet. Tikhonov was elected in his place.143 Kosygin died two days later, on 18 December 1980, without having left hospital. Since Brezhnev wanted to celebrate his seventy-fourth birthday on 19 December in great style, he had the announcement of the death of the former premier, once his comrade, delayed until 21 December.144 While Kosygin’s accident had played into Brezhnev’s hands, he could not rely on such good fortune in the case of the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Podgorny. Ironically, Podgorny himself had shown Brezhnev the solution: as general secretary, Brezhnev was not permitted to rule over the state as chairman of the Council of Ministers – but the position of president, who was above the government and deployed it, was open to him. This particular coup was a case of masterly long-term planning. When Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, constitutional reform disappeared from the agenda. In 1977, Brezhnev took up the reform once again, with almost the same content, and made it ‘his’ constitutional transformation. The reform elevated the role of the chairman of the Presidium and for the first time contained a chapter on foreign policy aims. At the CC plenum of 24 May 1977, Brezhnev proudly proclaimed the benefits of the new, progressive, socialist-democratic constitution. What then followed was a piece of perfect stage management. Five party oblast secretaries stood up one after the other and urged that the offices of the state president and the party leader should be combined in one person in future – Brezhnev. The first to speak was Boris Kachura, oblast chairman of Donetsk: Comrades! We all know too well that all fundamental foreign policy issues are decided by the CC, the Politburo and with the greatest engagement by General Secretary Comrade Brezhnev (applause). […] Accordingly, I make the practical suggestion for which the time is nigh and which will surely meet with the full support of all CC members: General Secretary L.I. Brezhnev should also become chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (thunderous applause).145

The recommendation by the Donetsk representative was then followed by similar eulogies from the party leaders of Penza, Kokchetav (Kazakhstan), Kuybyshev and Tashkent, and then reinforced by the powerful party associations from Moscow, Leningrad and Ukraine. After eight party leaders had sung their hymns to Brezhnev and demanded he finally become president, Suslov called the vote. The CC plenum unanimously decided to propose to the Supreme Soviet that Podgorny be released

The Caring General Secretary

189

and Brezhnev appointed. As if that were not bad enough, Podgorny also lost his seat on the Politburo at the same vote.146 Brezhnev sat calmly beside the shocked Podgorny and acted as if he had known nothing about it: ‘I don’t understand it either, but clearly it’s what the people want.’147 Presumably at Brezhnev’s request, but perhaps also to reduce his humiliation, Podgorny retrospectively requested his release on ‘health grounds’, and the minutes were altered accordingly.148 On 16 June 1977, Brezhnev wrote in his pocket diary: ‘10:00 in the morning – meeting of the Supreme Soviet. Election of Comrade Brezhnev as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (many congratulations)’.149 It is hard to say whether Brezhnev envisaged deposing his comrades one by one back in 1964. At the same time, thinking in terms of clan structures was such a matter of course that he probably did not doubt for a minute that competing patrons like Shelepin, Semichastnyy and Shelest could be a threat. It was less a question of whether than of how he could get rid of them. Mindful of the approaches taken by Stalin and Khrushchev, with his scenario of ‘trust and care’ he took the ‘humane’ option, one that also posed less of a risk to himself. Although everyone saw through his game sooner or later, they accepted the roles they were given. Party discipline and the idea that the general secretary embodied the party line sat too deep within them. In their often accusatory, bitter memoirs they describe how Brezhnev played with them, but also express respect for the way he went about it. Brezhnev not only remained true to his power scenario of ‘trust and care’ to the end; he had every choice of personnel blessed by the members of the party plenum so that no one could say it had been against his will. Even if Brezhnev now used the plenum only as a stage and the members as extras in his theatre, no one objected to the roles they were assigned; they all played their part as members of the collective leadership and read their script as directed. After all, as long as they played along, they were guaranteed a share of the power.

Familiarity in the Politburo, or Lënya, Kostya and Andryusha But Brezhnev’s power was not based on trust and care alone; it also rested on familiarity within the Politburo. While trust, as a habit based on actions, implies reflection on security and risk on the cognitive level, familiarity is a purely unconscious, emotional condition that does not demand decision-making, instead conveying security through familiarity.150 According to the philosopher Niklas Luhmann, familiarity ensures that the extreme complexity of the world eludes our consciousness, the world thus seeming simple, known and safe.151 After four decades of insecurity under Stalin and Khrushchev, it seems only logical that restoring trust was not just a mental process, but also an emotional one.152 It was even more important to pay attention to sensitivities given how, if we follow the philosopher Martin Hartmann, victims of terror and violence often have difficulty building trust. Once they have lost ‘trust in the world’, risks take on exceptionally high significance.153 Even if the Politburo and CC members had all been perpetrators of the Great Terror to some degree, they still felt they were victims of Stalin’s regime of fear. After all, in 1964, Stalin had only been dead eleven years. Hence it was vital for Brezhnev to allow all

190

Brezhnev

suspected and real risks to be forgotten and to present himself as a protector. The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka observes that a group of people traumatized by abuse of trust sometimes completely isolates itself from the outside world, ghettoizes itself, as it were, creating internal familiarity by shutting out everything foreign and threatening.154 ‘They become a quasi-family with a strong surrogate father who takes care of all its members.’155 It is fruitful to examine the inner circle of power as a traumatized group whom Brezhnev served as a father figure by ensuring they ‘felt safe’ via familiarity. This opens up a new perspective on the practices he established in and around the Politburo. Familiarity in the Politburo and Central Committee was first expressed by constant contact and personal meetings in informal settings.156 It began with Brezhnev spending several hours a day on the phone to his entourage and the party secretaries throughout the country, even when on holiday.157 According to one aide, Shakhnazarov, the phone calls followed a precise procedure. Brezhnev opened by asking the secretaries of the oblasts or republics how they and their families were and offered assistance if necessary. He then enquired about the production plans in industry and agriculture; they finally spoke about party policy, personnel issues and the next party plenum.158 This is also reflected by Brezhnev’s notebooks, in which he noted with whom he spoke and whom

Figure 20 Brezhnev on the phone while on holiday in Crimea, 1982.

The Caring General Secretary

191

he phoned: ‘10 January 1967: spoke to Comrade Kosygin […], conversation with Comrade Rudenko […], 27 January: received Comrade Semichastnyy V. Ef., regular report on the current situation, extraordinary report on the issues of young writers, an open discussion on trust. […] 15.2.: A.N. Kosygin rang, called his visit to England historic.’159 Brezhnev used these regular conversations to demonstrate empathy and solidarity while ensuring he had the cadres’ loyalty. Shakhnazarov noted, ‘This is the new kind of social contract between the leader and the nomenclatura – I take care of you – you take care of me.’160 But this display of care went beyond extensive phone calls. Brezhnev also made sure that he regularly met with his comrades in informal settings. These constant personal meet-ups went a long way to fostering commitment. Every Thursday, he gathered all the CC secretaries; they travelled from throughout the Union.161 The evening before every plenum of the Supreme Soviet, fifteen to twenty oblast and rayon secretaries met at Brezhnev’s home for an open exchange of thoughts.162 Brezhnev not only lived in the same building as Minister of the Interior Shchëlokov and KGB chief Andropov on Kutuzovskiy prospekt, but also regularly invited his confidants round, such as KGB General Georgiy Tsinëv or Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Tikhonov.163 Brezhnev established further familiarity by calling most of his comrades in the Politburo by affectionate nicknames and having himself referred to as ‘Lënya’ (the diminutive of ‘Leonid’).164 While this would have been unthinkable during the Stalin era, and Khrushchev had a derogatory epithet for everyone by the end of his rule,165 Brezhnev called Andropov ‘Yura’, Chernenko ‘Kostya’, Gromyko ‘Andryusha’ etc. He only addressed Suslov and Kosygin by their fore- and patronymic names, since to them, it was said, he felt intellectually inferior.166 This too was another gesture showing he did not consider himself the one and only figure in the Politburo. Brezhnev continued this close contact on national holidays and on vacation. He travelled with the members of the Politburo and their families to his dacha or to Crimea, where they had neighbouring holiday homes. A big fan of CSKA Moscow, he went to football matches with them, and they also took in ice hockey games together.167 On holidays, Gromyko, Kirilenko, Andropov, Chernenko and Kulakov or, as we should say, Dima, the two Andrushyas, Yura, Kostya and Fedya, came to the dacha to spend the day with Lënya.168 Brezhnev liked to play the private host, personally receiving his guests at the door, taking their coats and serving them plain food.169 A psychological culture of trust developed, then, on the basis of emotional familiarity. Emphasizing personal, quasi-familial relationships seemed to banish all risks on the professional level – such as dismissal or repressions. The regular meetings and phone calls and the joint activities provided constant performative renewal of this trust and familiarity. Levelled hierarchies It was not only the members of the Politburo and the CC secretaries who enjoyed informal, familial exchanges with Brezhnev. The CC apparatus staff also speak of the familiar, relaxed atmosphere at Zarech’ye, the government dacha on the outskirts of

192

Brezhnev

Moscow or at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, where they gathered for work meetings. Brezhnev addressed them using the informal second person pronoun, did without a collar and tie, and expected that they too would be casually attired. He chatted with them about how he had slept, what he had dreamt about and what mood he was in.170 While his aide Brutents was turned off by the ‘vulgarity of his behaviour and his familiarity in dealing with the stenographers’,171 his speech-writer Bovin liked his matey approach: The dinner party was a way of forging a community, relaxation, as we say today. There was no tension to be felt – here the general secretary, there the secretary. When clinking glasses and enjoying the starters, everyone was equal. Poems were recited. Brezhnev could do a wonderful rendition of Yesenin and, standing on a stool, recited almost all of ‘Anna Snegina’. We sang too.172

Brezhnev usually appeared for breakfast at eleven, made his phone calls, and then worked on speeches. The afternoon was for hunting. The evenings were spent with traditional fare and vodka. Brezhnev loved convivial company, entertained his aides royally with tales from his life and ensured nobody drank too much.173 He allowed them insights not only into his daily schedule, but also into his complaints, ailments and weaknesses. He thus blurred the boundaries between the private and the professional, treating the CC apparatus staff as if they were ‘members of a family’. Brutents remarks, ‘But viewed from the slightest distance, the illusions are destroyed, and the “reality” often proves to be primitive, a banal matter even reminiscent of familial, clan-like and communal relations.’174 What Brutents disliked was possibly exactly what Brezhnev was aiming for or the foundation of his rule. By levelling all hierarchies and blurring social boundaries, he established common ground with his entourage. They were to see him as one of them and not as a foreign being who could pose a threat to them. Brezhnev practised this levelling and unity not only on the level of the Politburo and the CC apparatus, but also with a third group: his bodyguards and staff. Brezhnev knew all the names of his bodyguards, cooks and staff and constantly asked how they were keeping, if their families were well and whether they needed anything.175 He took care of them all by sorting out accommodation and payments for them. In his notebook he had noted all their birthdays so that he could present them with gifts.176 As much as he loved gifts and medals, he enjoyed giving presents to others.177 He had a particularly close relationship with his bodyguard Vladimir Medvedev, who remained with him from 1968 onwards and saw himself as a member of the family: ‘I entered this family as one of them. It went so far that I packed Leonid Il’ich’s suitcase when he travelled on business. And Viktoriya Petrovna was calm when she knew I was with her husband.’178 While Medvedev was trained in close combat and evacuation from the firing line, lifesaving and skiing,179 he was deployed as a close friend of the family, as a hunting companion and as a babysitter during the holidays. In Crimea, he had to look after Brezhnev’s grandson Andrey, who was very taken with the bodyguard and kept him on his toes all day.180 Brezhnev also loved to

The Caring General Secretary

193

play dominoes with his bodyguards and staff.181 Medvedev remembers, ‘Both bragging and condescension were alien to him. His easy manner was natural.’182 This is well exemplified by an event recalled by Shelest: when Brezhnev visited him at his dacha in the summer of 1964, he was also introduced to his grandson Petya, who immediately explained, ‘Ah, you are Uncle Lënya from the cinema box office.’ Brezhnev was first lost for words, then laughed and from that point on, whenever he saw Shelest, he told him to say hello to Petya from ‘Uncle Lënya from the cinema box office’.183 Brezhnev also particularly enjoyed sharing his hunting quarry equally with ministers, members of the Politburo, friends and staff, his bodyguards keeping precise track of who received what.184 He not only kept meticulous records of who was to receive so many ducks or a certain cut of boar, but also rang them shortly afterwards to see if the meat had arrived.185 His tailor regularly received game, sometimes fifteen wild ducks at a time.186 He even had hunting trophies sent to his dentists in the Rhineland, who took care of his teeth in the 1970s.187 This exchange of gifts clearly had the crucial function of securing support in the Politburo and from his wider entourage. It combined two different practices, the obligations and ties created by gifts and the levelling of the hierarchy, and implied a commonality that was expressed whenever he rang in person after sending a gift, as if he himself were the delivery service. Like the paterfamilias who carves and serves the Sunday roast himself, he was the provider who took care of his charges, including their physical well-being. Just as he established closeness with rituals, gestures and nicknames, he secured the loyalty of his entourage with gifts, presenting himself as the caring patriarch. This very ‘taking care of everyone’ and ‘gift-giving’ was repeatedly attacked as corruption.188 But as a practice constantly securing the loyalty of those around him and underpinning his scenario of the caring general secretary, it represented the norm rather than a departure from it. He thereby ensured that not a single member of staff might think he had been treated unfairly. He treated them all like one big family.

Male bonding Brezhnev’s scenario of power appears to have been based on one further element in addition to trust, care and familiarity: male bonding. This too was a form of communalization that underpinned the cohesion and conspiratorial nature of the group, created a strong feeling of ‘us’ and allowed the world to seem a safe place. Much more than the other elements, it followed the practices established under the rules of Stalin and Khrushchev. Born as a conspiratorial underground community that perceived itself as a battling avant-garde, the party leadership’s inner circle had consisted only of men since the days of Lenin. Only one woman ever made it into the Party Presidium or the Politburo, Ekaterina Furtseva, who served under Khrushchev from 1957 to 1961 before being relegated to the office of minister for culture. Politics was and remained a man’s business, even more so when they met unofficially or went to the match or hunting together.

194

Brezhnev

Brezhnev seems to have firmly believed that men changed the world while women made it more beautiful – with their work in the home and by decorating society with their presence. The informal men’s gatherings with his comrades clearly fulfilled two purposes: firstly to celebrate inviolable community on the level of gender and secondly to present himself as the alpha male. It would appear that with respect to his role as a man, Brezhnev permitted himself to act in a way he did not dare to as the party leader: he portrayed himself as the highest ranking and the best. What was too dangerous a game in politics was made possible by gender roles: acting like the number one and reclaiming leadership – Brezhnev was the best shot, drove the fastest cars, was the best-looking and had the prettiest women. A passion for hunting As we have seen, hunting had been Brezhnev’s great passion since the 1920s, when feeding his family was still the priority rather than sport. As far as we know, Stalin did not hunt, probably because he was too frightened of being shot ‘by accident’. In 1951, he also had several hundred hunting grounds closed due to alleged abuses.189 This attitude towards hunting would fundamentally change under Khrushchev: on a conciliatory visit to Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1955, he learnt that hunting could be a social occasion during which the Soviet Union could present itself as a generous host while creating a loose, relaxed atmosphere. Tito invited him to the old royal hunting ground on the island of Veliki Brijun with its luxurious lodge, trained hunters and dogs and plenty of game.190 Just as he was inspired by Tito to develop Soviet tourism, he returned from Yugoslavia with the idea of establishing a few representative hunting paradises. Presumably this kind of protocol conviviality in the outdoors with dirty boots and a rifle in one’s hand was a welcome diversion for Khrushchev, who despised fine ceremony and anything stiff. He had four hunting grounds set up that were suitable for diplomats from both the East and the West: Zavidovo, around 150 kilometres north-west of Moscow, halfway to Tver, founded as a private hunting club in 1917, before the Revolution, but nationalized in 1929; one in Crimea; one on the Black Sea, near the city of Kherson; and one in the primeval forests of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha on the border between White Russia and Poland. When Tito paid an unofficial visit in 1962, Khrushchev was able to treat him to hunting and everything that went with it.191 Brezhnev regularly went hunting with Khrushchev and his state visitors. As president, he went hunting as Tito’s guest in Yugoslavia in 1962 and as the guest of the king in Afghanistan in 1963.192 Hence he was familiar with hunting as a representative practice used to honour a state visitor while fostering male bonding with him. When Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev in 1964, he thus also took over development of the Zavidovo hunting ground. Since stocks were not particularly dense here, the state hunting authority had had game brought from all corners of the empire since the 1930s, especially wild boars and hares.193 Zavidovo was Brezhnev’s favourite place. He used it both to pursue his own private hobby194 and to form non-hierarchical communities with members of the Politburo, the brother states and Western state visitors. He went hunting there with Erich Honecker, Finnish President Urhu

The Caring General Secretary

195

Figure 21 Brezhnev with a stag at the Zavidovo hunting lodge, 1977.

Kekkonen, Tito, Cuban revolutionary leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro and Fidel Castro’s wife, who was a better shot than many men.195 But here too, exceptions proved the rule. There was nothing aristocratic or hegemonic about these hunts. Dr Wilhelm Osing, Brezhnev’s West German dentist, who was also invited to Zavidovo in September 1974, reports the pleasure Brezhnev took in providing clothing and selecting a gun for him. He always allowed his guest the honour of taking the front passenger seat and clambered into the back of the car or jeep himself; he also let his guest take the first shot at a boar or stag.196 He thereby not only flattened hierarchies, but also lowered himself in the pecking order. The men all looked alike in their green hunting outfits and all played the same role as hunters, stalking an animal together before finally toasting their success with vodka. Even the buildings and facilities appeared to

196

Brezhnev

Figure 22 Standing, left to right: Brezhnev, First Secretary of the CP of Ukraine Vladimir Shcherbitskiy, Andrey Gromyko. Seated, right: Josip Broz Tito; Zales’ye hunting lodge near Kiev, 1976.

underline the lack of hierarchy: in Zavidovo, everything was small and practical; only Brezhnev had a three-room apartment. The French ambassador Roger Seydoux, whom Brezhnev hosted there in 1972, turned his nose up at such facilities: The dacha is terribly furnished in the most disastrous of tastes. The general secretary’s room looked like a high-class Intourist hotel. He then led me into a winter garden with beautiful plants and an oddly long table that surely had room for the entire Politburo. The garden is very badly kept, like most Russian gardens, but the vegetation is very beautiful and the view wonderful.197

Brezhnev also used the long table and the familiarity promoted by the surroundings to pursue his domestic political goals. It was in Zavidovo that he negotiated for Shchëlokov to become minister of the interior,198 consulted the head of the state planning authority Gosplan, Nikolay Baybakov, and chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin on economic policy and other such matters.199 His aide Bovin, who travelled to Zavidovo with Brezhnev in December 1966, recalls that the maxim was ‘Work tactically, relax strategically’.200 In other words, there had to be enough time for leisure along with work. When he and Vadim Zagladin, another colleague from the CC International Department, drank so much during a snowy troika excursion that Andropov had to tell them to behave, Brezhnev dismissed their subsequent apology: he was happy people had enjoyed themselves. He usually

The Caring General Secretary

197

spent his birthday on 19 December the way he preferred: in Zavidovo, surrounded by his comrades from the Politburo.201 There was an important side effect to this informal conviviality, however: chatting about hunting over dinner allowed Brezhnev to present himself as the best shot.202 He enjoyed relating how he had brought down a wild boar. He clearly enjoyed not only entertaining people, but also bragging of his abilities with a rifle in order to reinforce that he was the alpha male among them, a real man who knew how to use a gun, in contrast to Suslov, who refused to hunt entirely – probably because he was scared, mocked Brezhnev – and Kosygin, who preferred the less exhilarating pastime of fishing.203 Brezhnev often noted on his desk calendar how many boars, ducks or geese he had shot. On 22 October 1976 he wrote: ‘Chernenko shot 3, Tsukanov – 3, me – 8.’204 Other entries record: ‘Chernenko – 1, Gromyko – 3, me – 11.’205 Brezhnev was an outstanding shot, his bodyguards relate; he could hit at long range without a telescopic sight.206 This must be qualified by the fact that towards the end of his life, he increasingly hunted from a raised hide, the boars being enticed with feed so they stood directly before his barrel.207 There is no evidence that his hunters tied bears to trees for him to shoot, as was often mockingly claimed – indeed an entry in his notebook on 11 September 1976 records the opposite: ‘Went hunting bear in the evening, came back at 2.30 in the morning, didn’t see a bear.’208 Zavidovo remained Brezhnev’s favourite place, a place where he presented himself beyond the party hierarchies and with a gun in his hand as ‘all man’. Whether or not it was intentional, it was a clever move to depoliticize pretensions to the role of leader and transfer them to this circle of males. Even when his doctors sought to prevent him hunting because he repeatedly injured his eyebrow or broke his collarbone from the gun’s recoil, he refused to stop. He simply had plenty of make-up applied for state visits so that no one saw his black eye.209 It was known at home and abroad that Brezhnev enjoyed hunting and valued good weapons; over the years he was gifted almost ninety weapons, keeping them all in gun cabinets and having them cleaned by his bodyguards.210

Fast cars ‘His hobbies are hunting, football and cars. President Nixon thus gave him a “Cadillac” upon his visit to Moscow, Pompidou in Paris a “Citroën-Maserati” ’,211 was how the West German Foreign Office characterized Brezhnev ahead of his visit to Bonn in 1973. This is not the typical description of a general secretary, and it appears Brezhnev deliberately cultivated a different image. That is not to say that he emulated the tsars, presenting himself as if ‘not of this world’. But it is striking that he made himself stand out with special leisure activities: his predecessors had not pursued such hobbies, nor did these activities stand for socialist values. Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev are not known to have had any pastimes. On the contrary: the image of the party leader demanded that he lived entirely for the revolutionary cause; there was no room for leisure. The Soviet people were allowed recreation, but it had to be ‘culturally useful’ and its main objective was to maintain their capacity for work, promote athletic

198

Brezhnev

robustness and foster intellectual training. Neither hunting nor driving fast cars belonged to the accepted canon of leisure activities. But while hunting was legitimized as a tool of diplomacy or could be seen as reverence for the revolutionary struggle, Brezhnev’s passion for fast cars was clearly a Western hobby. While the car had been a symbol of progress and a sign of commitment to achievement, since only deserving Stakhanov workers and engineers received one, in 1959 Khrushchev had declared that the car was not something for Soviet man, who was better off travelling by bus or train. Brezhnev, however, enthusiastically said that every young woman should receive a car as a dowry.212 There was undoubtedly a shift in values towards individual mobility and with it consumption under him. But it was far from what the general secretary himself practised. Of course, his love of cars can be simply dismissed as a personal quirk: he had fallen in love with the notary’s car as a small boy and could now indulge his foible. But as the general secretary, Brezhnev was not a ‘private person’ whose actions went unnoticed. Everything he did and didn’t do was under permanent observation by his staff, his colleagues in the CC Apparatus and the Politburo and a host of CC members. A life of luxury and extravagance was out of the question for the simple reason that since the days of Lenin, asceticism had been the first rule for the party leader: he possessed no private property and did not concern himself with superfluous frills. Hence Brezhnev had to ensure that his passion for cars did not appear to the Politburo as breach of a taboo. Nor could it cause resentment. The image he put across was thus certainly that of a nouveau riche or dandy who collected cars as status symbols for power and wealth. In this respect, Roy Medvedev’s accusations miss the true core of his passion.213 It was of course a luxury that his private fleet included a Rolls-Royce, two Mercedes limousines, a Nissan President, a Cadillac, a Lincoln and many other models.214 But the message he sent was the same as when he went hunting: look what a dashing fellow I am. I do the 148 kilometres from the Kremlin to Zavidovo in just fifty minutes – a speed of 180 kilometres per hour. In his notebooks he occasionally made notes such as: ‘To Crimea – on holiday. At the wheel myself – in the Roy-Rolls [sic].’215 His bodyguards trembled whenever Brezhnev took the wheel, which he did often and with great pleasure, and put his foot to the floor. They emerged from such journeys soaked in sweat.216 Since he did not drive the state cars himself, they tried to trick him by suggesting they take the ZiL (a Russian manufacturer) instead, but Brezhnev usually declined, asking, ‘What did we have last time, the Lincoln? Let’s take the Mercedes then!’217 As he did with a gun in his hand, behind the wheel he demonstrated that he was a ‘real man’ and different to his comrades in the Politburo. Kosygin, for instance, did not keep the Western cars he was given, but passed them on to the general fleet, nor did he drive himself.218 Behind the wheel, Brezhnev demonstrated on the level of masculinity the leadership he sought to conceal on the level of politics. Beautiful women Brezhnev had another passion in addition to hunting and fast cars: beautiful women. It is difficult to analyse this side to the general secretary properly, since innumerable

The Caring General Secretary

199

rumours and probably slander abound regarding his many affairs and efforts to cover them up – but there are few reliable sources. It is nevertheless beyond doubt that Brezhnev made no bones about his weakness for the ‘fairer sex’. This in itself is remarkable and not just a subject for gossip columns, since from the days of Lenin, Soviet party leaders had to observe prudish morals, to which all of his predecessors had adhered, as far as we know. Brezhnev, however, ignored the behavioural code and, as with his enthusiasm for motor sport, thus broke the mould cast for him as general secretary and as a role model for the party. To avoid misunderstandings: he was not like NKVD chief Beriya, who was renowned for his rape orgies.219 Brezhnev might have had an old-fashioned idea of women, but didn’t consider them an object so much as a creature to be worshipped. As his photographer put it, Brezhnev ‘venerated’ women.220 He is certainly not known to have abused his power in order to approach them. His many embittered, grudge-bearing former colleagues would have certainly enjoyed making such accusations if anything of that nature had happened. Brezhnev used the opportunities that presented themselves to him as state president and subsequently as general secretary to seek and enjoy the company of beautiful and famous women: after a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi Theatre, he drove prima ballerina Mayya Plisetskaya home, quoted his favourite poet Yesenin, sang her a song from the ‘Beautiful Dnieper’ and patted her knee.221 He also wooed the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, reciting Yesenin to her too, along with amusing satirical verses. Given Brezhnev’s charming manner, the ladies clearly took it as it was intended: as a compliment. What’s more, Vishnevskaya not only found Brezhnev’s company pleasant and cultivated, but even attested to his musical talent.222 It is uncertain with which women Brezhnev had intimate relations. He appears to have often been happy to leave it at flirting and gallantry. The singer Anna Shalfeyeva, who sang the popular soldier’s song ‘The Little Light’, reports that Brezhnev met her during the war at a concert she gave for the troops; he often accompanied her on her subsequent appearances at the front. She says he often met with her after the war whenever he holidayed in Sochi without his family. When their affair was over, he ensured she was able to move from a communal room with alcoholics for neighbours to an apartment of her own. Her assessment: ‘Leonid took care of his women and made sure they were looked after. But more than singers he loved nurses.’223 To an extent, this is confirmed by KGB chief Semichastnyy, who grumbled that the KGB was more occupied with covering up Brezhnev’s dalliances than with taking care of state security. Brezhnev, he said, had taken several of his front wives with him to Dnepropetrovsk and then to Moscow, where he had got them all apartments and married them off to influential men.224 He further claims that in Moldavia, Brezhnev fell for the canteen lady Alla Mokhova, whom he made his secretary and with whom he watched his favourite films Volga, Volga and Tractorists long into the night.225 Semichastnyy goes so far as to claim Brezhnev selected his comrades on the basis of how attractive their wives were or only promoted those in whose wives he was interested – that was the only reason Shchëlokov was made minister of the interior, Tsvigun deputy chief of the KGB and Bodyul first secretary of Moldavia.226 Whatever one thinks of these tales from a bitter ex-KGB boss, it is remarkable that Brezhnev’s ‘affairs’ did not harm him; rather he clearly used his success with beautiful

200

Brezhnev

women to present himself as a ‘real man’ to his comrades in the Politburo. According to Shelest, Brezhnev always showed up at the hunting trips to Zavidovo accompanied by ‘some girl or other’ and these ‘girls’ also spent the night there with him.227 Brezhnev clearly took as much pleasure as he possessed great skill in demonstrating he was a ‘real man’ who didn’t turn down any opportunity to enjoy himself while considering his comrades in the Politburo dried-up, puritanical bores. He is said to have teased Suslov and Kosygin in particular for being steadfastly faithful to their wives.228 He treated Suslov with irony and ridicule, ‘Like a bonvivant towards a pencil pusher’,229 according to his advisor Bovin. In the Politburo, he made fun of Suslov by suggesting they have a whip-round so that he could buy himself a new coat.230 When on an official trip Kosygin told Brezhnev he would spend the evening reading a book, Brezhnev was most amused.231 Clearly those he mocked did not want or dare to say something in reply. He was thus able to triumph in such company as the alpha male. Brezhnev’s behaviour towards women does not mean that he did not love and dote on his wife. According to his bodyguard and his photographer, he treated Viktoriya Petrovna very respectfully and tenderly. They had an ‘old-fashioned’ relationship.232 Viktoriya Petrovna relates that when he was a land manager, he brought her flowers from the fields every day and would later continue the practice on a regular basis.233 For Brezhnev, she was responsible for the children and the home and for offering support, while he sought adventure and romance with young beauties, thereby rising above his Politburo comrades. Good looks Ultimately, Brezhnev had a further foible that separated him from the grey ranks of his comrades in the Politburo without defining a leadership role on the political level: his concern for his good looks, to which many different colleagues attested, his penchant for snappy dressing, and his vanity. He thus established a new playing field on which to measure himself against the other party leaders and demonstrate to them, as with his hunting, fast cars and beautiful women, that they were no match for him. This too was male strutting that distracted from the political arena – competition on the gender level. Brezhnev must have known his good looks, as a distinguishing characteristic, formed part of his capital. Even if the many legends about Stalin noticing him due to his appearance are actually apocryphal, they do demonstrate that he was handsome enough for his contemporaries to have considered it possible. His wife also attests to his good looks and the attention he paid to how he dressed: ‘He constantly changed his suits. He wasn’t a flashy dresser, but he was always well dressed, wore a white shirt, he didn’t like colourful or striped shirts, but he always chose bright colours for his ties, but always one colour. And they had to have a readytied knot. He didn’t like tying them himself – he didn’t always manage the knot.’234 In Moscow, he had his ‘court tailor’, from whom he only ordered tailor-made clothing – and who would later be engaged by Raisa Gorbachеva, who was renowned for her elegance. Aleksandr Igmand sewed for him from 1970 onwards; Igmand considered himself more than just a tailor; he called himself an artist and boasted of how well his suits sat on Brezhnev: ‘He was completely transformed. As if he were taller and

The Caring General Secretary

201

slimmer, but he wore a size 56.’235 Brezhnev often noted in his pocket diaries when he had ordered a suit, had been measured for one or had visited the tailor to try one on.236 The Kremlin couturier also dressed Brezhnev’s clan: his minister of the interior and friend Shchëlokov and his son-in-law Churbanov – but otherwise mainly worked for writers and film stars, not other members of the Politburo.237 Brezhnev was not only noted for having better material and better-fitting suits than his Politburo colleagues, however. He was also always groomed, the hairdresser or barber Tolya visiting him twice a day: he had a shave and his hair coiffured in the morning and in the afternoon following his midday sleep.238 He often noted this in his diary: ‘11 April – Monday – groomed – shave – head washed – Tolya.’239 His entire appearance was photogenic, according to his personal photographer Vladimir Musael’yan, who met him in the late 1960s and soon found a place in his entourage.240 Neither Stalin nor Khrushchev had their own photographer who followed their every move. But Brezhnev enjoyed posing for the camera; he had done this during the war, when he took his self-portrait with the German Rolleiflex. While photography had been more about play and vanity for him until 1964, he used it for political ends once he had Musael’yan by his side, if not before then. In doing so, he was very clever in his approach, the photographer relates.241 For instance, to get good photographs, he also went with Musael’yan to his studio.242 When he received the rank of marshal in 1976, he immediately had his photo taken in his new uniform; this was the portrait he preferred to give to his entourage and the leaders of the brother countries.243 When he visited Fidel Castro in 1974, he took with him the photograph showing him at the victory parade in his parade uniform on 24 June 1945.244 However, his good looks and their exploitation for political ends were not all fun and games, but were a source of increasing frustration the older and weaker – and fatter – he became. Throughout his entire life, he had strictly watched his waistline and found it hard to come to terms with gaining weight. His obsession with staying at a certain weight or losing it can be sensed in entries such as those of August 1977: ‘Weight before breakfast 85.5. Weight after breakfast 85.5. After 2 hours swimming in the pool 85.15’ or: ‘85.8. Naked 85.7’.245 If he stayed at a given weight or lost some, he was in a good mood for the rest of the day. If, however, he had put it on, the day was ruined and his mood remained darkened, according to his bodyguard Medvedev.246 Indeed, the photographs from the last years of his life, when he had become grey, bloated and haggard, reveal nothing of the young, strapping tall, handsome figure he once was. Brezhnev must have been painfully aware of this. Since he had made his appearance a mark of distinction setting him apart from his comrades and resembling the West, he will have found it particularly saddening that as an old man he looked like any of the old grey apparatchiks in his entourage. He fell back into their dreary mediocrity. Summary Brezhnev presented himself on three stages: on the political stage, he fostered a new trust with his obligingness, friendliness and consistency. With great tact he established himself as a genuine alternative to Stalin and Khrushchev, as someone whom no one

202

Brezhnev

needed to fear. He restored the dignity and sanctity of the old party rituals, treated his comrades with respect and took care of them all, even when removing them. He had understood that it wasn’t about policy but about the form it took, a question of how one treated one another and simple things like decency. His trump card and ultimately his triumph too were his ‘soft skills’, his mastery of which was peerless. Secondly, he persuaded his comrades not only on the conscious, cognitive level, but also on an unconscious, emotional level that he was a trusty pal they did not have to fear. It wasn’t just that the members of the Politburo got on so well that they always met up in their spare time. Rather, the way Brezhnev dealt with them in private and his informal, affectionate way of addressing them were an essential method of restoring existential trust after the terror under Stalin and humiliation under Khrushchev. It made the world seem safe and reliable once more. The interesting thing is that while Brezhnev performatively created trust on the political and familiarity on the private level, on the third stage of male bonding he sent out a different message entirely. While in the former two arenas he did everything he could to be seen as one of many, or at the very most as the spokesman for the collective or a caring figure acting for the benefit of the group, on the gender level he brazenly acted as the alpha male who was superior to his comrades in every important respect – shooting, motoring, success with women, good looks. This was clearly a surrogate forum for his leadership pretensions: here he could revel in his dominance, since these ‘hobbies’ seemed depoliticized and hence were no cause for alarm; they remained underneath his comrades’ political radar. Nevertheless, these extravagances appear to have contained a latent warning: don’t forget who’s the strongest in the ring. In this sphere, he could at least enjoy hierarchies he otherwise did the utmost to level. Brezhnev thus chose a double scenario of power: ‘trust and care’ was the official motto, while in male company it was ‘fast cars and beautiful women’.

Figure 23 Brezhnev visits the Pepsi Cola factory in Novorossiysk, 1974.

203

6

Live and Let Live, or ‘Everyone should be able to live and work in peace’

Our photo shows a jolly Brezhnev visiting the Pepsi Cola factory in Novorossiysk in 1974, leaning over the conveyer belt loaded with Pepsi bottles to flirt with a young factory worker. The picture thus points to many developments Brezhnev stood for – or at least tried to. His top priority was supplying the population with sufficient food and consumer goods. But he clearly wanted more than for the Soviet people to be full – he also wanted them to be able to enjoy things and experience a taste of the West. As part of the economic treaty signed in Moscow in 1972, Brezhnev and US President Richard Nixon agreed that the Stolichnaya brand of vodka would be produced in the USA and Pepsi Cola would be produced in the Soviet Union. And so the factory in Novorossiysk was built. Pepsi thus symbolized not only prosperity and a certain Western flair, but also compromise with the USA and openness towards American culture. Brezhnev wanted to be the party leader who brought such blessings while remaining approachable and always good for a joke or flirting. Nevertheless, there has been much debate and conjecture as to whether Brezhnev pursued a political agenda or even had any idea what he wanted to achieve as general secretary. The prevailing opinion, most recently advanced by Leonid Mlechin, is that Brezhnev did not have a programme.1 His entourage, on the other hand, asserts that he certainly did have goals, but that they were very simple: all Soviet people were to have a better life and no longer fear war.2 Immediately upon taking power he is said to have told Kosygin the main task was now to guarantee everyone a carefree existence: ‘Under Stalin the people feared repression, under Khrushchev reorganization and transfers. The people didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. So in future the Soviet people should live in peace so that they can work fruitfully.’3 He thus had no epoch-defining, ambitious plans like Stalin with his Cultural Revolution and forced industrialization in the 1930s or Khrushchev with his opening up of society and the turn to the people’s everyday needs. On the contrary, he sought to continue Khrushchev’s policies, build even more housing, further increase pensions and wages and ensure even more material security. His motto could well have been: ‘We won’t do everything differently, but we’ll do a lot of it better.’ If we analyse Brezhnev’s home policy in the context of his scenario of power, his intention was to be seen as the man who brought security to the CC and prosperity to the people. His welfare policy sought to gain more trust, as if he wished to say: you have nothing to fear, you’ll be better off under me than under Khrushchev. 204

Live and Let Live

205

Ultimately, Brezhnev promised nothing less than the right to a carefree life and private happiness. Roy Medvedev thus drew the parallel between Brezhnev and the protagonist in Daniil Granin’s story ‘A Personal Opinion’, published during the thaw, who intends, if he ever finds himself in an important post, to do everything better and resist becoming corrupt and satisfied with convenient lies and half-truths – and upon attaining such positions acts just like everyone else.4 Medvedev presumably quite correctly observed Brezhnev’s urge to do everything better than Khrushchev. But it is doubtful he actually sought to press for a culture of truth and uncompromising inquiry into abuses. Rather, he was more concerned with the concrete living conditions of the population and appearing to be a generous benefactor. If his own experiences – from the famine of the 1920s and the terror of collectivization in the early 1930s to the horrors of the Great Terror and the Second World War to his time as party secretary in Zaporozh’ye, Dnepropetrovsk, Moldavia and Kazakhstan – had fostered in him one burning desire, then it was to free the population from their misery. Kolkhoz workers and pensioners had to have a livelihood, workers and engineers were to be able to afford things with their wages, families were to have a small apartment and a car. In this respect, the dream Brezhnev dreamed for the Soviet population was in essence petty bourgeois, but a dream the shaken and stricken country dearly yearned for just twenty years after the war.

Benefactor and carer To this day, there has been much debate as to whether the late Soviet Union was a welfare state and the social programmes and services actually available to the people really met the standards of a modern welfare system.5 But irrespective of which criteria one wishes to apply here or how much sense it makes to assess the Soviet Union using Western benchmarks, it was Brezhnev’s declared intention to ensure the people had a better standard of living. ‘People’s prosperity’ or ‘people’s welfare’ were thus not just terms he constantly repeated, but the guiding policy he chose for the entire party, for economic growth and for the five-year plans that were developed under him. In the autumn of 1964, he formulated in his notebook the agenda he intended to announce to the assembled CC secretaries of the republics and the oblasts and would indeed pursue for the next eighteen years: ‘Our CC will untiringly orientate its line and its work around fulfilling our plans to create the material and technological foundations of communism and the increase in our people’s standard of living.’6 In the list of proverbs he kept in his office, he underlined an Albert Camus quotation: ‘Prosperity for all comes from the happiness of each individual.’7 Raising the standard of living remained his guiding principle, undergoing only slight variations. He introduced this line at the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966 as the most important aim of the eighth five-year plan (1966–1970). All developments, measures and means were to be used to achieve a ‘significant rise in the people’s quality of life’.8 ‘As societal wealth increases, the prosperity of each worker grows to the same degree.’9 With great pathos he proclaimed, ‘Everything that has been done in our country to

206

Brezhnev

raise the standard of living and the culture of the Soviet people, for the flourishing of science and education, for literature and the arts, confirms the simple truth that the main goal of socialism is people’s welfare, their all-round blossoming.’10 Researchers also refer to this imperative course towards the people’s welfare as the ‘little deal’ Brezhnev made with the people: prosperity in exchange for loyalty.11 While Brezhnev initially justified his prosperity policy as representing an incentive for workers, in 1970 he reversed this causal relationship, declaring an appropriate standard of living as a prerequisite for greater productivity. He explained that this was a law of Marxist-Leninist theory, ‘that a permanent increase in the standard of living is an objective economic necessity for the development of production forces’.12 At the December Plenum of 1970, he insisted, ‘It is not just that we want to, rather we must guarantee the constant growth of the people’s prosperity, since it is the most important prerequisite for a country’s accelerated economic growth.’13 He thus headed off critics who did not understand why ever more funds were invested in light industry and agriculture and hence were unavailable for heavy industry and armament. He issued a reminder, at the same time a warning, that they had long been able to observe the impact of low wages on the urban and rural workers: ‘It is known what mood that has caused among many people.’14 He thereby alluded not only to the unrest in the Soviet Union, in Novocherkassk in 1962, but also to the Prague Spring of 1968 and the workers’ strikes in Poland in 1970. Hence the most important task, he insisted, was and would remain increasing the standard of living.15 That was also the line shaping the ninth five-year plan (1971–1975) determined at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress held a year later. Brezhnev explained the fact that this was the second five-year plan dedicated to the people’s prosperity by pointing out that the targeted growth required enormous efforts, funds and resources: ‘The strength of our plans and the pledge to realize them consists in the inseparable connection of the rising standard of living to the growth of the people’s economic production and increased productivity.’16 At the December Plenum of 1972, he pressed further, admitting that the five-year plan was very ambitious: ‘ambitious because we have decided, while maintaining the high rate of economic growth, to make more funding available than ever before to raise prosperity and agricultural development […].’17 Again, his speech sometimes seemed to be an attempt to justify the policy to anticipated opponents: ‘We didn’t think we could, nor did we have the right, to postpone realization of the programme for improving the living conditions of the people and the provision of social services to the future.’18 In December 1973, Brezhnev reported that the efforts had paid off; they had succeeded in getting closer to their most important goal, growth in workers’ prosperity: ‘The Soviet people have begun to eat better and clothe themselves better; over eleven million people have received better housing conditions.’19 In 1975, as the ninth five-year plan was drawing to a close, Brezhnev announced that the successes in industry and agriculture had created a stable basis for the increase in the population’s standard of living,20 only to make the entire tenth five-year plan (1976–1980) all about the people’s prosperity. In the years 1976–1980, he declared, the Soviet Union would possess over twice as many funds as in the previous five years, which would be primarily invested in the ‘welfare of the Soviet people, improving their working and living conditions, for significant

Live and Let Live

207

progress in healthcare, education and culture’: ‘That is, we are talking about everything that fosters the formation of the new man, the diverse development of his personality, the perfection of the socialist way of life.’21 This was the first time Brezhnev had brought the New Man into play: prosperity was not just an indicator of ‘developed socialism’, but also created the basis for higher forms of being. Only those who were materially secure could reach new levels of consciousness. He thereby once again combined his policy of ‘prosperity for all’ with Marxist ideology, as if to make clear that prosperity was not an end in itself, but fulfilled a political mission. And that is indeed precisely how he phrased it: he warned that not everyone had yet grasped that production of consumer goods was a matter of the utmost importance: ‘Not everyone has understood yet that we are talking about an issue of the utmost political and economic significance, about the programmatic directives of our party.’22 In July 1978, already president, he expressed for the first time what had long been obvious: raising the people’s prosperity was ‘the party’s general line’.23 He didn’t see any need to justify his stance by explaining it was a law of Marxism-Leninism fostering productivity or the formation of the New Man. To applause, he declared that they would adhere to the course they had taken.24 When the tenth five-year plan came to an end in 1980, he announced that to increase welfare within five years, spending had exceeded the ninth five-year plan by 329 billion roubles. He now referred to the reformed constitution of 1977 he had initiated: the billions spent ‘increased the economic basis for upholding the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the Soviet People to free education, medical care, recreational holiday and material security in old age’.25 Finally, Brezhnev also dedicated the eleventh five-year plan (1981–1985) – his last – entirely to prosperity: ‘I wouldn’t begin the discussion on the question of [economic] development with metal, transport or even fuel and energy – despite their great importance – but with those questions on whose solution the living conditions of the Soviet people depend most directly.’26 Brezhnev declared his programme the sole true party issue: ‘I think that this approach corresponds to our party the most, if care for the welfare of the people is made its cornerstone.’27 To his dying day, Brezhnev adhered to this line, using prosperity and the party programme as synonyms: ‘Specific care about the specific person, his wishes and needs is the beginning and end point of our economic policy. And that means that the production of goods for the population and the development of services are also a party task of the utmost priority.’28 It seems that Brezhnev’s constant references to the welfare state were not just lip service. For one thing, there was, as we have already seen, his experience under Stalin. His speeches were impassioned too. And ultimately, when he made his daily phone calls to the oblast secretaries, he also enquired as to the mood among the people, which he then recorded in his notebooks: ‘The mood among the people is excellent’, Boris Shcherbina reported to him from Tyumen in the autumn of 1967.29 ‘The people’s mood is good’, came the message from Vladivostok in May 1972.30 One might ask to what extent the oblast secretaries told him what he wanted to hear. But he also had other sources of information. Along with the opinion reports provided by the KGB, letters and complaints were also forwarded to him by newspaper editorial offices and television stations. In November 1972, television journalist Andrey Zhukov reported

208

Brezhnev

he received three thousand letters a month, each containing ten to fifteen questions on the issues of inflation, poor grocery supplies and aid for developing countries. The people asked why foodstuffs were being exported when they were lacking in the stores at home.31 Finally, Brezhnev often travelled to the republics and oblasts himself, continuing the routine to which he had become accustomed while a secretary of an oblast and a republic, as depicted in the photo from the Pepsi factory. His scenario of power did not just entail presenting himself as an approachable and affable party boss who personally formed an impression of people’s day-to-day reality. His aides also confirm that the people actually welcomed him openly and with warmth;32 the local leaders never displayed the reserve they had increasingly shown towards Khrushchev. At the November Plenum of 1978, Brezhnev reported that over the course of the year he had visited Siberia, the Far East, White Russia and Azerbaijan: ‘I have gained very different impressions and spoken about various problems. But everywhere I saw and felt the people’s great confidence in their strength and in the correct political course of our party.’33 There is no way of knowing whether this was really what he had encountered, but it certainly can be said that the popular mood was an important cornerstone of his politics, albeit perhaps not quite as essential as the mood within the Politburo and the CC. For one thing, he sought to take the credit when the people benefited. But he also would have known only too well that popular displeasure or indeed unrest could very quickly pose a threat to his rule. More money for everyone Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev at a point when he had just authorized the second great pension reform. Under Stalin, less than one per cent of the population had received a pension, worth a minimum of five roubles. The first reform of 1956 guaranteed all workers a minimum pension of thirty roubles, but the peasants received nothing.34 It was only on 15 July 1964, three months before Khrushchev’s dismissal, that the party and state granted the kolkhoz workers a pension, although the minimum rate of twelve roubles was much lower than that of the industrial workers. Male farmers could not retire until the age of sixty-five, female farmers sixty, while industrial workers were entitled to a pension once they reached sixty, or fiftyfive in the case of women.35 Brezhnev himself had worked on reforming the wage system under Khrushchev in 1956 and made some suggestions,36 on the basis of which Khrushchev had introduced a minimum wage of forty roubles for workers.37 Brezhnev was thus familiar with the area and continued where he had forced Khrushchev to break off. But although Brezhnev’s man, Secretary for Agriculture Kulakov, proposed adjusting the retirement age for the kolkhoz farmers to match that of the workers as early as December 1965, Brezhnev was unable to push this through. The Presidium decided to embed the benefits for farmers in an entire list of measures for raising the standard of living during the period 1966–1970.38 Before the TwentyThird Party Congress in 1966, when he announced to the party rank and file that urban and rural conditions were to be aligned, Brezhnev wrote in his notebook: ‘Discuss again what a chasm there is between the average wage in the cities and in the country.’39 At the Congress he accordingly proclaimed the benefits intended with the

Live and Let Live

209

eighth five-year plan: the minimum wage for workers would be raised to sixty roubles per month, while the guaranteed wage for kolkhoz farmers would gradually match that of the sovkhoz workers and standards of living would be steadily aligned with those in the cities. Prices and taxes were to be lowered and the five-day forty-hour week would ensure greater productivity.40 As he had to concede half a year later at the December Plenum of 1966, these were promises that could not be fulfilled within one to two years, but which could not be broken either. Given that they had fallen significantly short of the plans, there was clear resistance to increasing social services: ‘I will make no allusions to what and with whom we have argued. We do not condemn it. Arguing is a natural process.’41 But now that the party had made its decision, the ministers had to fall in line.42 As 1967 was the anniversary year of the October Revolution, and given the prevailing popular opinion and doubts, this was the right time to pay the people more money.43 Indeed, Brezhnev introduced the generous social reforms at the September Plenum of 1967, at which it was decided to implement them from 1 January 1968. He announced the rise in the minimum wage to sixty roubles and generous bonuses for workers in the Far East and the Far North. Minimum holiday entitlement increased from twelve to fifteen days and tax on low wages below eighty roubles was reduced by twenty-five per cent. The state made the retirement age for workers and farmers a uniform sixty (for men) or fifty-five (for women), the minimum pension for kolkhoz workers was raised to thirty roubles, pensions were raised or indeed introduced for farmers unable to work, along with many more changes.44 Finally, Brezhnev announced the transition to the five-day week, joking, ‘I find it hard to image (laughter), but presumably I must fall in line (laughter). An argument has erupted between me and Alexey Nikolayevich [Kosygin]. I say the CC should be the first to introduce the two days off, but he says no, the Council of Ministers will start.’45 The jokes painted over the fact that within the Politburo, doubts remained as to whether the economy would be able to cope with a five-day week. Ukraine’s party leader, Shelest, reports that he clearly advised Brezhnev against it.46 Brezhnev too seemed to be worried about this reform. In his notebook he wrote as late as December 1967, ‘How should we go about it, what to recommend regarding the five-day week, what to do with the forty-one-hour week, [there are] different approaches.’47 That he stuck by the reform demonstrates once again that he placed the modest well-being of the people above the potential damage to the Union’s economy. Presumably it was his deepest desire; it was certainly in line with the image of patron and carer he sought to project: ‘Our party has always treated the people with great respect and great love. So it will also be in the future. And our people has always returned this love with boundless trust in our party’s policies.’48 Four years later, at the March Plenum of 1971, Kosygin declared they had comfortably surpassed the plan: the average wage for workers and employees, which should have grown by twenty per cent, had actually risen by twenty-six per cent. Wages for kolkhoz farmers had risen by forty-two per cent instead of the targeted thirty-five to forty per cent.49 At the same plenum, Brezhnev announced that the ninth five-year plan would include further increases in wages and social benefits: the minimum wage was to increase by a further ten roubles to reach seventy, workers for the Far East and the Far North were to be incentivized

210

Brezhnev

with more bonuses and night bonuses were also to be raised. The target, he said, was to raise the average wage to 148 roubles for workers and 100 roubles for kolkhoz farmers. At the same time, he promised generous benefits for families with a lot of children, fully-paid maternity leave, another rise in pensions for workers and farmers and better funding for students.50 Having succeeded in raising real wages for the entire population by almost twentyfive per cent by the end of the ninth five-year plan and thereby demonstrating great success on the part of both himself and the party,51 in October 1976 he announced that the tenth five-year plan would entail a ‘a new stage in increasing the minimum wage’: ‘On average, wages for workers and employees will rise to 170 roubles a month and wages for the kolkhoz workers to 116 roubles.’52 Together with a further increase in wages, he promised to introduce paid maternity leave of one year.53 In 1971, he announced another benefit that amounted to redress for the extortionate policy under Stalin: in the age of high industrialization in the 1930s and after the war, the population had been forced to concede a proportion of their wages to the state as development loans. In 1958, Khrushchev had begun to repay some of the money. Brezhnev promised the remaining 25.8 billion roubles, originally to be repaid by 1996, would be returned by 1990.54 In February 1981, Brezhnev declared of the new, eleventh five-year plan: ‘The aim of our social policy is to strengthen the unity of the people, allow democracy to flourish and make the Soviet people happy.’55 This statement demands attention, if it is not to be immediately dismissed as cheap propaganda. One can only speculate about how Brezhnev imagined the ideal Soviet society. After all his speeches, it seems plausible he was serious about material care and petty bourgeois happiness. But how should we interpret ‘democracy flourishing’? He did not mean unconditional democracy as a political system, as in the Western concept. In Soviet usage, democracy meant the right to co-determination, the involvement of the people in administrative processes and consideration of opinions in the party basis. His statement also forces us to sit up and take notice given what Anatoliy Kovalëv, deputy foreign minister under Brezhnev, has to say about a conversation he had with the chairman of the KGB. In the late 1970s, Andropov said that in fifteen to twenty years, the party leadership could afford to do what the West was already doing – experimenting with freedom of opinion, more information and greater diversity in society and in art. ‘But that will only be possible in around fifteen to twenty years’ time, when we have managed to raise the people’s standard of living.’56 In short: it was only once the majority of the populace was satisfied that they could risk allowing freedom of opinion and participation. ‘But at the moment – you can’t imagine what the mood is like in our country, he told me. Everything can go downhill – the people’s standard of living is very low, the level of culture too, the school system is disgusting, literature … what sort of literature is it?’57 We don’t know whether Brezhnev shared this opinion, whether his assessment was just as cynical. He niece claims, however, that he was no longer under any illusions about establishing communism,58 and had forbidden her from leaving to live with a boyfriend in East Germany, saying, ‘First we let you out, then others, and before we know it, I’ll be on my own with Kosygin, and he’ll clear off too at the first opportunity.’59

Live and Let Live

211

Even if Brezhnev did not believe in the party’s mission (any more), he still ensured that millions of roubles were desperately invested in social benefits. He at least tried to bribe and placate the population to reconcile itself with the political system. Judging by today’s recollections, Brezhnev managed to create a ‘social paradise’ with Saturdays off, the first sufficient salaries of 120 roubles and paid maternity leave: ‘For the first time in its entire history, Soviet power said to the people, “Relax” and did not demand enthusiasm from them. It was enough to simply be loyal. For the first time, Soviet power, which had been built on a system of oppression, was mild’, wrote a journalist in 2008.60 Even if the 1970s were by no means the years of plenty they are nostalgically said to be today – for instance, in 1972 over half of all retired women and a quarter of all retired men lived below the poverty line61 – they were a time of material consolidation, albeit at a low level. From peasants to citizens Brezhnev assessed the situation in 1964 as Khrushchev had in 1953. He knew only too well what the main problem was: agriculture. Agricultural production amounted to only twenty per cent of that of the USA.62 Like his predecessor, Brezhnev first set out to reform the agricultural sector – before Kosygin was allowed to begin work on the much more famous economic reform. Again, it is speculation, but obvious, that Brezhnev was heavily influenced here by his own activities in the country, from working as a land manager during the collectivization of the first five-year plan to his time in the war-torn republics of Ukraine and Moldavia to managing the Virgin Lands campaign in Kazakhstan. He knew from his own experience what miserable and inhumane lives the kolkhoz peasants led and that they lived almost exclusively off the produce of their gardens or its sale, since they did not receive regular wages. He was aware that the villages had next to no infrastructure and that there was nothing to buy.63 As he put it himself: socialism was yet to arrive for the rural population64 – some forty per cent of the Soviet people.65 For Brezhnev, it was not just a matter of compensation and justice; it was about the societal system itself. On 21 November 1969, he wrote in his notebook: ‘But the question of democratization is dependent on the question of life and activity on the kolkhozes […]. The question of an upturn in agriculture depends less on such factors as – member of the trade union or not – as does he have papers or not.’66 He was brooding over a problem for which he didn’t find a legal solution until 1974: from 1935 to 1 January 1975, kolkhoz peasants had no right to identification papers. They were thus ‘serfs’ who were not permitted to leave their village.67 For Brezhnev, ‘democratization’ was thus not merely a word he used in plenum speeches, but a concept that also occupied his mind. In this context, the term meant extending all rights to the rural population so that they too could finally participate in life in general as fully-fledged Soviet citizens. Hence he dedicated the March Plenum of 1965 to discussion of agriculture. When in later years people spoke of the ‘March Plenum’, they always meant that of 1965 with its agricultural reforms. Brezhnev spoke very openly and critically. Although he did not mention his name, everyone knew he was attacking Khrushchev’s policies. It was cheap of Brezhnev to pillory recent policies, since he knew better than anyone else that the main problem had

212

Brezhnev

been created under Stalin. But it was still less than a year since Khrushchev had been ousted, and hence he had to go for the ‘great shortcomings and mistakes in the management of agriculture’68 in order to justify the changes and present himself as an innovator. The prices the peasants received from the state for their products did not cover the cost of production, and the kolkhozes and sovkhozes thus fell into ever greater debt. The farms received high targets from the centre, but not the machinery required to meet them or sufficient petrol for the tractors.69 Brezhnev’s programme was as simple as it was revolutionary: the kolkhozes and sovkhozes were first to receive enough money to cover the cost of production and actually pay the peasants wages they could live off and still use to buy consumer goods. What Kosygin was able to announce half a year later for industry Brezhnev declared for agricultural production in March 1965: the principle of covering costs. In future, agricultural issues were to be decided only in terms of objective profitability. There was to be no more consideration of any form of ‘subjectivism’ – such as ideological lapses and personal errors.70 Instead, ‘material and moral stimuli’ were to ensure that the peasants increased production.71 The farms were to have more tractors and repair workshops so that the harvest could now be completed within twenty days instead of taking two months and incurring huge losses. At the March Plenum, Brezhnev also brought an end to the Trofim Lysenko era. An extremely controversial geneticist, Lysenko had not only ideologized biology and denounced many of his colleagues under Stalin, but had also ensured that Soviet agricultural research, among other fields, remained cut off from Western science under Khrushchev. Brezhnev himself had consulted Lysenko in Moldavia and Kazakhstan.72 He now declared that the days of charlatans, campaigns and coercive measures were over: ‘We cannot close our eyes to the fact that in many cases the democratic foundations of kolkhoz regulations are being violated.’73 Although this speech was far from a universal departure from Stalinist agriculture, he left his audience in no doubt that he was resolutely determined to usher in a new era in which the villages enjoyed the same rights as the cities and the rural population were no longer treated like second-class citizens. Consumer goods had to cost the same in the country as in the cities instead of being sold at extortionate prices; it was the duty of the party organizations to take care of culture and the peasants’ everyday needs and ensure that clubs, libraries, schools and shops were set up in rural areas.74 Tellingly, Brezhnev concluded the March Plenum by warning that ‘informational work’ could encounter misunderstandings and resistance if they simply said that the farmers’ standard of living was to be adjusted to match that of the workers. Of course the workers had to earn more too, but they couldn’t do everything at once.75 In other words, the primacy of the workers had formed the basis of policies since the Stalin era, and hence the departure from this axiom had to be communicated carefully. Thirteen years later, in his speech for the July Plenum of 1978, Brezhnev praised this historical achievement: ‘for the first time in centuries of history, the peasants were actually freed from exploitation and poverty and integrated into socialism’,76 the unspoken admission being that under Stalin, the peasants had been treated not as part of society, but as its slaves. Brezhnev adhered to this ‘village-oriented policy’ to his dying day. Not only was investment in agriculture a priority and increased by a third for the eighth five-year

Live and Let Live

213

plan (1965–1970),77 but Brezhnev made the situation in the rural regions the ‘number one issue’ throughout his life.78 Just a year after the March Plenum, the May Plenum of 1966 was once again devoted to agriculture, specifically irrigation and water management. Even if Brezhnev left the main speech to the relevant minister and his suggestion they grow grass for livestock at airports was somewhat unqualified, he made it very clear that the Politburo and the Council of Ministers were keeping a keen eye on improvements to the situation, since increasing the harvest yields was essential for the ‘creation of the material-technological basis of communism’.79 He unequivocally criticized the ministers who were responsible for soil quality and tillage and had remained silent. As was his wont, he remained objective, however, and avoided coarseness, but certainly named names, including those of a favourite he had recently appointed minister of agriculture and old comrades from Ukraine: ‘Clearly Comrade Matskevich and the others to whom this applies have to think about this, isn’t that so, Vladimir Vladimirovich.’80 Agriculture during the Cold War On the one hand, Brezhnev strove for better supplies for the people. On the other hand, agriculture increasingly became a foreign policy issue, as he stressed two years later, at the October Plenum of 1968, which again focused on the agrarian sector: in 1966 and 1967, the developing countries had asked the Soviet Union for a total 500 million pud of grain.81 ‘We were only able to fulfil a third of these orders. You understand very well, comrades, how that affects our country’s political influence and how the reactionary elements in the developing countries are exploiting it for their own purposes against their progressive governments and against the friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union.’82 While the capitalist countries provided ninetyfive per cent of worldwide grain exports, delivering 104 million tons, the socialist countries, with only seven per cent of the market, he asserted, were trying to secure influence over the decolonized countries.83 The figures he presented were alarming: while the USA had been able to increase its yields by twelve to 20.8 hundredweight per hectare over the past fifteen years and now had sixty-three tractors for every thousand hectares, the Soviet Union lagged far behind: instead of the planned 167 million tons of grain per year, in the period 1966–1968 they had only managed 160 million, with an average of 15.6 tractors per thousand acres.84 While Bulgaria irrigated twenty per cent of its fields, France thirteen per cent and the USA ten per cent, the Soviet Union managed only 4.5 per cent.85 Brezhnev did not close his eyes to the reality, then, and openly addressed the country’s plight at the plenums, but at the same time he ordered that such passages were not to appear in the printed minutes sent to the CC secretaries in the republics and oblasts.86 In early February 1968, he still found time in the middle of dealing with the developments in Czechoslovakia to make detailed notes on the fertilizer industry: ‘We need a general line or a general plan for chemicalization or for fertilizer, what is to be built and how to do it. At the moment it seems that today they ask for one thing and tomorrow they say we’re not having that, it’s no good.’87 Brezhnev’s passion for agriculture was by no means shared by all members of the Politburo, even if they rarely voiced criticism. Brezhnev believed the state planning

214

Brezhnev

authority, Gosplan, was trying to obstruct his aid for the villages, and assumed Kosygin was behind it.88 He complained that it had happened repeatedly and that it was clearly considered to be justified for the oblasts to re-allocate investment funds intended for the villages. In Azerbaijan, he said, 3.1 million roubles had been siphoned off to build housing blocks in Baku, and in Moldavia funds had been channelled into building roads with the argument that they led through villages.89 In October 1968, Ukrainian party leader Shelest, whom Brezhnev would oust in 1973, dared to criticize the enormous sums invested in agriculture, albeit carefully packaging the criticism as the opinion of others: Meanwhile there have been voices here and there [asking] whether it is not time to reduce the financial and material aid for the kolkhozes and sovkhozes again, to change the firm plans, to reduce the stimuli for grain purchases surpassing the plan etc.90

But Brezhnev was not to be dissuaded and declared that three goals first had to be achieved: the development of the fertilizer industry, progress in agricultural technology and irrigation. He sent a relatively clear warning to his doubters. ‘I think that no one should try our patience and respect. It would be better if the comrades accepted that, drew the right conclusions and provided the villages with the necessary support. I assume that this remark applies to everyone present in this room.’91 The extent to which the subject of agriculture occupied Brezhnev also came through in his passionate statement a year later, in June 1969, when he invited all those involved in the oblasts and rayons to discuss the situation in that sector.92 He made no bones about the fact that agriculture was in a bad state: in 1967 there had been a poor harvest and in 1968 the CSSR had been promised generous food supplies to keep the population satisfied. The switch to a guaranteed minimum wage also meant that the kolkhoz workers had not had an extra incentive to work; on the contrary, they had shown greater apathy.93 Brezhnev merely hinted at this: ‘Clearly we have overlooked something here.’94 In the early 1970s, a kolkhoz chairman would put it more openly: whereas the farmers had not worked previously because they couldn’t expect any money anyway, now they weren’t working because wages were guaranteed.95 Brezhnev nevertheless warned against pessimism and schadenfreude: ‘I would like to rephrase that. Some comrades are of the opinion that […] in 1970 the state of livestock breeding will get worse. I dare say these are opportunistic conversations.’96 With remarkable clarity, he stated that their political fate might depend on whether the people were fed: We are going through a very critical time. If we cannot guarantee normal food supplies for the population, doubts might arise about our policy. The people could confuse our policy with practical errors, and I think that our policy in the country is correct, although there are, unfortunately, practical errors.97

Wages versus performance At the agricultural congress that took place in November 1969 and was meant to determine a new statute for the kolkhozes,98 Brezhnev made many entries in his

Live and Let Live

215

notebook. He was concerned about three main issues: first, there was, once again, the economic issue of mechanization, irrigation, fertilization and production incentives. He then grappled with the political problem of papers and freedom of movement for the farmers, which had to be solved – ‘but not at the congress’, he wrote.99 Finally, and this was probably the toughest task, there was the ‘education of the kolkhoz workers in the spirit of diligence and economy’.100 Brezhnev did not use the expression, but what he envisaged was a cultural revolution steered by a paternalist state: the farmers received a guaranteed monthly wage and freedom to travel, but were to understand it not as an impulse to leave the countryside or as an excuse for idleness, but as an appeal to their sense of responsibility to now fulfil the plan voluntarily. Brezhnev left the implementation to the rayon committees and administrations, for they, he thought, had the necessary experience; it could not be pushed through from ‘above’.101 He thereby delegated a fundamental societal problem to subaltern cadres who were bound to fail. The problems continued and the supply situation remained fraught. Less than a year later, Brezhnev again dedicated the July Plenum of 1970 entirely to the subject of agriculture. To avoid any doubts that feeding the population was still the top priority, his speech was entitled ‘The Party’s Pending Tasks in the Agriculture Sector’. In this speech, he openly conceded that – although the situation in the Soviet Union was not as bad as suggested by the lies spread abroad – it was generally well known that they lagged a long way behind other countries in feeding the population, and thus strengthening agriculture would remain one of the most important economic and political goals in the near future.102 He distanced himself from an expression that he said had crept into party circles: ‘We have given assistance to agriculture.’ This phrase was only justified in the case of aid sent abroad. ‘And the problem is not the words, but that solving urgent issues in agriculture is seen as a favour.’103 Nevertheless, Brezhnev himself criticized the kolkhozes for their tendency to spend eighty to ninety per cent of gross revenue on wages or bonuses for the kolkhoz workers in order to ‘artificially raise’ their income, clearly to prevent them from leaving; in contrast, there was little or no investment in the kolkhozes.104 This practice was confirmed with remarkable openness by the chairman of Moldavia, Ivan Bodyul; the heads of the republics normally covered up any failure to meet the plan.105 In late 1973, however, Bodyul explained that given the greater freedom of planning, it had become common practice for the kolkhoz chairmen and sovkhoz directors to draw up modest plans for their organizations, fulfilling them and then cashing bonuses although there had actually been no real growth.106 In the light of such reports, Brezhnev demanded that the Ministry of Agriculture had to ensure that the kolkhozes and sovkhozes adhered to covering costs, worked according to the rules and were well supplied with seeds, breeding stock and veterinarians.107 At the following December Plenum of 1970, Brezhnev persisted and defended his course: Incidentally, I would like to say – can it be the impression is that in recent years we have devoted especially great attention to this sector [agriculture]. That impression is correct. The CC of the party has really paid a lot of attention to the development of agriculture, and I think that the CC members will say I am right, that that was a correct and justified decision.108

216

Brezhnev

Once upon a time … But despite investments and subventions, the situation in agriculture could not be consolidated. In 1971, the Soviet Union once again suffered from a lack of rain;109 in 1972 they were blighted by the worst drought for a century, a drought so devastating that Brezhnev postponed hospital treatment to travel to Siberia and Kazakhstan to lend help.110 He not only began to study weather maps, long-term forecasts and climate zones, but also sought information on how Lenin had responded to the drought of 1921/22 and what measures the party had taken to counter the one of 1931–1933.111 The figures Chernenko reported to him from his hometown of Dnepropetrovsk were horrific: the oblast normally delivered over a million tons of grain; in 1972, it had not managed 200,000.112 Having recorded an annual average of 3.8 million tons of grain since 1962, the Soviet Union was forced to buy 25.4 million tons to make up for the deficit in 1972.113 The following year, however, saw a record harvest that would present agriculture with new challenges, since there were not enough vehicles to transport it all. The military were called on to provide 45,000 trucks, but Brezhnev was only able to persuade Defence Minister Grechko to release 20,000.114 Again he travelled to Kiev to form his own impression of the situation.115 He once again had figures put together showing with what modest means he had delivered the harvest back in 1948/49 and how big a fleet his successors had had in comparison, but was still unable to get on top of the situation. He noted, ‘Consulted W.W. Shcherbitskiy, reminded him of the past.’116 In 1975, Brezhnev complained that in the entire five-year plan, there had only been one year, 1973, in which the climate had not presented difficulties. They had recorded crop shortfalls of ‘several million roubles’.117 However, despite or indeed because of this lack of success, discontent remained over the billions ploughed into agriculture. In September 1975, Brezhnev received a note from his loyal aide Golikov reporting there were people like the head of Gosplan, Baybakov, and Boris Gostev, deputy head of the CC’s Planning Department, who questioned what had been achieved in agriculture and were of the view that it yielded nothing and only swallowed up subventions. In his usual negative manner, Golikov told Brezhnev these views were widespread within the apparatus of the planning authorities, putting every antiSoviet, bourgeois newspaper in the shade. There was a ‘spirit of being compromised’, for they felt that all the problems in the other sectors of the economy would not exist if all the resources were not channelled into agriculture.118 We do not know how Brezhnev reacted to this, but resignation seems to have been slowly setting in for him too. According to Mlechin, in the mid-1970s, Brezhnev withdrew from agriculture: for one thing, it was frustrating to have so little success to announce and instead to have to report shortfalls, supply shortages and deficits and constantly withstand the misgivings of his comrades, and he was also increasingly crippled by what was becoming an addiction to pills.119 He passed on responsibility to his CC secretary, Kulakov, who now had to carry the can for the failures and increasingly fell out of favour with him. Nevertheless, things looked up in 1976, with record harvests. The enthusiasm with which Brezhnev received the reports on these successes seems to have been genuine

Live and Let Live

217

and shows once again how important this sector was to him: he could hardly contain himself when Kunayev read him the figures from Kazakhstan at the October Plenum: ‘That’s marvellous!’120 In 1972, upon being informed of the figures for the year of the record drought, he noted on the paper: ‘For this year that is class. Keep [this note].’121 With Gorbachev in tow It was not until 1978 that Brezhnev would dedicate another plenum to agriculture. According to Mlechin, he no longer involved the heavy alcoholic Kulakov in the preparations; Kulakov died a few days after this July Plenum.122 Brezhnev postulated the start of a new developmental phase in agriculture. Since the party and the government had created new foundations for production and peasants’ welfare in the villages, the funds invested now had to be used more efficiently. Efficiency and quality were the order of the day; he called for an average harvest yield of twenty hundredweight per hectare.123 But, as he conceded, that was the amount the USA had achieved ten years earlier, in 1968. While he declared that agriculture had to continue to be reinforced ‘materially and technologically’, he appeared to be making his first concessions to his critics when he said that even though they were discussing agriculture, they were always aware of the ‘leading role of our industries’.124 But he stuck to his pro-village line. A few months later he explained at the November Plenum of 1978: ‘We must always create a certain climate in which the employees of the kolkhozes and sovkhozes feel that with their livestock and poultry breeding they are fulfilling a beneficial state mission.’125 As his advisor and ally in agriculture he appointed Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he had got to know in the summer of 1978. At the November Plenum, Brezhnev made him Kulakov’s successor as CC secretary for agricultural affairs.126 It took only another year for him to be elected a candidate and in October 1980 he was made a full member of the Politburo.127 Brezhnev was glowing in his praise: ‘He works well, penetrates the spectrum of questions within his remit.’128 His enthusiasm was not reciprocated, however, or at least Gorbachev later claimed this to have been the case: the first time they spoke, Brezhnev didn’t even listen to him and seemed to be elsewhere with his thoughts.129 However, he appeared to have offered Brezhnev the vital support he needed to resolutely adhere to his agricultural policy. Brezhnev once again attacked agricultural policy with new energy and at the same plenum of October 1980 was able to push through the establishment of a new agricultural department that would take care of development of the ‘agroindustrial complex’.130 They still lacked the tractors and combines needed to bring in the harvest. In 1980, an investigation of 1,249 brand new agricultural machines revealed that only eight fulfilled the technical requirements: ‘I repeat, comrades, only eight’, said a furious Brezhnev.131 For the eleventh five-year plan he thus had an extensive programme drawn up, primarily devised to optimize distribution of food supplies and their delivery to the end consumer. Too often, grain was transported only for it to be returned soon afterwards for processing; livestock and milk were transported hundreds of kilometres instead of being processed on site, he complained in November 1981. To counter the huge loss of potatoes and vegetables, he announced the construction of new stores and warehouses.132 In May 1982, half a

218

Brezhnev

year before his death, he presented a catalogue of measures for ‘improving the management of agriculture and diverse branches of the agroindustrial complex’ compiled by a Politburo working group headed by Gorbachev. A paper was adopted on raising the agricultural capacity of the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, increasing measures for raising the material interestedness’ of the agricultural workers, improving – once again – housing and supplies for the rural population, and employing more specialists in the management of agricultural enterprises and breeding operations.133 At the same time, Brezhnev took stock of the situation: since the March Plenum of 1965, life and work in the country had been fundamentally transformed: ‘In many rayons, the face of the village has changed. In other words: the life of the rural workers has become much richer and more interesting.’134 Meat for the masses Despite his officially positive assessment, Brezhnev was well aware that they were not solving the key problems – namely delivering the targeted yields to the end consumer without significant losses and coping with the climatic conditions, which hit the Soviet Union with another drought in 1979–1981 – let alone reducing subventions or the profitability of agriculture.135 In 1981 he declared, ‘As long as we haven’t learnt to make the weather, we must adapt agricultural work better to the vagaries of the climate.’136 Whether or not as an engineer he considered controlling the weather a realistic aim or was simply being sarcastic, the climatic conditions were a constant problem with farreaching consequences. While Golikov wrote to Brezhnev that socialism was the ‘fight to lower production costs and prices hourly, daily and absolutely everywhere’,137 rising prices due to crop failure, poor animal husbandry and unprofitable production were a constant worry for the Politburo.138 In particular, supplying the population with meat and dairy products remained Brezhnev’s problem child. He repeatedly wrote in his notebook which republics were suffering from meat shortages.139 They had seen where rising prices and dissatisfaction could lead: in Novocherkassk in 1962, Prague in 1968 and Gdansk in 1970. Indeed, there were again strikes in Gdansk in 1980/81. In December 1968, only a few months before military intervention in Prague, Brezhnev warned that something was going massively awry in meat production; although they had supported the sector with six billion roubles in subventions, there was hardly any meat available in the shops.140 ‘This is not an easy question. We are a big country – 230 million inhabitants. If we neglect such questions and do not react in time, then we will have to correct the situation with harsher measures.’141 Presumably Brezhnev recalled his own time as a secretary in Kazakhstan, when he learnt at the party plenum that twelve million animals had died in the winter of 1968/69.142 Brezhnev was furious: in earlier times, losses to livestock could be blamed on a lack of feed, but this was no longer an excuse. Although the state was very ‘generous’, he said, towards the kolkhozes and sovkhozes, in 1967/68 there had been 1.4 million fewer cattle than the previous year, and swine had dwindled by fifteen per cent.143 ‘But it’s not just in the towns you can’t live without meat. You can’t go without it in the country either’, he raged.144 Yet the problem was not livestock numbers, but produce. His aide Golikov noted that the Soviet Union had more cattle per head than in other

Live and Let Live

219

countries, 0.43 animals per inhabitant compared to 0.36 in East and 0.25 in West Germany. But while the Soviet Union produced 117 kilograms of meat per slaughtered animal, the GDR managed 198 and the USA 214 kilograms.145 In the December of 1975, Brezhnev also warned that overwintering was not to be taken lightly, feed was to be used efficiently and decimated stocks would not be tolerated.146 Sufficient production of animal feed remained an issue Brezhnev repeatedly brought up at the plenums.147 He regularly received contradictory statements from local party secretaries when he rang them: ‘We will fulfil the plan in animal husbandry with the extra demands […], there is little meat in the shops.’148 Brezhnev did not let go, warning, ‘It is completely obvious that the growth in the people’s prosperity has led to a strong increase in the demand for meat products.’149 But breeding also lagged behind this rising demand. Meat consumption, he said, had risen from sixteen kilograms per head in 1965 to fiftyseven kilograms in 1977.150 By 1990, it should be up to seventy kilograms.151 But given that in 1977 twenty-two per cent of the enterprises had not fulfilled their plan for meat and poultry production,152 he concluded that if they continued to produce as little meat for the first three years of the five-year plan, ‘terrible speed’ would be required to meet the targets.153 In 1975, the state had provided nineteen billion roubles in subventions for meat and milk production, with a turnover of 28.7 billion. One hundred billion roubles in subventions were intended for the entire five-year plan of 1976–1980.154 Brezhnev remarked, ‘The main thing is to achieve tangible growth in production of meat, milk and other animal produce.’155 He reportedly told Gorbachev when he had him elected to the Politburo, ‘Take care of meat. That’s your main job. That’s what you were elected for.’156 Importing food Despite all efforts to increase agricultural production and improve logistics,157 Brezhnev, like Khrushchev before him, had to resort to buying food from abroad. In 1968, he agreed to the minister of agriculture’s proposal to buy facilities for ten pigbreeding stations at 1.2 million gold roubles apiece, each of which was meant to produce up to 12,000 tons of pork a year. The Soviet government further ordered ten concentrated feed factories and three breeding stations for veal.158 In August 1971, the Politburo collectively voted to buy four million tons of wheat from Canada.159 In early 1972, Kulakov advised Brezhnev to task the Ministry of Trade and Gosplan to conclude a long-term agreement to buy soya supplies from the USA, since they were urgently required for animal breeding and previous purchases abroad had not been sufficient.160 After the conclusion of the Moscow Treaties with Nixon, in July 1972 the international press were amazed that the Soviet Union bought 750 million dollars’ worth of feed from the USA, while Brezhnev decreed it would not be officially announced as long as he lived.161 On 16 May 1979, he noted, ‘Signed a document of Kosygin’s on acquisition of meat – cooking oil from abroad.’162 In 1980, Trade Minister Nikolay Patolichev reported to Brezhnev that they had just concluded an agreement with Argentina for annual delivery of four million tons of maize and other grains and half a million tons of soya beans. The same year, the Soviet Union received 2.2 million tons of grain from the USA, 1.5 million from Argentina, one million from Australia,

220

Brezhnev

further supplies from Canada, Hungary and Romania163 and 100,000 tons of sugar at a cost of thirty million dollars.164 In May 1982, at the height of the new freeze in foreign policy, Brezhnev warned that imports from capitalist countries should be replaced with purchases from the brother states, since ‘the leaderships of some states attempt to employ common commercial operations, for example the sale of grain, to apply pressure to our country, as a political weapon’.165 Brezhnev thus accepted not only that the country invested billions in agriculture in the form of subventions, but also that it became dependent on imports, sacrificing revenue. Since he could risk neither famine nor revolt, did not wish to resort to the Stalinist methods of threatening, arresting and shooting people, and did not perceive the plight of agriculture to be a structural problem, he drove the sector into an increasingly large dilemma. It would be the legacy inherited by Gorbachev – and his undoing.

The consumption course Brezhnev’s mother had dreamed of petty bourgeois contentment for her son. The wish for a certain level of comfort consisting of one’s own four walls, a few pieces of furniture and household objects, if one were lucky a car and a dacha, was clearly something Brezhnev sought to fulfil for his countrymen. His much-ridiculed or even cynically depicted slogan ‘We must attentively and considerately care for people’166 was obviously meant in earnest. Industrial production was supposed to cater to people’s needs and ensure that his promise that everyone would live and work in peace and quiet was fulfilled. Firstly, this meant that Khrushchev’s deflection of the course from the primacy of heavy industry towards developing light industry was to be continued and intensified. Secondly, industrial production had to be cost-effective at last. The economic situation was not as drastic as agriculture in 1964, but it was serious enough. The problem of the state investing far more than the value of goods produced was only just emerging as a consequence of Brezhnev’s policy of subventions for agriculture, but was already well evident in industry. Hence the new magic word Brezhnev and Premier Kosygin introduced as a new principle of production was ‘khozrazchët’ – self-financing. To this end, the enterprises were to receive a certain degree of freedom in planning and the opportunity to re-invest some of the revenue themselves and create wage bonus incentives for the workers. Kosygin’s economic reform Hence it is not true, as was long speculated in the days of closed archives, that Kosygin had to forcefully push through his economic reform against Brezhnev’s will or that the latter tried to block it.167 That does not mean that there was no resistance to the ideas on liberalizing the plan economy the Kharkov economics professor Evsey Liberman had published as early as September 1962.168 But the sceptics were the likes of Podgorny or the ministerial bureaucrats, who feared for their influence, while Brezhnev and Kosygin were in concert.169 In 1957, Brezhnev himself, as a CC secretary,

Live and Let Live

221

had been involved in developing recommendations on how to give the directors of companies and enterprises greater managerial freedom and accountability. Even back then, they had considered what was later introduced by the reform of 1965: the directors were to receive fewer directives stipulating financial production volume, production quantities, unit prices and the levels of provisions and wage payments. Each director was to be able to make his own plans and decisions within the established parameters, free from all other directives.170 At the September Plenum of 1965, Brezhnev had to delegate the main speech to Kosygin. The CC decided to relieve Gosplan of all detailed planning and make the company directors responsible for organizing production with the materials provided. They could distribute wages and bonuses in such a way that the workers were incentivized not only to fulfil plans, but also to deliver high-quality products. Echoing Brezhnev’s speech on the agricultural reforms, Kosygin identified raising the standard of living as the motive for restructuring the economy.171 And as Brezhnev had done for agriculture in the March, at the September Plenum of 1965 he presented an unsparing analysis of the Soviet economy, the most critical sections of which were not released for publication, however: gross national product sank, as did industrial production. While every rouble invested in industry had yielded 95 kopeks in 1958, in 1964 only 83 kopeks were made per rouble.172 But the lower the gross national product, the less money was available to increase the standard of living, Kosygin criticized. Growth was sinking, however: from 6.5 per cent in the period 1956–1960 to just 4.6 per cent in the years 1961–1965.173 While growth could be observed everywhere in the capitalist states, the Soviet Union remained a long way behind its own plan targets. The main problem, Kosygin railed, was that resources were not being used efficiently, and hence a disproportionate amount of gross national product, almost forty per cent, went towards new investment, compared to just twenty per cent in the USA. Productivity in the USSR was two to two and a half times lower than in the USA. Average national income in the Soviet Union amounted to only fifty-three per cent of that in the USA and seventy-four per cent of that in West Germany.174 The picture of the Soviet economy Kosygin painted in his speech was forthright and sobering. There was an imbalance between heavy industry, known in the Soviet Union as ‘Group A’, and light industry, ‘Group B’. Nevertheless, heavy industry also remained backward, there were large problems in construction and the foreign trade balance was negative: too much equipment was bought abroad and too few finished products were exported. Exports continued to consist largely of raw materials, since the Soviet machinery could not compete with capitalist products: ‘This is due both to mistakes in the construction plans and the quality of finishing.’175 In the very lively debate that ensued, lasting three days and also involving the commission tasked with developing the draft resolution, no one doubted that the economy was indeed in a critical condition. The discussion focused on which sectoral ministries were to be created on which levels. As Brezhnev and Kosygin announced at the debate’s conclusion, there would now be combined ‘decentralization and democratization’:176 the local People’s Economic Councils introduced under Khrushchev would be replaced by the central ministries in Moscow. At the same time, sectoral ministries were established on the level of the republic, too.177 Brezhnev and

222

Brezhnev

Kosygin agreed that the problems could be solved with the right organizational structure and the right system of incentives. And yet Brezhnev’s speech was marked by a different spirit. While Kosygin’s speech was that of the economic analyst, presenting a dense array of figures, Brezhnev remained the party politician, painting a much more comforting picture with broad brushstrokes: it was not a matter of the economy being fundamentally poor; they were, after all, number two in the world, in some sectors quantitatively even number one. For Brezhnev, it was only a question of the right planning, which would bring to bear the advantages of the socialist economic. They merely had to abolish parallel institutions, deploy good leaders and offer the workers effective incentives and the current shortcomings would soon be eliminated.178 Brezhnev and Kosygin agreed that the state planning body Gosplan now had a new role: it was to monitor all plans as an unassailable authority, but never to dictate quotas; rather, it should consult the oblasts. Nor should it give rigid, unrealistic directives from above or stipulate minimal plans driven by local interests from below. The future plan targets were not to be determined arbitrarily, but had to be oriented around scientific forecasts and be the result of ‘creative’ work at Gosplan.179 In September 1965, less than a year after Khrushchev had been ousted, the Party Presidium under Brezhnev was by no means certain as to how the population would respond to the new restructure. Hence the CC began a Union-wide propaganda and informational campaign in all media and sent emissaries to the enterprises to explain the resolutions of the September Plenum.180 The CC also had the KGB report on how the workers in the republics and oblasts reacted to the abolishment of the People’s Economic Councils, the re-establishment of ministries and the directors’ expanded responsibilities. The report revealed that there was concern whether the reforms might not encourage abuses, for instance in determining workers’ and engineers’ wages and delivery of substandard goods. People wondered whether this was not just more pointless reorganization that would be declared a failure a few years later. The promise that people’s lives would improve was regarded with great scepticism.181 Apartments and appliances Brezhnev and Kosygin were thus under pressure to prove to the population that their reforms brought tangible benefits, for instance in the form of consumer goods.182 The Twenty-Third Party Congress decided that the ‘Group B’ consumer goods industry was to reach forty-three to forty-six per cent of the Union’s economic volume, compared with the thirty-six per cent during the previous five-year plan.183 For the eighth five-year plan, Gosplan was tasked with massively increasing consumer goods production, expanding services for the population and further intensifying housing construction.184 The services sector in particular was considered completely underdeveloped. Per Soviet inhabitant in 1965, a third of a pair of shoes were repaired, a fifth of a piece of clothing was dry-cleaned, and two kilograms of clothes were washed per urban resident, whereas in the GDR, 2.5 pairs of shoes were repaired, 6.8 kilograms of clothing were washed and 1.3 items were dry-cleaned, not to mention England, where thirty-three kilograms of clothing were washed per person.185 When Brezhnev took office, there was practically no production of washing machines,

Live and Let Live

223

refrigerators or similar household appliances.186 So experts studied the quality and performance of washing machines made by the companies Westinghouse, Bosch, Miele and others, to determine which manufacturing licences to acquire.187 In order to establish 1,000 cleaning enterprises throughout the country by 1968, Gosplan even ordered the Aviation Ministry to produce 700 such facilities in their aeroplane factories and monitor their assembly; the prototypes would be bought in West Germany and Great Britain.188 Brezhnev attached the same importance to providing the population with humane housing. In 1960, only forty per cent of all Soviet citizens lived in a place of their own; most were squeezed into a single room with their entire families in a communal apartment, that is, together with several other families with whom they shared a kitchen and a bathroom, as Brezhnev himself had lived in the 1930s.189 Like investment in agriculture, the efforts to construct housing continued without interruption throughout Brezhnev’s tenure. During the ninth five-year plan (1971–1975), around 575 million square metres of new dwellings were created.190 In 1980, Brezhnev announced that eighty per cent of the urban population had their own apartment – double the figures of 1960. Housing construction, he said, continued to be the top priority. But in reporting this success, he also revealed the problems: although the projected costs had been exceeded by 1.5 billion roubles, the 530 million square metres completed by the end of the tenth five-year plan (1976–1980) were almost eight per cent down on the figures for the first half of the 1970s.191

Empty shops Just as Brezhnev repeatedly insisted it was the supreme duty of all local party cadres to personally take care of housing construction,192 he never tired of stressing that providing the population with sufficient consumer goods was of the utmost priority: ‘Clearly we have not yet succeeded in completely eliminating the view that the production of consumer goods is of secondary importance. Not everyone has understood yet that we are talking about an issue that is of great political and economic significance here, on the level of a directional decision for our party.’193 He also had to struggle with the tendency for local party chairmen to make unauthorized changes to the plan targets for housing construction and the consumer goods industry, since they considered the norms stipulated by Gosplan to be unrealistic.194 On the other hand, even Gosplan and Kosygin occasionally presented him with figures that angered him, since they were clearly oriented around what was realizable rather than what he wanted. Brezhnev too, however, knew the latest economic data, which revealed that not only was overall economic growth lagging behind the plan, but production of consumer goods in particular was stagnating. While heavy industrial growth was supposed to hit 46.3 per cent during the ninth five-year plan (1971–1975) and according to the official figures had at least managed to expand 44.7 per cent, light industry fell well short of the target, at 37.6 per cent instead of the envisaged 48.6 per cent.195 This led to the problem that while the people in the towns and the countryside did have money to spend, there were ever fewer goods in the shops. But for Brezhnev that

224

Brezhnev

was no reason to correct the plans. On the contrary, he demanded greater effort and stronger discipline. When in 1977 Gosplan suggested filling this gap between supply and buying power – some twelve billion roubles – by doing without further pay rises, abolishing bonuses and increasing the prices of wine, tobacco and taxi rides, Brezhnev and his staff were indignant: in 1977, the jubilee year, cutting the people’s supplies was out of the question. Instead of introducing cuts, the plans had to be fulfilled and each ministry had to produce extra refrigerators, washing machines, radios and televisions and buy more goods from abroad.196 Reducing the people’s prosperity to balance the budget and render plans more realistic was not an option for Brezhnev. It was neither in keeping with his image nor worth the risk of discontent and insurrection. He was forced to repeatedly defend this line. In November 1978, he ranted at the Politburo: in three years, a billion fewer roubles had been invested in the consumer goods industry than had been made available and the plan for the following year had been lowered by 200 million without authorization – clearly some economic planners thought they could stuff financial gaps in other sectors as they pleased with the funds for ‘Group B’.197 A year later, at the November Plenum, he asserted that people were increasingly complaining because there were shortages of some goods ‘that for some reason or other are termed “little things”: simple medicines, soap, washing powder, toothbrushes and toothpaste, needles, yarn, nappies and other consumer goods.’198 He certainly admonished them: ‘Comrades, that is unforgiveable.’199 In view of the poor quality and insufficient quantity, both Brezhnev and Kosygin repeatedly supported importing goods from socialist and capitalist countries alike. They particularly wanted people to be happy with additional imported goods in the holidays in May and November so that they associated the anniversary of the Revolution with a positive consumer experience.200 In 1967 alone, the fiftieth anniversary year of the October Revolution, Trade Minister Aleksandr Struyev ordered 1.5 billion roubles’ worth of clothing and shoes from the socialist brother countries.201 However, since this exhausted their production capacity while the shops in the Soviet Union soon emptied, the CC made a further 112 million roubles available for orders of clothing and citrus fruits from capitalist countries such as England, France, Italy and West Germany.202 But this too proved insufficient, and Trade Minister Struyev requested the release of more millions in order to continue shopping abroad.203 Even the country’s gold reserves were tapped into to meet the population’s consumer needs; in 1972, Kosygin asked Brezhnev if he could sell 100 tons of gold to raise money for importing consumer goods.204 A car as dowry Finally, Brezhnev dedicated himself to a subject closely linked to his own personal passions. Kosygin too, however, thought it was high time they departed from Khrushchev’s dictum that Soviet man should take the bus and train and promoted individual automobility.205 In March 1965, Kosygin complained at a Gosplan meeting: You know how doggedly the idea was promoted that there was no need to develop the automotive industry in our country. Clearly, everyone had to travel only by

Live and Let Live

225

bus. Everything was done to deny even the managers of the large enterprises and economic organizations their right to use a car. Is that correct? That ultimately meant that many managers were forced to use trucks illegally for their business travel.206

Brezhnev’s address displayed the same passion: ‘I must say, (irrespective of whether we manage to or not) we are orienting ourselves around production figures that are intended to satisfy the demand within the population (the car also stops young people from doing stupid things).’207 Neither the previous approved annual production of 210,000 cars nor the current proposed output of 700,000 were sufficient: ‘We are setting the target of a million cars.’208 He declared there would be huge demand, and if only one or two cars made it into a village, that in itself was a big success, since there were currently no cars there at all. ‘Not to mention that a foreman will buy a car. Or, say, a young girl gets married and her parents decide not to give her a chest as dowry, but give her a car – that’s the modern dowry.’209 Since inland production was not only minimal, but also inferior,210 in August 1966 the Soviet government under Kosygin concluded an agreement with Fiat to build a car factory in the city of Togliatti on the Volga that was to produce 2,000 vehicles a day and 600,000 per year, as Brezhnev proudly announced at the CC plenum of December 1966.211 An entry in his notebook in June 1967 reveals how important this was to him: ‘Expert appraisal of factory in Togliatti – what is the deadline, will we make it?’212 In January 1970, Brezhnev’s aide Evgeniy Samoteykin advised him, in view of the high demand and the 3,000 people in Moscow on a waiting list for what was still a luxury item for the elites, to reserve ten to fifteen per cent of the cars manufactured for the best workers, who would receive special buying rights by recommendation of the enterprise management together with a state loan. This would have two positive effects, Samoteykin explained: the workers would have an incentive to work more productively, and they would spend less money on vodka because they were saving up for the car.213 With the factory in Togliatti becoming operational in 1970, in 1972 the Soviet Union produced more cars than trucks for the first time in its history.214 In 1977 there were a total of five million cars for every 250,000 people – that is, one car for every fifty people, while in the USA and West Germany there were 500 cars for every thousand, and even in the GDR 206 per thousand.215 Cars remained a highly soughtafter, rare luxury product with long waiting lists.

Brezhnev versus Kosygin and Gosplan Economic development was not only decisive for the people’s prosperity and Brezhnev’s image, however. It was also a ‘battleground’ for his rivalry with Kosygin. When it came to agricultural policy, Brezhnev had repeatedly felt the need to issue justifications and warnings; he was under pressure, never had things entirely under control. Concerning the economy, however, he played a different role: it was he who applied the pressure to Kosygin, who as premier was responsible for this sector.

226

Brezhnev

Brezhnev did not miss a single opportunity to scold Kosygin’s ministers and confront them with their shortcomings. There are no writings or statements by either Brezhnev or Kosygin indicating what the reason was for this rivalry. Many of their contemporaries assert that they were diametrically opposite personalities: the measured, ascetic, intellectual, small and crumpled-looking Kosygin, always composed and with all the charisma of a ‘rusk’216 and the lively, epicurean, down-to-earth, jovial, tall and imposing Brezhnev. Brezhnev, it is said, valued Kosygin’s intellect, but he was also scared of it and annoyed by him.217 It is claimed he was jealous of his success and natural authority.218 Kosygin stood for the same type of measured party cadre as Suslov, without freely and clearly subordinating himself to Brezhnev like the latter. When Brezhnev received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1973 and all the other speakers at the party plenum indulged in felicitations, praise for his contributions and flattery, Kosygin was the only one who did not say a word about it and refrained from offering congratulations.219 However, in time he learnt his lesson and adapted. From 1973 onwards, he embellished his subsequent speeches at the plenums with the usual flattery and verbal homage to Brezhnev.220 For one thing, then, there was personal antipathy, but through their positions they also found themselves in a structural contest for state power that was not decided until 1977, when Brezhnev had it clearly written into the constitution that the party steered the government, thereby placing himself above Kosygin in two functions: as general secretary with the authority to issue directives, and as the newly elected state president, who formally deployed the government. But irrespective of their mutual antipathy and their power struggle, they shared the same ideas on reform. In 1965, their common will to create more economic growth, more autonomy for the managers and more consumption for the workers even extended to joint decision-making regarding personnel. Brezhnev and Kosygin agreed that the reform could only be implemented with a new head of Gosplan. Kosygin felt he needed his man Nikolay Baybakov, ousted by Khrushchev, in this key position, and Brezhnev welcomed any revision to appointments made by the latter. In the autumn of 1965, they both asked Baybakov to return to his old post.221 Brezhnev saw him as Kosygin’s man; he tolerated him, criticized him, but clearly, as in the case of Kosygin, he respected his expertise.222 It was not until Gorbachev came to power that Baybakov was pushed into retirement. With typical consistency, each year at the December Plenum Brezhnev first let Baybakov, as head of Gosplan, and Finance Minister Vasiliy Garbuzov present the plan figures and financial data for the next year, before playing his own part in the ritual and criticizing plan deficits and abuses within the ministries. What was often portrayed as dispute or conflict between the government and the party was actually due to the personal rivalry between Kosygin and Brezhnev, who had placed their entourages in the respective apparatuses. It was not an institutional conflict, but competition between two patrons with very different personalities and problemsolving strategies. As much as Brezhnev wanted to be the top man in the government as well as the party, he seems to have taken just as much satisfaction in not being formally responsible for the economy and being able to upbraid and humiliate Kosygin and his ministers for their errors every December.223 In this respect, he found

Live and Let Live

227

the division of responsibilities was most convenient: he preached efficiency, discipline and responsibility, while Kosygin had to report squandered resources, deficits and unfulfilled plans. Baybakov relates that in presenting the new annual plans for Gosplan to the Politburo too, over the years Brezhnev became increasingly indignant in his response whenever Baybakov and Kosygin reported problems, deficits and plans it was impossible to fulfil.224 According to Baybakov, things reached their nadir at the meeting of 2 April 1975, when after a very difficult ninth five-year plan, three years having been plagued by drought, Brezhnev complained that Gosplan was painting too gloomy a picture of the situation, declaring: ‘But this is our best five-year plan.’225 But while he played the issue down at the Politburo meetings, if what Kosygin claims is true, at the plenums Brezhnev used the data and facts to call the government and Kosygin to account. As early as December 1965, Brezhnev warned that the government was not fulfilling its responsibility: The thing is that irrespective of all efforts the workers, the party organizations as a whole have invested with great success, we nevertheless have to be honest and state before the plenum that we have to tolerate very large state costs, losses, and in so doing damage our people’s economy, since we clearly aren’t planning properly and aren’t supplying it with technical data in time; material and technology supply is lagging behind.226

Brezhnev conceded that in part it could have been because of Khrushchev’s People’s Economic Councils that they were investing a lot of money but only achieving fifty to sixty per cent of the projected capacity.227 ‘I don’t mean that just generally, rather it is an overall trend.’228 Brezhnev’s secret speech of 1969 In December 1966, the focus was on the success of the Fiat agreement. December 1967 was an exception in that no plenum took place, and the December Plenum of 1968 was dominated by the subject of supplying the population with food, against the background of the ‘Prague Crisis’. Brezhnev’s speech at the December Plenum of 1969, however, was the first time he seriously took Kosygin to task with general criticism. The fierceness of his attack came as a surprise to both the CC and the Politburo.229 In a departure from his usual habits and his scenario of power, he had not discussed the speech with the Politburo. Instead, it had been prepared by his Secretariat under the leadership of his aide Bovin.230 It was marked ‘secret’ and a fundamental difference to all previous speeches was that it did not first praise the achievements before broaching a few problems and then ending with praise for the party. Brezhnev opted for the format used by Western politicians in that he mainly addressed all the problems in the Soviet economy.231 He conceded it was wrong to concentrate only on the shortcomings and difficulties, and then proceeded to do exactly that. In timehonoured fashion, however, he distinguished between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reasons for a decline in economic growth, stagnating construction and the people’s

228

Brezhnev

low level of prosperity. The objective reasons were the international situation and two years of tough climatic conditions; both factors had placed a strain on the Soviet people’s economy and could not be resolved overnight. The other reasons, however, were a host of problems of their own making, the common threat being that they finally had to overcome pursuing economic activity ‘the old way’. They had chosen the correct path in 1965, when they decided to radically increase efficiency and transition from an extensive approach that was a constant drain on funds and workers to intensive use of the funds already invested. Nine out of ten people of working age in the Soviet Union worked and yet there was an acute labour shortage. This was where the true competition with the capitalist system played out.232 To better organize the economy, they had reinstalled the ministries, and they now finally had to prove together with Gosplan that they were up to the task. ‘Great responsibility lies with Gosplan. They are the subject of serious criticism.’233 He asserted that the plan Gosplan had presented for 1970, the last and decisive year of the five-year plan, was badly thought out and imbalanced, and its perspectives did not reflect the existing conditions. ‘In today’s times, even experienced and talented organizers can no longer manage the old way and rely only on feeling and common sense.’234 This was a personal attack on Baybakov and Kosygin, both of whom were considered excellent economic experts – and certainly didn’t rely only on ‘feeling’; rather, they had a very good understanding of the figures in the planned economy. And yet Brezhnev claimed, ‘Management is becoming a science and this science must be mastered as quickly and as comprehensively as possible; it must also be thoroughly studied by those who are at the very top of the management chain of command.’235 Brezhnev ended his attack by quoting Lenin: the correct decision could only be made on the basis of the correct information. Hence information technology had to be developed urgently.236 After letting Kosygin and Baybakov know what he thought of their work, he roundly criticized all the ministries under them. These ‘non-objective’ reasons were not a matter of individual abuse of office or legal transgressions: ‘What is even more dangerous than such manifestations is a lack of conscientiousness and discipline, which almost become the rule and a widespread practice.’237 He then began to read out figures showing in which sectors within which ministry’s remit the plans were regularly only met by fifteen, twenty, fifty-five or sixty per cent.238 He stated that if an oblast fell behind the targets once, there could be objective reasons for this. ‘But if in some sector of the people’s economy wages rise quicker than productivity, profitability and efficiency only grow slowly, if new technologies are introduced only very slowly and the minister doesn’t notice this and remains silent – then he is satisfied with what has been achieved, then his sense of responsibility is dulled.’239 He provided drastic examples: four port cranes ordered from the GDR had first been transported to the Far East instead of directly to their destination on the Black Sea – in taking a ‘walk’ of 20,000 kilometres, they had cost the country 50,000 roubles; machinery worth 5.5 billion roubles, including 1.5 billion in imports, remained sitting unpacked in warehouses; each year over ten million tons of cement, eleven billion cubic metres of gas and fifteen million tons of coal were lost due to sloppiness.240 The ministries, he said, were systematically lowering their plan targets but increasing investments; the communes were not building the housing they were

Live and Let Live

229

supposed to, but administrative buildings, cultural palaces and sports facilities as they saw fit.241 He even addressed the issue of alcoholism. Alcohol abuse was causing great damage to the people’s economy; ninety per cent of all unapproved absences from work were due to drinking. Communists who drank had to be called to account and expelled from the party if necessary.242 The speech broke a taboo in more than one respect: Brezhnev had not put it up for discussion beforehand, he departed from the usual positive narrative, and he pulled no punches with his criticism – albeit with the very transparent aim of humiliating Kosygin and Baybakov and blaming them for the economic deficit. There were no unusual reactions within the plenum for his ‘rule-breaking’, and there are no known or accessible sources indicating anyone protested. Roy Medvedev reports, however – although without naming his sources – that Suslov, Shelepin and Kirill Mazurov, Kosygin’s first deputy, wrote a piece criticizing Brezhnev’s speech with the intention of putting it up for discussion at the March Plenum of 1970. But Brezhnev had cancelled the plenum at short notice and travelled to White Russia for Defence Minister Grechko’s manoeuvres there.243 This was a double symbolic gesture with which Brezhnev signalled that it was he who decided what would be spoken about when, while also making it clear that if the Politburo wasn’t behind him, there was always the army. When he returned to Moscow, Suslov was the first to kowtow to him.244 It is hard to judge Medvedev’s version of events, since no one else mentions it. The most we have to go by are a few clues: it is true that in 1970 the usual spring plenum did not take place; they did not convene until the July. And Brezhnev did indeed travel to White Russia for manoeuvres.245 A further indication is that in April 1970, the ‘secret channel’ installed between the Federal Republic of Germany and Moscow reported to Bonn that Suslov, Podgorny, Shelepin and Kosygin could be expected to be ejected from the Politburo in the near future.246 In Paris too, there were rumours of a crisis in the leadership troika.247 Irrespective of whether this power struggle took place, Brezhnev must have won through, even if it was only later that he had Podgorny, Shelepin and Mazurov expelled from the Politburo and he didn’t remove Suslov at all, perhaps due to his submissive apology. Medvedev relates that the May parade of 1970 was the first at which portraits were shown only of Brezhnev and none of the other members of the Politburo.248 Brezhnev had the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress, scheduled for November 1970, postponed to the spring of 1971. It was at this congress that he had the Politburo expanded from eleven to fifteen members in order to accommodate four more of his clients.249 Year after year Brezhnev was thus firmly entrenched in office, and hence so was the conflict with Kosygin. As banal, or childish even, as this game of passing the buck might seem today, it played a role in the failure of the Soviet economy. The personal and powerpolitical rivalry between the premier and the general secretary prevented them from agreeing on further reforms. Brezhnev’s (superstitious) belief in the superiority of the Soviet economic system made him search for the reasons for all problems outside of the Soviet Union, in the international situation, or in human factors, but never in the

230

Brezhnev

structure itself. In short, for Brezhnev the solution was that with the right attitude, the correct ethos and a sense of responsibility, all the problems in the Soviet economy would disappear. ‘Today the party builds its relationship with the cadres on trust, relying mainly on party consciousness and the communist’s general sense of responsibility.’250 We do not know whether this slogan was rather born of his desire to blame Kosygin and his ministers for every problem or whether it was the result of a mental block which meant he thought it was impossible for the planned economy to fail. It would become his ceterum censeo: year after year he stressed that the Soviet economic system was superior but the responsible individuals were behaving irresponsibly. Having concentrated entirely on his policy of rapprochement with West Germany and the USA at the December Plenum of 1971, in December 1972 he resumed his overall criticism of Gosplan. ‘Two years have passed and neither Gosplan nor the ministries, nor the relevant departments, nor even the CC have gone about setting up such a programme [for improving the supply of high-quality goods].’251 The ‘two years’ referred to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress of April 1971, but his ‘comrades’ will probably have been reminded more of the chastizing they received in December 1969. His criticism was no less vehement this time round: ‘Gosplan has not become an economic centre capable of effectively resisting the parochial interests of the authorities and oblasts, far from it.’252 He accused the organization of liberalism: I lovingly call it liberalism, as it’s now called, [on the part of Gosplan] and sometimes the organs above it too. It’s the pressure of the sectors’ and oblasts’ interests, it’s also the interests of the buyers, who set everything on getting properties, all the more so when the money isn’t coming out of their own revenue but out of the overall public purse.253

He also directly attacked the reforms developed by Kosygin and stressed that they were now referred to as ‘economic reforms’ although they used to be known as ‘Kosygin’s reforms’ (which must have annoyed him greatly).254 ‘The measures undertaken in some areas, it must be said quite openly, have not proved effective. They do not help us decide on such issues as adopting ambitious plans, increasing workers’ productivity, accelerating scientific-technical progress and improving the quality of our production.’255 Brezhnev quickly added that he himself had been and still remained a supporter of these reforms. It was nevertheless a broadside against Kosygin, since he blamed the reforms’ failure on the planning body, that is, Baybakov and Kosygin, who could have prevented abuse of the new indicators: the enterprises, he said, recorded a profit by setting high prices and increasing production by churning out goods the market didn’t need and no one wanted to buy.256 Scolding the ministers But despite his harsh criticism, the measures he took were ultimately very gentle: he did no more than appeal to the party members’ morals and sense of responsibility. His only demand was that they set themselves higher standards: ‘[…] if we conclude the

Live and Let Live

231

plan for 1973 today, we cannot leave with the feeling that a year of quiet life and leisurely work lies ahead of us […]’.257 Ultimately, he remained true to his scenario of power; while his criticism was harsh and unsparing, there were no consequences. The ministers, factory directors and oblast party leaders he chided could duck their heads down and let his tirade wash over them in the certainty that neither their lives nor their careers were in danger. Brezhnev also remained true to himself in that when he named some ministers and enterprise managers, he neither insulted nor humiliated them, but addressed them in an irate but fatherly, benevolent tone. For example, he had recently been to the newly built tyre factory in Barnaul, which was supposed to supply the car plant in Togliatti and still wasn’t producing the nine million tyres required by the plan; Minister Viktor Fëdorov had given them thirty months to do so. Brezhnev reported he had said to the workers, ‘ “I know Comrade Fëdorov, he is a very good minister, a good person, but very good-natured at the cost of the states.” I told them thank God I’m not your minister, I would really pile the pressure on you. What are these thirty months you need for fulfilment [of the plan]?’.258 Recently, he continued, Fëdorov had rung to tell him that following this meeting they had taken measures and the factory was now fulfilling the plan. ‘Why couldn’t Comrade Fëdorov manage that himself earlier?’ Brezhnev asked.259 Such anecdotes were not born of a delight in needling people, as with Khrushchev, but appear to have been driven by sincere, keenly felt concern about the economic situation and the potential consequences: ‘Presumably one should add, comrades, that the difficulties in implementing higher wages for the population reduce the material incentives to work, encourage speculation and a bad mood among the people.’260 Here too, then, Brezhnev presented himself as the concerned patriarch of the nation; occasionally, he also adopted the stance of an engineer who found the situation untenable. At the same December Plenum, he criticized the ministers for the iron industry, Ivan Kazanetz, and heavy industrial construction, Nikolay Goldin, for failing to fire up the only blast furnace projected for 1972, at the Novolipetsk foundry. ‘It cannot be that in a country that is able to provide 500 billion roubles in investment funds in the course of the current five-year plan, no cement, no iron, no machines could be found to complete a single blast furnace on time? I as an engineer, as a metallurgist, as a party member, will never believe that.’261 Here, Brezhnev presented himself as an outraged expert who also had his eye on the overall situation: ‘While we are proud to have overtaken the USA in cast iron, steel and sheet metal, we also know that with respect to end production in the sectors that are the main buyers of metal, we remain around thirty per cent behind the USA. That, Comrade Kazanets, is no insignificant circumstance.’262 Brezhnev himself said of his second great summary of the state of affairs, ‘I don’t wish to use strong words here, but when we appear at the plenum, we are all obliged to use the language of the party.’263 He thus took a more conciliatory tone than in 1969; perhaps he too had learnt his lesson from Suslov’s protest note. He opened the December Plenum of 1973 even more placidly: referring directly to the December Plenum of the previous year, he declared they had all ‘passed the test’, made up for the deficits, finally driven on the underdeveloped energy sector and fulfilled the directives of the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress.264 However, that did not alter the fact that it was ‘especially necessary to increase the sense

232

Brezhnev

of responsibility, plan discipline and the level of economic management’.265 On one occasion, he presented a list of individual cases to illustrate the general malaise; due to faulty rolling mill construction, the automotive industry had received 300,000 fewer metal sheets than planned: ‘I don’t know whether Comrades Kazanets and [Vladimir] Shigalin can convincingly explain that to the plenum.’266 In 1955, construction work had begun on a mirrored glass factory in Salavat (Bashkiria), twenty million roubles had been invested, but because production problems had eaten up a further nine million in investments, it had been recommended the factory be torn down, although an English manufacturing licence had been held since 1967 and it had been used for successful production elsewhere. ‘One wonders – who is to blame for this outrageous sloppiness? After the explanations received by the CC, it would appear to be no one …’267 He again complained that the Soviet Union almost exclusively exported raw materials even though finished products fetched a higher price on the world market; even raw material exports would make a big loss if they continued to pump eighteen billion cubic metres of natural gas into the air, the pipelines to West Germany weren’t completed on time and soon contract penalties were incurred instead of generating profit.268 Here he again took aim at Kosygin. Given all the problems, it was now time to think about really consolidating management and planning: ‘Isn’t it about time many of them [the 100 ministries and authorities] were merged into groups led by the deputy chairmen of the Council of Ministers?’269 Brezhnev proposed the ministers also be granted more rights while greater responsibility was also demanded of them. He quickly added that he certainly didn’t wish to return to the old ‘reorganization itch’, but Gosplan was clearly overburdened with too many duties. He thus proposed improving management methods along with optimization of management structure. Since Gosplan was quantitatively overburdened, the plan targets were also qualitatively inadequate. He finally proposed that they also expand the system of incentives and ensure that everything that was good for the people’s economy and the state also had a positive impact on the workers.270 This reform proposal was ultimately a double blow to Kosygin: firstly, Brezhnev was implying that Kosygin and his people did not have the situation under control, and secondly he co-opted the ideas for which Kosygin had stood since 1965 – promoting cost-effectiveness via greater accountability and incentives for the individual. This appears to have been another example of his tussle with Kosygin, about which only very little is known. Kosygin clearly found the attempted attack on his sector so unbearable that he is said to have offered his resignation, which Brezhnev did not accept, however.271 These conflicts, otherwise fought out behind the scenes, became evident at the July Plenum of 1974, when Brezhnev declared, ‘Comrade Kosygin is relinquishing his position as chairman of the Council of Ministers. Not exactly. – Voices: He has had a rethink’.272 At the December Plenum of 1974, there was no more talk of restructuring. Brezhnev merely demanded greater production efficiency and implied some warnings: although the plan for 1975 was very tight and the production of consumer goods was far from covered by the necessary funds and resources, it still had to be considered the minimum target and was to be exceeded.273 In October 1975, he again reported on the mirror factory in Salavat, from which he had received a letter stating they had finally

Live and Let Live

233

launched the new production line. Brezhnev was delighted that the comrades had responded to criticism ‘in the party way’: ‘But I cannot help making one comment that is not only addressed to them. Is it really necessary to report shortcomings from the platform of the CC plenum for them to be dealt with quickly and effectively?’274 He used this as a further sideswipe at Kosygin’s ministers: ‘And does the party’s CC not have the right to demand of our revered comrade ministers and other economic leaders that they constantly remain in control of what is happening in the enterprises under them, and put things right in timely fashion when necessary?’275 In the list of proverbs he kept with him, he had underlined a saying of Joseph Pelet de Lozère’s: ‘It is bad if the ministers change often; but it is even worse if bad ministers remain in their posts.’276 A fighter for efficiency and quality Brezhnev’s trademark remained the unusual frankness with which he addressed all the shortcomings, deficits and plan-related problems at the plenums. In doing so, he adhered to one of his favourite sayings, by George D. Prentice: ‘We are in favour of tolerance, but it is a very difficult thing to tolerate the intolerant and impossible to tolerate the intolerable.’277 When Baybakov claims that Brezhnev appeased the Politburo and that he was to blame for his entourage playing down the situation and thus preventing effective measures being taken, this is only half true.278 Quite on the contrary, Brezhnev expressed his alarm year in year out whenever the budget and plan were discussed at the CC plenums, urging change. If his time in office is to be labelled an era of stagnation, two things must be considered. Firstly, he criticized this situation himself every year and hence to an extent he would have agreed with the historians. Secondly, he was by no means as passive as the label suggests. Rather, he presented himself as combative, active and demanding. That is not to say that his demands and measures were appropriate and effective, but the image he projected at the CC plenums was that of a man passionately arguing for his country to flourish, a politician dedicated to ‘efficiency, improving quality and optimizing management’.279 ‘Efficiency and quality – these two words have now become the slogan for our entire economic activity’,280 he declared in October 1976. Brezhnev was painfully aware that the Soviet economy was failing to bring about a second industrial revolution and move away from extensive heavy industry towards an age of more intensive electronic production. He appealed forcefully, albeit unsuccessfully, for the overdue restructuring of Soviet industry: ‘I hope that the comrades from the Ministry of Steel Industry finally understand that you can’t do business this way. They have to learn to work in a new way!’281 Again he warned, ‘You get the impression, I say that here in parentheses, that Gosplan and the State Committee for the Economy and Technology are not sufficiently concerned with prospects. But it is a very important thing, and it is regrettable that I have to remind them of this.’282 He did not doubt the principle of planned economy; rather, he believed that everyone provided the tools of rational enterprise. If twenty to twenty-five million tons of grain had to be written off every year due to a lack of harvest machinery and transport, or millions of tons of fertilizer did not make it to the fields due to a shortage of packaging material, these were deficiencies that simply could not be

234

Brezhnev

permitted in this economic system: ‘Isn’t it astounding that these kinds of questions arise at all in our planned economy? And if they do arise, why then isn’t it possible to solve them on site without bringing them before the Politburo?’283 The lack of efficiency in the use of items already produced remained a constant concern for him: ‘We produce more oil and coal, more steel and cement, mineral fertilizer and many other things than many others in the world. And yet we record a deficit in everything, even where the plans are fulfilled.’284 He was also aware that the Soviet Union would have a labour shortage in the foreseeable future if they weren’t able to transition to greater efficiency: ‘Comrades, I consider it imperative to share with you figures that we must think about seriously. In the 1980s, the growth in the population of working age will be four times lower than in the 1970s: 5.9 million instead of 24 million. Everyone must understand what that means.’285 But instead of more mechanization and the use of machines instead of people, there was an increase in manual labour.286 Better management For Brezhnev, efficiency also meant better economic management. Hence in February 1974 he had instructions sent to all party and Soviet organs to streamline administration, monitor adherence to guidelines and reduce correspondence.287 In October 1976, he once again demanded, ‘The Council of Ministers of the USSR must finally develop measures to enable the switch to new methods of planning and financing construction in 1977.’288 And in 1979, he diagnosed, ‘The problem is due to the lack of organizational structure. The Council of Ministers must develop corresponding proposals. It is a matter of such cardinal problems as the further development of the consolidation and coordination of the activities of the horizontal and vertical sectoral ministries.’289 He was in a noticeably gentler mood at the October Plenum of 1980, with Kosygin absent due to severe illness; he could be certain he had removed his last great adversary. Kosygin died two months later. Brezhnev’s speech was without the harshness of the previous years and also without the usual revelations and identification of guilty parties. He announced a structural reform like the one he had previously demanded from Gosplan and Kosygin: the CC had set up a new department of mechanical engineering for the agricultural sector in order to finally address the lack or shortcomings of harvesting technology. And a new balance had to be struck between centralism and a ‘democratic basis’: ‘The Council of Ministers is preparing a proposal for improving the organization of the leadership structures.’290 This was to be presented at the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in 1981 to avoid ‘carrying’ the outdated structures under the new five-year plan.291 Brezhnev seemed confident: ‘In the 1980s, the changeover to the path of intensive growth must be completed, productivity and quality of work must increase significantly.’292 A year later, however, in November 1981, this new optimism had dissipated. Possibly, Brezhnev had realized that simply replacing Kosygin with his loyal follower Nikolay Tikhonov was not enough to put the economy on a ‘new track’. But now he could no longer blame Kosygin for the failures. The explanation that remained was, firstly, the tense international situation:

Live and Let Live

235

The downturn in the economic situation on the world markets has reduced our [grain] export opportunities. The crisis in Poland also required extra spending. We are confronted with increased pressure from the American imperialists and the Peking hegemonists in Afghanistan and Cambodia. The Reagan government is trying to take revenge in Angola and Ethiopia. They are fuelling the tense situation surrounding Cuba. The USA and a number of their allies have attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to impose an economic blockade on our country. We must of course consider the complications in the international situation when developing our plans.293

Moreover, he could still blame undesirable developments on Gosplan, its head, Baybakov, and any number of ministers: ‘Unfortunately, the style of economic activity and economic thinking, the planning methods and the administrative system are not being transitioned with sufficient energy.’294 Ultimately, he replaced Kosygin as the responsible party with more ministers than ever before: ‘Comrades Ezhevskiy A.A., Belyak K.N., Khitrun L.I. together with Gosplan must thoroughly address it [the transport and storage of agricultural produce] and create order here.’295 ‘In the ministries headed by Comrades Mal’tsev N.A., Bratchenko B.F., Neporozhniy P.S., Shcherbina B.E., Dinkov V.A., the responsibility must be mainly to supply the entire country with oil, gas and electricity so that we can deliver the necessary amount of fuel to the brother states and the world market.’296 Brezhnev still had big plans: he announced that an entire plenum would soon be dedicated to the economic management system.297 While it did not materialize, the last CC plenum under his leadership, in May 1982, was devoted completely to the future with a food programme running until 1990. His intention was to mark a new dawn in the food industry in which agriculture would work in close interplay with corresponding economic sectors, the transport system and trade.298 The newly established‘agroindustrial complex’ was to be able to plan and manage independently.299 He revived the slogan ‘democratic principles of production management’, Khrushchev’s idea that if all workers had a say, they would have more interest in the success of their work.300 To the very end, then, he gave the impression that he was a committed planner who thought far into the future, always taking new measures. Indeed, he had marked a maxim of Francis Herbert Bradley’s: ‘He who doesn’t look ahead remains behind’.301 That is not to say that these measures were implemented, or that the CC members believed such efforts were genuine. But he was clearly able to maintain the scenario of the active economic leader to the end of his life, and the CC members played their part by acting as if they considered him the country’s leading economic expert.

‘The cadres decide everything’ The most striking thing about Brezhnev’s CC plenum speeches is the very critical analysis of the economic situation, imitating the style of a Western politician, attacking his political opponents and revealing their mistakes. However, the solutions Brezhnev then proposed for the problems appear, to the Western reader at least, to stand in

236

Brezhnev

stark contrast to his analysis. While he demanded a reform of the management culture and the system of economic management year after year, his real calls to change the situation, remove the shortcomings and adhere to the plan were addressed to individuals. Systematic analysis and fundamental criticism were thus followed by personalized suggestions for improvement and individual warnings. We can only assume why this was the case. Firstly, party discipline forbade him from openly questioning the concept of a planned economy itself. Whether he quietly did so himself, as his niece claims,302 we will never know. Secondly, apportioning the blame in this way gave him the opportunity to attack his rival Kosygin while presenting himself as a competent problem-solver. Ultimately, this approach reflected his experience as a party secretary under Stalin and Khrushchev: if you wanted it badly enough and were prepared to ruin your health, then plans could be fulfilled under the most adverse conditions and to the tightest deadlines. Stalin’s maxim of 1935, ‘The cadres decide everything’, which he had used to claim that the people were important to him and had to be looked after, since industrialization’s progress depended on them, had a second meaning that had firmly taken root in people’s minds: if a person really wanted to, he could achieve anything. Inversely, this meant that anyone who failed in his post was a slacker at best and a saboteur and traitor to the people at worst. Although this criminalization ceased after 1953, a deeply rooted concept in Soviet ideology was that personal willpower was all-powerful: if you really wanted to, you could control nature, divert rivers, control nuclear fission and, of course, fulfil plans. The distinction Brezhnev always made between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ – that is, man-made – reasons was typical of such thinking: since socialism and the planned economy were held to be infallible sciences, it had to be the cadre who was to blame if problems arose. In his list of sayings, Brezhnev had marked one by Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Elder: ‘One rotten egg ruins the whole pastry.’303 This was quite in keeping with the idea that the New Man was still in the process of becoming; any mistakes were because he was yet to have reached the required level of being or had stopped working on himself. Brezhnev, his life sometimes in danger, had squeezed the last grain out of Dnepropetrovsk and re-launched steelworks in Zaporozh’ye for Stalin. He had sovietized Moldavia and conducted the Virgin Lands campaign in Kazakhstan for Khrushchev. It would appear he expected the same sacrifices from his successors, who did not even have to worry about being arrested and shot. When during the drought of the early 1970s he had his own agricultural successes of the Stalin era presented, it seemed to express his bewilderment as to why the subsequent leaders produced worse results under objectively better conditions and with less risk to life and limb than he had managed while fearing his arrest. The undertone to his speeches at the CC plenums seemed to imply: you have no idea how well off you are and how good you have it under me. And so he asserted and urged that the cadres could achieve anything if only they really wanted to: ‘If we wish to improve the situation, then we will not have as many successes via resolutions and programmes than we will achieve through the cadres. I wish our entire party, all our party organizations in the republics, oblasts and rayons, including our leading party organizations, would focus their attention on the selection

Live and Let Live

237

and deployment of the cadres,’304 he said in April 1968. Ten years later, he still thought, ‘The key problem for the party leadership in agriculture was and remains the work with the cadres. […] Not only production, but also interpersonal relations, their living conditions, their education, their psychology, their consciousness are subjects for the constant attention of the party.’305 It was the party’s duty to select the correct cadres, and it was the cadres’ duty to act responsibly: ‘If in an oblast’s industrial enterprises profitability isn’t growing, if in agriculture the harvest isn’t increasing, if the numbers of livestock are in decline, if productivity is on the slide and the leaders of an oblast look on in silence, then we have every reason to assume that a sense of responsibility has been lost.’306 He repeatedly underscored that the party leadership relied on ‘communists’ consciousness and sense of responsibility’: ‘I think we have no reason whatsoever to depart from the style of work and working methods established in the party. But such a style of work absolutely demands of every cadre the correct party consciousness and relationship to state interests and a keen sense of responsibility.’307 Brezhnev responded to the profound structural problems besetting the Soviet economy with moral appeals and reliance on the time-honoured practice of ‘criticism and self-criticism’,308 a procedure obliging Soviet man to reflect on and optimize his own development towards a higher plane of consciousness in a critical process involving the assistance of his party comrades. Here too, working on the individual was the solution to global issues. Some of Brezhnev’s suggestions sounded almost like therapy: ‘Without going into detail, I would like to say to the heads of our ministries and authorities, you must find the strength and ability within yourselves to rise above purely sectoral interests and really turn once again to agriculture.’309 Brezhnev tried to appeal to the economic leaders’ consciences, urging them to view the situation through the eyes of the populace: ‘The Soviet people can understand the difficulties caused by the weather conditions and the tense international situation. But they cannot and will not except as an explanation for the existing difficulties wastefulness, irresponsibility and indifference.’310 This too was followed by a moral appeal: ‘The soul of every communist, every economic and party employee must burn for the people’s prosperity.’311 In his list of quotations, he had marked a similar line of Stefan Zweig’s: ‘Responsibility always almost makes a person sublime.’312 Every single cadre had to feel personally responsible: ‘An attentive and caring attitude towards people must permeate the style of work of the party, Soviet and economic organs and of course the trade unions. […] There can be no place for bureaucracy, cold-heartedness and conceit in our Soviet way of life.’313 Brezhnev remained true to the old slogans, even when the forecasts became increasingly bad from the mid-1970s onwards. When he emphasized in October 1976 that the plans for the new five-year plan were ‘ambitious’ – that is, unrealistic – since they were based on growth rates that had not yet been achieved, he demanded the targets be surpassed and that the work collectives establish ‘counter-plans’ – that is, even more ambitious targets – in the fashion characteristic of the industrialization of the 1930s.314 In December 1977, he once again responded to the tense situation by drawing on the propaganda techniques of the 1930s: ‘We must mobilize the party, the cadres, the entire people to ignite the masses’ enthusiasm for work and local initiative.

238

Brezhnev

We must develop socialist competition with full force so that the work collectives fulfil the tasks of the five-year plan. We have done this so often and had success this way.’315 He banked on propaganda’s impact on the individual when he urged the Komsomol, the press and writers to focus on oil drilling in Western Siberia and suggested that a medal be created for those undertaking such hard work.316 As his aide Bovin observed, as a product of the system, Brezhnev was not in a position to recognize problems in the system itself.317 To his dying day, he remained faithful to the Soviet idea that the whole depended on each and every cadre: ‘Every communist – and there are almost 18 million of us – who at his station lends all his strength, his experience and his knowledge to generating reserves and increasing efficiency of work must be a worthy example of sacrifice in the workplace.’318 Corruption as a peccadillo This mode of thinking, the assumption that the key to all problems lay with the individual and his being educated correctly, also prevented Brezhnev from systematically addressing the country’s growing corruption. That is not to say that he closed his eyes to it. On the contrary, in July 1973 he had a message sent to Minister of the Interior Shchëlokov complaining that illegal dealings were unfortunately widespread throughout the entire country; he could see for himself from his car how people on Moscow’s ulitsa Gor’kogo traded scarce goods near the shop called Gifts, but also outside the shop Sanitation Technology and around the Hotel Ukraine. He also knew that in the city’s Bauman quarter, his own constituency, one could acquire anything one wanted on the black market; radios, telephones and cameras were sold openly on Sadovo-Kudrinskaya ulitsa. Neither the militia nor the press were doing anything about it: ‘That enrages the population’.319 The directions he gave were typical of his overall approach: the ‘societal organizations’, that is, the party, the trade unions and the Komsomol, were to be called upon to eliminate these abuses.320 He thus treated misappropriation, speculation and personal enrichment as a moral failing of individual cadres or the party’s educational work. Another problem was that his established system of cadre stability prevented him from dealing rigorously with those local party leaders who were his clients and governors. When in 1974 complaints and rumours reached Moscow that the head of the Georgian trade centre, A.P. Klimov, had embezzled over a million roubles, spent enormous amounts on building luxury restaurants, developed a mafia-like structure of trade cooperatives and speculated in cars on the black market, the CC summoned him to Moscow and found that there was a plausible explanation for everything that had been going on.321 It was the same with the Aliyev clan in Azerbaijan, to whose self-enrichment Brezhnev was happy to turn a blind eye as long as they remained his loyal representatives.322 However, in February 1975, the CC decided to do something about ‘theft and squandering of socialist property’.323 Many party leaders in Azerbaijan, Kirgizstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Tajikistan were dismissed. The militia and the state prosecution intensified their work; the ‘Department for Combating Theft of Socialist Property’ secured some twenty-five million roubles, 476 kilograms of gold,

Live and Let Live

239

eleven kilograms of platinum, 2,527 carats of precious stones and 75,000 dollars in 1975.324 Over 102 million roubles were lost through misappropriation, however.325 It was not until much later that Brezhnev was prepared to deal with this phenomenon systematically, and he once again proceeded on the cadre level. In October 1981 the CC sent all party members a confidential letter in which the party leadership called for the ‘uncompromising fight against such reprehensible phenomena as theft, bribery and speculation’.326 Once again, the basic stance was that if the Communists set a good example, then everyone else would follow and there would be no more corruption. The local party organizations discussed this letter with their members and reported to Moscow that many had participated in the discussions and that the Communists had unanimously considered the letter a ‘very important document correctly representing the line of approach’.327 But in early 1982, Brezhnev still refused to have the first secretary of Krasnodar, Sergey Medunov, tried for abuse of power and misappropriation, even though Andropov urged him to open criminal proceedings.328 Under Medunov, Krasnodar had developed into a hub for smuggling caviar into the West since 1973.329 But Brezhnev felt particularly obliged to Medunov, since the ‘Little Land’, the scene of his wartime memoirs, was part of Krasnodar Oblast and Medunov had done everything to honour Brezhnev as a war hero, receiving him many times, embracing him and being photographed with him.330 When Andropov suggested prosecution, Brezhnev responded with a long silence before finally saying, ‘Yura, that’s impossible. He is the leader of such a big party organization, the people believed in him, they followed him, and now we put him on trial? […]Transfer him, and then we’ll see.’331 Andropov had to delay his large-scale anti-corruption campaign until after Brezhnev’s death. It was not in keeping with Brezhnev’s scenario of power as the carer and good patron to put loyal acolytes on trial. He treated speculation and misappropriation as a cadre issue or peccadillo, not as a criminal act. He knew that such generosity secured support and loyalty; even when combating corruption, he seemed to take great pains to avoid emulating Khrushchev, who had destroyed careers. He didn’t even dismiss his hairdresser and barber, even though he regularly failed to show up for work or used the blade while utterly inebriated.332 He personally ‘rehabilitated’ his chauffeur after the Kremlin administration had suspended him for drunkenness.333 Everyone had to be able to live and work in peace. Summary Brezhnev’s impressions and experiences under Stalin shaped his economic policy for good and for bad. The deprivation and devastation he had seen throughout the Soviet Union meant that he not only continued Khrushchev’s social programmes, but also made them his main agenda and ultimately even the general party line. He even inverted causality: the people were not to earn prosperity by building socialism; rather a human standard of living was the prerequisite for total commitment to the socialist cause. He went further than Khrushchev in another respect too: he was interested not only in the prosperity of the masses, but the private felicity of every individual. Not only did everyone have to have the opportunity to live in their own

240

Brezhnev

dwelling, but they were also to enjoy individual mobility by owning a car. Ultimately, what stands out about Brezhnev is that he sought to raise the standard of living of the peasants too, and was prepared to push this through despite resistance from his own party. His time managing collectivization and the Virgin Lands campaign clearly left their mark. A negative was that he had completely internalized Stalin’s slogan ‘The cadres decide everything’; it became not just a guiding principle for political action, but his only solution. He was a product of this political system and could not accept – and presumably did not want to accept – that much more fundamental reforms were required and that moral appeals to party discipline and the economic leaders’ sense of responsibility were not enough. While the dressings down he gave the ministers were unusually unsparing, frank and critical, they were also harmless, since he eschewed both the arrests that became common under Stalin and the routine dismissals under Khrushchev. His harsh criticism ultimately remained ineffective, since he resisted more profound reforms. In Paris, Pompidou’s advisors thought Moscow fell between two stools; the need to rationalize the economy, and the leading role of the party.334 However, that Kosygin’s reforms soon faded and no new efforts were made in this regard was also largely due to the patron–client structure of the Soviet political system and the resulting personal rivalry between Brezhnev and Kosygin. All economic analysis was dominated by competition between the two, which meant joint action was out of the question. It is doubtful whether they would actually have been able to implement far-reaching structural reforms in the face of resistance from many economic leaders and ministerial apparatuses, but together they would have surely been able to develop a completely different, new dynamic. Instead, they became mired in their annual rituals of needling each other and demanding changes. And hence all Brezhnev could do was wonder how he had been able to achieve so much more under Stalin than his younger successors in ‘objectively’ better times.

Figure 24 Brezhnev visiting the BAM construction site in Skovorodino, 1978. The banner reads: ‘BAM – pride of the Lenin Komsomol’.

241

7

‘Developed Socialism’, or Re-launching the Soviet Project?

Our photo shows Brezhnev in 1978 on a visit to the Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) construction site, surrounded by young construction workers. The BAM is symbolic of the Brezhnev era: the last great propaganda campaign in connection with a largescale construction site, intended to prove once again that Soviet society was in a position to penetrate inhospitable regions, subjugate nature and exploit the vast empire and its resources. But the BAM stood not only for the glorious age of giant projects, but also for the party leadership’s increasing departure from reality, its failure to recognize that the slogans expounding enthusiasm for labour and friendship among the peoples at the construction site were increasingly seen as hollow and ridiculed by many young people. They were not working on the BAM to participate in the wonderful development of socialism, but to make money quickly so that they could return to their homelands and furnish an apartment or buy a car. The BAM, glorified and promoted in the press, in film, on television and in novels, seemed strangely anachronistic. It was a project of the Brezhnev generation; their children still had some understanding for it, but their grandchildren didn’t, with the exception of enthusiastic party members and those who paid lip service to the party line.

‘Developed socialism’ The BAM is also representative of Brezhnev’s approach to socialism: he was not a theoretician and thinker, but a pragmatist and an engineer who saw socialism best realized in large-scale projects. Accordingly, when he took up office as general secretary, he instructed his staff not to include Lenin quotations in his speeches, since no one would believe that he had read him anyway. In the 1970s, the usual references to Lenin’s writings resumed, however. Like all party leaders, and as his scenario of power demanded, he used Lenin to legitimize his own position, to support new theories and measures and to repeatedly present himself as his successor. But these were ritualized clichés used by the speech-writers, who sought the fitting quotations and edited them into the texts. None of his entourage report that he concerned himself with the classical works of socialism, and none of his notebooks provide any indication either. His relationship with ideology can thus be described as pragmatic or instrumental. The first priority was national prosperity, then the appropriate Lenin quotation had to 242

‘Developed Socialism’

243

be found to support it; if necessary, he encouraged his advisors to interpret the theoreticians freely and invent a new phase of socialism. It was clearly his conviction that socialism was meant to serve the people, not the other way round. And hence he was the source of an ideological innovation his staff elaborated for him: ‘developed socialism’. He first formulated the new guiding principle on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, underlined it again on Lenin’s hundredth birthday on 22 April 1970 and finally established it at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress of 1971.1 The new directive was pragmatism and ambition combined.2 On the one hand, Brezhnev used it to withdraw Khrushchev’s frivolous promise of 1962 that the Soviet people would be living under communism by 1980.3 On the other hand, the claim was that they had already reached a new stage of societal development characterized by the demands of consumers and intensive economic growth. ‘Developed socialism’ was a new invention for justifying and securing Brezhnev’s policy of focusing on national prosperity, which he declared to be the precondition for the second industrial revolution. As Brezhnev put it in a nutshell, ‘The main battlefield of the Soviet people for the victory of communism is the economy, the creation of the material and technical basis of communism.’4 While Lenin had once said ‘Communism = Soviet power + the electrification of the entire country’, Brezhnev altered the formula to ‘Developed socialism = consumption + intensive growth’. His advisors could not initially agree as to whether or not the new concept made sense or was justifiable. After the speech on Lenin’s birthday, the ideologically conservative Golikov told Brezhnev that claiming developed socialism had been achieved was not consistent with Marxist doctrine: ‘That is a made-up and unscientific formula.’5 Another advisor took this as an opportunity to send an anonymous memo pointing out that none of the founding fathers of Marxism had mentioned ‘developed socialism’ or ‘developed communism’. Communism had two phases, socialism and communism; there was nothing else. The Soviet Union had reached the first phase, socialism, which did not require additional epithets such as ‘developed’.6 But, the note continued, Lenin’s writings contained some hints at ‘developed society’ as a stage in its own right on the road to communism. Since the Soviet Union was the country with the most progressive socialism, there was sufficient reason to assume ‘that the formula which you have chosen and which has been confirmed by the Politburo, that developed socialist society has been achieved in our country, will be confirmed at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress’.7 Such confirmation would amount to a ‘practical and political signal’:8 firstly, it would educate those who thought socialism was an independent stage in the competition leading to communism; secondly, it would show the Chinese comrades that they were on the wrong path; thirdly, the Soviet Union could thereby claim it was the socialist equivalent of the developed capitalist states like the USA, Japan and the West in general; and fourthly, the Soviet Union would thus define its position in contrast to the socialist developing countries in Asia and Africa.9 On 21 December 1972, at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev specified what ‘developed socialism’ meant

244

Brezhnev

for him: solid technology in the cities and the country instead of only rudimentary preconditions for the socialist economy; a homogeneous society in which the classes were increasingly merging into one another; a significantly higher level of education; and a ‘developed socialist democracy’ with a stable legal system, regular legislative procedures and a larger role for the soviets.10 The formula of ‘developed socialism’ thus reflected both domestic policy guidelines and all the facets of Brezhnev’s foreign policy. It gave the lie to the claims of both the Western socialist parties and China and placed the Soviet Union on a footing with the USA and thus above all ‘de-colonized’ countries. Brezhnev declared that the current stage, with its productivity, scientific-technological progress and welfare benefits, made socialism particularly attractive to other countries.11 He thus had his ideological cloak tailored to his aims and pushed through his desired slogan of ‘developed socialism’ with remarkable ease. And as early as 1972, he announced that the new society also required a new constitution.12 Brezhnev’s constitution Five years later, this idea was implemented and ‘developed socialism’ was anchored in ‘his’ constitution. The constitutional reform of 1977 not only secured his power in the state, by establishing the party’s authority to issue directives to the government and expanding the remit of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, to which he then had himself elected chairman. It also did much more than intensify the cult of personality. He also used it to write himself into the constitutional history of the Soviet Union: Lenin’s founding document of 1924 and the age of Stalin’s constitution of 1936 were now followed by Brezhnev’s ‘developed socialism’. Once more, Brezhnev thus triumphed over Khrushchev, whose reform attempts of 1964 he had scuppered and now made his own. Irrespective of the power-oriented, clientelist and historical policies Brezhnev thus pursued, he principally legitimized the new constitution by establishing a ‘developed, mature socialist society’.13 He thereby claimed that, under his rule the people had grown into a ‘new historic society’: the ‘Soviet people’ – there were now hardly any distinctions between workers, peasants and intellectuals and all nationalities enjoyed equal rights.14 The sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution thus marked a caesura: ‘The constitution enshrines the new historic milestone on our path to communism: the establishment of developed socialist society.’15 It was Khrushchev who had had the basic idea of enshrining both the allpowerfulness of the people and the party’s special role as the guiding force, and it had been developed by Brezhnev under his direction back in 1964.16 Brezhnev added the concept of ‘developed socialism’, which was discussed intensively by the mass media, at party and enterprise meetings and in many submissions between the new constitution’s announcement at the CC plenum in May 1977 and its adoption by the Supreme Soviet on 7 October 1977. Brezhnev declared that the four-month public discussion, which he claimed had involved 140 million people, over four-fifths of the population,17 proved how much the people were interested in this constitution. It also proved that the party was serious about ‘socialist democracy’: ‘We can say with

‘Developed Socialism’

245

certainty that the entire Soviet people has indeed become the author of its state’s constitution.’18 However, Brezhnev’s aide Shakhnazarov noted that ‘developed socialism’ was disseminated too ‘declaritively’, without sufficient explanation using specific examples from everyday life. They were now paying the price for the fact that, to date, only specialists had concerned themselves with ‘developed socialism’ and there had been too little thought about how to deliver it to the people.19 Critical voices among the masses were asking how long building communism was still going to take if they had needed sixty years for developed socialism. They repeatedly commented that the Soviet Union might be the most highly developed society in theory, but in practice there was probably no other society that drank as much.20 Only a minority demanded more democratic rights, while forty to seventy per cent insisted something finally had to be done about alcoholism and ‘social welfare scroungers’. This must have strengthened Brezhnev’s belief that he and the people were pulling in the same direction.21 Party propaganda Brezhnev clearly thought that the people were actually interested in the party, its programmes and plenums. At the Politburo meetings, he attached great importance to hearing how the previous plenum had been received by the population, and expected positive responses.22 He also seemed to continue to believe in the effect of propaganda, which for him was a matter of working to increase conviction, education and information. In his time as an oblast or republic secretary, it had often been the only available means of motivating people. In this respect too, he was pragmatic: he was interested in theory and ideology not as pure doctrine, but as a framework for social coexistence and a means for activating and mobilizing the population. However, he clearly rejected Khrushchev’s ‘campaigns’, in which ‘enthusiastic’ communists had to compensate for bad planning and a lack of resources with shock work. For Brezhnev, the communist’s sense of responsibility and consciousness were to become the panacea and precondition for successful economic development. It is in this context that we must see the change of party books introduced at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in the spring of 1971. A year later, he explained that the action planned for 1973/74 was certainly not intended as a ‘purge’, but was to reactivate ‘passive and indifferent’ members. Discussions were to be held with the passive comrades in order to establish the reasons for their lack of participation and to correct it for the long term.23 During the Politburo meeting of 31 May 1972, he noted: ‘Instruct the Secretariat to develop a programme for propaganda work.’24 He was fully aware that the Soviet people were becoming more critical and could no longer be convinced by the standard slogans. In 1978 he complained that the information distributed via the mass media was often no longer convincing enough. The Soviet people were politically better educated than ever before and made high demands of the media, but formalism, formulaic slogans and the ‘campaign style’ were still the norm in reporting. He proposed a commission headed by Suslov to design measures to improve the ideological mass work.25 At the February Plenum of 1981, he even announced, to

246

Brezhnev

applause, that if the delegates of the forthcoming Twenty-Sixth Party Congress so wanted, then the party would have to revise its outdated programme.26 This did not actually happen, but Brezhnev clearly saw the opportunity for a legacy comprising not only his own constitution, but also a party programme, thereby annulling the one adopted under Khrushchev in 1961. Brezhnev’s programme was meant to enshrine ‘developed socialism’ as a modern form of society for the highly industrialized state. His aide Shakhnazarov had already formulated initial guiding principles. The programme was to be ‘more laconic’, that is, it would rely less on the rhetoric of the class struggle. Instead, the focus would be on the ‘well-rounded person’ and developing a ‘materially and intellectually attractive communist society’ – which would be free from ‘petty bourgeois consumer ideas’, however, and was certainly not to look like a pure consumer society.27 Brezhnev sought to avoid misinterpretation at home and abroad. What he apparently envisaged was a modern ideology that didn’t burden people with the old slogans. Rather, it was to serve as the consuming Soviet citizen’s philosophy of life and basic attitude, like the American’s ‘pursuit of happiness’.

Re-Stalinization? Brezhnev was and to an extent still is considered the party leader who rehabilitated Stalin, reversed the opening up of society and once again silenced critics with arrests, internment in camps and involuntary commitment to psychiatric clinics. This is incorrect. Firstly, Brezhnev repeatedly expressed his clear rejection of Stalin and his repressive measures. Secondly, the restrictive corrections he made to the course were not born of his convictions, but were concessions to the ‘hardliners’, with whom he felt he had to find some consensus within the framework of his style of leadership. Thirdly, he left it to KGB chairman Semichastnyy to deal with dissidents, or to Yuri Andropov after 1967. Fourthly, far fewer people were arrested and sentenced under Brezhnev than under Khrushchev: while 3,448 people were imprisoned for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ under Paragraph 190/1 between 1958 and 1966, between 1967 and 1975 the fate befell 1,583, fewer than half as many.28 That is by no means to excuse what happened under Brezhnev’s aegis, but it is remarkable how little interest he showed in the dissidents, how reluctant he was to even concern himself with such matters, and how he left the ‘dirty work’ entirely to the KGB. He thus wasn’t the hardliner he was perceived to be, but in most cases gave the nod to whatever was suggested by Andropov or discussed by the Politburo.29 This also means that he dealt with every single case, despite his dislike of doing so, and thus personally approved the exiling of the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the physicists Valeriy Chalidze and Pavel Litvinov, the publicist Vladimir Maksimov, the economist Viktor Krasin, the mathematician Aleksandr Yesenin-Vol’pin and many other prominent human rights activists and dissidents.30 He bore responsibility, but he was not the driving force behind the arrests. Given his own experiences under Stalin, it would have been remarkable if he had advocated Stalin’s rehabilitation. However, one must bear in mind that even

‘Developed Socialism’

247

Khrushchev had not clearly branded Stalin a criminal; rather, he had drawn a distinction between the ‘good leader’ before 1935 and the ‘bad’ one thereafter. As Stalin’s ninetieth birthday drew closer (21 December 1969), debate again raged concerning how the first general secretary was to be judged. The Politburo commissioned the CC to prepare an article on the subject.31 At the same time, Brezhnev gave his secret speech on 15 December 1969, criticizing the poor economic development, complaining that alcohol was the scourge of the country, and warning that Stalinist methods should not be considered a solution: Some comrades […] recall past times and say there used to be ‘order’, thus suggesting we return to the old methods of cruel administration. I think that these are unsuitable formulas […] One has to view the past rationally, not portraying it too gloomily, but not idealizing what happened either. We still remember well where the fear caused by the administrative methods led.32

He thus clearly opposed the Stalinists desiring tougher measures against transgressions and indiscipline of any kind. At the same time, he made his position clear when he said that the past should be neither glorified nor demonized. He had explained to his speech-writers why he did not want a public reckoning with Stalin: I don’t think that Trotsky or Bukharin were spies or enemies of the people either. And I am not bothered by the severity of their remarks. What bothers me is something else: I think that very many communists are not ready for such a transition. […] The party won’t understand me. Not at all. Hence I ask that we stop arguing about this topic and cut all severity and abrupt phrasing.33

On 17 December 1969, discussions revealed that opinions within the Politburo diverged widely: some did not want there to be any mention of Stalin at all, because it was too controversial a topic, while others clearly wanted him celebrated. But there were plenty of voices who preferred a more balanced picture, while others advocated presenting him flatly as a mass murderer. As was his wont, Brezhnev quietly listened to all the arguments for and against before declaring: I’ll openly tell you that my initial position was not to publish any articles. Why rake up this issue? But after speaking to many oblast secretaries and listening to your contributions, I think it will in fact be of greater benefit if we publish an article. After all, no one is denying his revolutionary merits. And no one doubts his grave errors.34

Strictly speaking, Brezhnev thus stayed true to the line Khrushchev had taken, praising Stalin’s achievements in building the country while holding him responsible for the Great Terror and poor decision-making during the Second World War. His interpretation did not change in 1977, when in a speech announcing his constitutional reform he said of the basic law on Stalin, which had remained in force to that day:

248

Brezhnev

We know, comrades, that after the constitution currently in force was adopted, some years were darkened by illegal repressions and transgressions against the principles of socialist democracy, Lenin’s norms of party and state life. This occurred against the principles of the constitution. The party firmly condemned this practice and it should never be repeated.35

Regarding Stalin’s hundredth birthday in 1979, Brezhnev again told the Politburo that they had already agreed to ‘objectively assess both the positive and the negative sides of Stalin’s impact’.36 Accordingly, Pravda was tasked with publishing an article on Stalin while the Kommunist was to feature a piece on the role of the masses in history. A combination of the two would be distributed by the news agency TASS and other channels. The new line of ‘objective balance’ meant that under Brezhnev, it became difficult to clearly reject Stalin. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, it was important for Brezhnev and his grip on power to seek compromise between Stalinists and liberal forces; neither the one nor the other extreme could gain the upper hand. Another factor was Brezhnev’s understanding of what was politically ‘fitting’ and what was out of the question. Shouting, strong words and incendiary speeches were Khrushchev’s trademark. There was no room for extreme positioning within the new political culture of compromise and consensus. Avoiding the negative aspects of history and being proud of what had been achieved was thus also a question of style. This was the explanation Brezhnev gave the writer Konstantin Simonov, who wanted to publish his diary of the horror and failure of 1941. It was all true, Brezhnev conceded, but it still could not be published: ‘No matter what we saw, the main truth is that we won. All other truths disappear in its wake. […] We should have consideration for the people, the victors, their children and grandchildren, and not reveal everything all at once.’37 However, after a long discussion Simonov, for whom Brezhnev had great admiration, was able to persuade him otherwise. This again suggests that Brezhnev was not a hardliner, even if he had hardliners advising him. One such character was his right-hand man, Viktor Golikov. In September 1966, he complained that the academic institutes were full of critical discussion of how Stalin lost touch with reality during the Second World War and decapitated the Red Army: It’s not a scientific debate, but a smear campaign against the party, its entire policy and a revision of its achievements. And the tone they take! The only thing missing is them demanding: Go on, CC, account to us ‘scholars’ why you call the piratelike annexation pursuant to the treaty with Hitler reunification with Western Ukraine, the Baltic etc.38

Golikov was one of two friends from his Moldavian days he had appointed as his advisors – irrespective (or perhaps because) of their pro-Stalin attitude. Golikov advised him on domestic policy and ideological matters and wrote speeches for him, while he made Trapeznikov head of the CC department for science and colleges. He had his own in-house editorial board, then. This gave them influence, but he could

‘Developed Socialism’

249

also keep tabs on them. Both complained to him they were unable to impose their desire for more rhetoric of the class struggle and slogans vilifying ‘imperialism’.39 It is only speculation, but it is perfectly possible that Brezhnev installed the ‘orthodox’ communists in his retinue in sectors that seemed less important to him while putting loyal liberals in charge of areas in which he sought to set a new tone, such as foreign policy under Ponomarëv, CC secretary for international relations. Andropov and the dissidents Unfortunately, there is no record of what Brezhnev thought about those who demanded the preservation of constitutional rights with satirical prose or critical remarks, or who warned of a re-Stalinization of society in their letters – for instance to the delegates of the Twenty-Third Party Congress, but usually directly to Brezhnev as general secretary. Nor do we know what he thought of those who demanded open courts, or those who assembled on Pushkinskaya ploshchad’ on 5 December 1965, Constitution Day, to silently insist on observation of the Basic Law, or those who petitioned him demanding the release of their friends. Nothing is known about his attitude towards the protesters who stood on Red Square in August 1968 after the invasion of Prague and unrolled banners proclaiming ‘For your and our freedom’.40 There is no mention of any of this in Brezhnev’s notebooks, and his contemporaries – supporters and embittered rivals alike – barely have anything to say on the subject, as though the issue had never existed. His bodyguard, Medvedev, reports that Brezhnev was not at all concerned about the dissidents.41 This corresponds with the view of Brezhnev’s son-in-law,Yuriy Churbanov, who says Brezhnev told Gromyko that if those who sought the right to travel didn’t like it in the Soviet Union, then they should leave.42 The problem was, however, that after leaving, dissidents became involved with Radio Free Europe or Voice of America in order to agitate against the Soviet Union, which greatly angered Brezhnev. What concerned him most about the dissidents was thus that they could damage his relations with the West. When Willy Brandt repeatedly spoke of the fate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others, Brezhnev urged Andropov to find a solution to the issue to release the strain on his relationship with the German chancellor.43 Ex negativo, we can conclude that had Brezhnev been an agitator and hardliner, sooner or later the party leaders he had upset would have had a field day and made their accusations heard. But even the former KGB chairman Semichastnyy, who goes to great lengths in his memoirs to show Brezhnev in a bad light, shows remarkable restraint with respect to his treatment of the dissidents.44 Brezhnev clearly remained true to the attitude he had adopted in 1937, refraining from hysterical shouting or calls for drastic measures, but rather saw the solution to be education and propaganda efforts. In this respect too, he was a conservative patriarch who thought that with the correct guidance and patient persuasion, the renegades would finally grasp that the Soviet Union was the better system. Aide Bovin’s view was that Brezhnev simply did not understand the issue of democracy and human rights.45 Anatoliy Chernyayev also observed that the Politburo was initially perplexed by the dissidents, who referred to themselves as ‘petitioners’ or ‘signatories’: ‘How can it be? In our society such a thing cannot and must not exist!’46

250

Brezhnev

Brezhnev’s response to the reports of the KGB chairmen were indifferent and baffled at once – baffled in that he was simply unable to grasp what drove these people, why they were not satisfied with what the party had created for them, but also in that he was angered and displeased by behaviour he considered not so much ideologically dangerous as violating the behavioural norms of the good Soviet citizen. It was at odds with his image of man that the educated elite of all people, physicists or writers with their privileges and particular responsibility for progress in the Soviet Union, abused the trust placed in them and showed criticism and rebelliousness instead of loyalty and gratitude. It appears Brezhnev tried to avoid dealing with these people and their motives as much as possible, leaving the unpleasant task to Semichastnyy and, after 1967, Andropov.47 That is not to say that he was not always well informed about what was happening in the country, or that he did not authorize all the actions of the KGB himself; the KGB chief provided the Politburo with both general updates and reports on every specific case, from Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov to Bukovskiy and Kopelev, and Brezhnev and the Politburo usually approved: ‘Well take care of it then. If the Committee [for State Security] considers that to be right …’48 This does not mean that Brezhnev gave Andropov free rein or allowed himself to be pushed around by him. On the contrary, Brezhnev pursued his proven strategy of divide and rule with Andropov too. Andropov had his clearly defined area of responsibility in which Brezhnev did not interfere as long as the former reliably reported to him, sent him thick daily dossiers on what was happening in the country and did not overstep his remit.49 There is diverse speculation as to why Brezhnev chose Andropov of all people to head the KGB in 1967; nothing he had done in his prior diplomatic career qualified him for the role. Semichastnyy’s opinion is that at the time, Brezhnev’s position was not sufficiently undisputed for him to appoint one of his Dnepropetrovsk cronies. Brezhnev’s niece claims that Brezhnev and Andropov had an agreement that the latter would become head of the KGB if they succeeded in ousting Khrushchev.50 A more plausible explanation, however, is offered by Brezhnev’s advisor Aleksandrov-Agentov and his personal doctor Evgeniy Chazov: Andropov was completely surprised by his appointment, which was dressed up as a concession to Brezhnev’s rival Shelepin, since it meant Andropov had to relinquish the important position of CC secretary.51 But Andropov used his new post to expand his power, with Brezhnev’s assistance: he became a Politburo candidate in June 1967 and a full member in April 1973.52 In this respect, there may be some truth in Brezhnev’s niece’s recollection that her uncle called Andropov ‘clever’, ‘crafty’ and ‘cruel’, and that both realized they needed each other.53 Indeed, this marriage of convenience soon developed into a friendship. His bodyguard Medvedev reports that none of the party leaders were as close to Brezhnev as Andropov.54 One reason for this was certainly that he was not a know-all like Podgorny, a dogmatist like Suslov or a pedant like Kosygin. Nevertheless, Brezhnev acted according to his old principle that ‘trust is good, control is better’ when in 1967 he installed his old friend from his days in Dnepropetrovsk, Georgiy Tsinëv, and his acquaintance from his time in Moldavia, Semën Tsvigun, as Andropov’s deputies.55 Andropov remained loyal to Brezhnev, probably partly due to old cadre discipline, and partly because they had similar views.

‘Developed Socialism’

251

Compared to Podgorny, Kosygin, Suslov and others, they were the two most liberal members of the leadership.56 Tellingly, Andropov is said to have told one of his protégés: In around fifteen to twenty years’ time, we will be able to afford what the West allows now – greater freedom of opinion, freedom of information, a pluralist society, various art institutions. But that will only be possible in about fifteen to twenty years’ time, when we have managed to raise the people’s standard of living. But at the moment – you can’t imagine what the mood is like in our country […]57

Another aide claims Andropov’s long-term goal was the gradual democratization of the Soviet Union. However, this had to be guided and monitored from above to avoid the country sliding into chaos.58 It seems Andropov and Brezhnev still felt the KGB’s role was to educate the Soviet people and reprimand the ‘engineers of the soul’, as the writers had been known ever since Stalin’s day. The case of Sinyavskiy and Daniel’ When in September 1965, KGB chief Semichastnyy reported to the CC on the two writers Andrey Sinyavskiy and Yuliy Daniel’, who had published parodies of the Soviet Union in the West,59 the Party Presidium called for a public trial to send a clear message at home and abroad.60 But it had the opposite effect: the trial in February 1966 and their respective sentences to seven and five years in a camp alarmed all the Soviet intellectuals, who suspected a return to Stalinist methods. Twenty-five of them signed an appeal to the Twenty-Third Party Congress opposing the threat of reStalinization and in the years that followed repeatedly protested against human rights violations, one such act of defiance being the publication of a White Book on the trial.61 The human rights movement was born, with outrage and protest abroad.62 Although Brezhnev was not the driving force behind this process, it earned him the reputation of a re-Stalinizer, an image he strongly rejected but never shook off. We do not know whether he approved the show trial because he thought he had to make concessions to the CC’s hardliners or whether he completely underestimated the reaction abroad and believed the masses in the Soviet Union would largely support the charges. In December 1962, he had accompanied Khrushchev to an exhibition at the Moscow Manege; faced with abstract paintings, Khrushchev flew into one of his rages and cursed the attendant artists.63 Perhaps Brezhnev thought he could show himself to be different to Khrushchev by refraining from attacking the writers and having the Writers’ Union soberly read out the charges instead. The more likely explanation, however, is that at this point in time he had neither the power to stop Semichastnyy and the hardliners nor the experience to predict the consequences of such a trial at home and abroad. In his speech to the Twenty-Third Party Congress in 1966, just a month after the trial, he said,64 ‘Unfortunately there are also such artisans in art who, instead of helping the people, use their profession to tarnish our society and slander our heroic people. Of course, these are just a few individuals.’65

252

Brezhnev

However, Brezhnev did not change the KGB’s fundamental approach as established by Khrushchev. Unlike under Stalin, the purpose of the secret police was not to eliminate enemies of the people, but to ensure prevention and education; arrests were a last resort. After Stalin’s death, under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev the KGB attempted to replace its image as a butcher with that of the caring teacher.66 In a threephase process, having identified people who had ‘strayed’ from the path of righteousness, the KGB first recruited individuals the dissidents trusted, whose job was to influence them. If such persuasion was to no avail, the dissidents would be interviewed by the state prosecutor or subjected to targeted smear campaigns in the press. It was only when both approaches failed that they would be treated like a criminal, that is, arrested and put on trial, committed to a psychiatric institution, forced to emigrate or banished to the far regions of the Union.67 In 1966, the KGB informed the CC that in 1965, the number of anonymous antiSoviet texts had dropped by more than half. That year, the KGB had registered almost 10,000 such works overall. Khrushchev’s removal had resulted in fewer satirical attacks on individual politicians, but more criticism of the party programme and the decrees of the CC; the thrust was that the party was afraid of free speech, and its dictatorship was based on censorship and imprisonment.68 But, said Semichastnyy, the ‘prophylactic measures’ in the form of workers’ meetings, newspaper articles and informational television broadcasts had reduced the number of anonymous letters.69 The KGB’s report indicates that its educational work was not cynical in its intentions: ‘Analysis of the reasons for the production and distribution of anonymous documents shows that the overwhelming majority of authors strayed onto the criminal path due to their political immaturity and their lack of understanding of events.’70 But after the disaster of the Sinyavskiy–Daniel’ trial and the resulting new forms of protest, Andropov adapted the KGB’s work to the methods of the petitioners. In July 1967, he told graduates of the KGB academy that these individuals had established the practice of operating within the law while pursuing anti-Soviet goals.71 In order to counter the signatories’ new methods, in July 1967 he set up, with Brezhnev’s blessing, the KGB’s Fifth Administration with six departments for fighting cultural, nationalist and religious dissent, student agitators and anonymous producers of anti-Soviet pamphlets among the wider population.72 They thereby created a very fine-structured diagnostic apparatus staffed with many agents who obtained information on almost all dissenting individuals and all forms of criticism throughout the country and thus kept the Politburo up to date with the situation. The International Year of Human Rights Despite the new apparatus and the desire to avoid another debacle like the Sinyavskiy– Daniel’ trial, the Politburo clearly made another error of judgement when, at Gromyko’s suggestion, it propagated the ‘International Year of Human Rights’ declared by the UN. The initiative had been launched by a number of African and Asian states and was supported by the socialist countries, foremost by the Soviet Union, as an opportunity to attack the colonial policy and racism of the capitalist world.73 Socialist human rights were not mere whitewash, but in Brezhnev’s understanding a genuine

‘Developed Socialism’

253

aim of his own politics, as he had already announced at the Twenty-Third Party Congress of 1966. In his definition, human rights meant democracy within the party, open discussion of laws, the right to work, housing and a certain level of prosperity.74 He would later enshrine freedom of opinion, assembly and the press in the constitution of 1977, but declared that these freedoms ended where they ran contrary to social order and the interests of the Soviet people.75 However, when on 8 January 1968 the CC accommodated Gromyko’s proposal to stage the Year of Human Rights with a series of conferences, public meetings, talks and newspaper articles,76 clearly no one had reckoned with the Soviet civil rights activists Pavel Litvinov, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pëtr Yakir and others making this motto their own. The activists marked the ‘Year of Human Rights in the Soviet Union’ with their own magazine, the Chronicle of Current Events, focusing on conditions in the courts, prisons and camps.77 It would appear the Politburo completely underestimated the danger of dissidents at home and abroad and the foreign media using ‘human rights’ to put the Soviet Union under pressure. In January 1968, in the ‘Trial of the Four’, a Moscow court sentenced the authors of the White Book on the Sinyavskiy–Daniel’ trial to one to seven years in a camp for anti-Soviet agitation. On 26 January, Andropov reported to the CC that the Western press campaign had rekindled the efforts of a group of thirty to forty who, led by Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz, had called for people to oppose the sentence imposed on the four. To combat the anti-Soviet campaign in the West and the ‘harmful activity of anti-social elements’ at home, Andropov suggested stopping further publications on the subject of human rights. Instead, articles on civil duties and patriotism should be distributed and the ‘delinquents’ Yakir, Litvinov and Bogoraz should receive further warnings. If that didn’t work, he requested authorization to expel them from Moscow.78 But the plan to silence the protesters without causing a stir did not work. The KGB could silence people on the domestic front, but not Radio Liberty. The broadcaster used the appeal to oppose the persecution of the dissidents voiced by Pëtr Yakir, Il’ya Gabay and Yuliy Kim in early 1968 to speak of an uprising by the ‘entire Soviet intelligentsia’.79 The situation came to a head on 25 August, when seven people protested on Red Square for a free Czechoslovakia and a total of eleven were arrested.80 Soviet support for the ‘Year of Human Rights’ threatened to become a political boomerang. The KGB decided that the time for prevention and warnings was over for six of the people they arrested. At the same time, Andropov was determined that the proceedings should not become another show trial like that of Sinyavskiy and Daniel’ in 1966. He suggested to the Politburo that the production of illegal writings (samizdat), their smuggling and publication abroad (tamizdat) should not be made public, to avoid giving the trial a ‘political flavour’.81 He also recommended that Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov only be banished to a remote region and not sent to a camp.82 No ado about nothing The top priority for Andropov and Brezhnev was clearly to avoid harming the prestige of the Soviet Union. Whenever they silenced critical voices, they were determined to

254

Brezhnev

attract as little attention as possible, and indeed to intervene at the earliest opportunity, so that such criticism was not even registered. For instance, Andropov attempted to prevent the very appearance of Roy Medvedev’s critical study of Stalin, Let History Judge. In 1969, he proposed inviting Medvedev to a discussion with the CC propaganda department and offering him the opportunity to write a book on the age of Stalinism under the party’s control.83 Brezhnev’s assistant Golikov too advised his boss that the best way to deal with troublemakers was to silence them: ‘Solzhenitsyn is dead to us – he does not exist as a public issue.’84 The party, he said, had often banked on the principle that ‘silence is golden’ and had only ever won its battles.85 Solzhenitsyn, he insisted, had to be removed from Moscow and the world would soon forget him.86 In 1972, Brezhnev’s foreign policy advisor Andrey Aleksandrov-Agentov told him the controversy surrounding Solzhenitsyn had died down and hence they had a golden opportunity to exile him quietly.87 If KGB man Vyacheslav Kevorkov is to be believed, in January 1974 the question of what to do with the prominent dissident unleashed a secret power struggle within the Politburo. He claims Andropov told him Podgorny had pointed to public executions in China and Kosygin had suggested banishing him to the coldest of the polar regions. But Brezhnev and Andropov favoured the moderate approach of expatriation and exile, even if their motivation was not so much the dissident’s well-being as preserving their prestige abroad. Hence Andropov used his go-betweens to arrange with Egon Bahr for Solzhenitsyn to leave for West Germany in 1974.88 Brezhnev and Andropov were unanimous: the most effective and least controversial method was annulment of citizenship. As early as 15 April 1968, they had advocated this approach in dealing with the civil rights activists Il’ya Gabay and Anatoliy Marchenko.89 But it seems the opportunity to deport them did not materialize, or no host country could be found – and so they continued to plague Andropov. Thus either secret negotiations had to take place with other states for them to take in the dissidents, which was a delicate issue and a lot of work, or the Politburo could take the opportunity to rid themselves of personae non gratae when they were abroad, as they did with Vladimir Maksimov in 1975 and Lev Kopelev in 1981.90 The interventions were not just silent, but also targeted and precise. According to biographer Mlechin, Brezhnev personally arranged for the release of Zhores Medvedev, committed to a psychiatric clinic in 1970. His aide Bovin brought the ‘mistake’ to his attention. Brezhnev asked Andropov if it was his doing; Andropov denied it and claimed the local authorities had been ‘overzealous’.91 AleksandrovAgentov also noted in a memo to Brezhnev that bulldozing an unapproved outdoor exhibition of abstract art in Moscow’s Cherëmushki district was an act of ‘stupidity and dilettantism’. The move had caused an unnecessary fuss and brought the ‘abstractionists’ the international attention they had been seeking. Had the artists been allocated an exhibition room, accompanied the show with a few articles on ‘pointless’ works of art and given the public an opportunity to form their own impression, the matter would have taken care of itself. By deploying militsioners, bulldozers and fire engines, the Moscow party leadership had set not only the ‘bourgeois’ press but also the Western communist parties against the USSR.92 Even if these are just two isolated cases, they amply demonstrate that the supreme directive

‘Developed Socialism’

255

was to avoid controversy and attention at all costs in order to preserve the Soviet Union’s reputation abroad. Andropov and Brezhnev appear to have considered the foreign policy dimension to the battle with the dissidents to be of greater importance than the threat they posed on the domestic front. From a foreign policy perspective, human rights and freedom of the press seemed to be mere instruments and part of a strategy to discredit the Soviet Union. Especially because the KGB insisted on its new image, relied more on prevention than repression and employed what it thought were measures tailored to individual cases, the secret police and the party were convinced that the protests in the West were essentially an overreaction and served solely as anti-Soviet propaganda. When Andrey Sakharov protested against the involuntary commitment of the civil rights activists Vladimir Borisov and Viktor Faynberg to psychiatric hospitals in 1972, the KGB chairman did launch an investigation, but came to the conclusion that they had both been dealt with appropriately.93 The KGB declared the campaign in the West to be a purely anti-Soviet act.94 The KGB analysed the tactics of Radio Liberty and Voice of America almost with admiration: to convince the listeners of their objectivity, the broadcasters also spread negative news about the West and presented plenty of statistics to give the impression that nothing was hidden.95 On the basis of such reports, Andropov told the CC plenum that Radio Liberty claimed their station was able to train the people to the point where they could conquer the Kremlin. Brezhnev remarked, albeit not without irony, that this was ‘best party practice’.96 The KGB deemed the emergence of the various human rights organizations to be nothing more than a ‘tool of the West’: in Andropov’s eyes, the sole purpose of 1969’s ‘Movement for Democratization’, as he called the Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights, 1970’s Human Rights Defence Committee, actually simply known as the Human Rights Committee, and the founding of a Russian sector of Amnesty International in 1973 was to damage the USSR’s global image. His response to disparagement of the Soviet Union abroad was to discredit its participants at home.97 The case of Sakharov While Brezhnev’s attitude towards the dissidents is hard to establish, the case of Sakharov provides useful insights. Brezhnev’s son-in-law Churbanov relates that Brezhnev couldn’t understand the behaviour of the recalcitrant atomic physicist, and was most annoyed by it. He nevertheless considered him a great scholar and a genuine academic, and for a long time he resisted Suslov’s insistence he be expelled from the Academy of Sciences.98 Sakharov himself also reports that Brezhnev clearly felt a peculiar connection to him. He says that in 1965, Brezhnev sent the secretary of the oblast committee to tell him it was high time he joined the party. He later discovered Brezhnev had told his messenger, ‘Sakharov is tormented by doubts and internal unrest. We must understand that and help him wherever possible.’99 Nevertheless, while Khrushchev had only argued with Sakharov, under Brezhnev the KGB began to keep a file on him in response to his actions in the lead-up to the Twenty-Third Party Congress in 1966: he had signed the letter in which twenty-five

256

Brezhnev

intellectuals and scientists called on the Party Presidium to refrain from rehabilitating Stalin.100 The KGB thus turned what had previously been an irritation for Khrushchev into a political issue; between 1970 and 1973, the Politburo had to discuss Sakharov almost every month.101 Under Khrushchev he had steadfastly opposed nuclear weapons, advocated a moratorium on nuclear testing and supported various individuals; he now signed a petition protesting the introduction of Paragraph 190-1 of the penal code, which saw harsher punishments for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. On 5 December 1966, he then participated in a silent protest at the Pushkin monument demanding adherence to the constitution.102 In line with their image of man, in Brezhnev’s and Andropov’s eyes that did not make Sakharov a traitor but a wayward fellow who had to be taken by the hand and guided back to the correct path.103 A profile Andropov had compiled in January 1971 described the physicist as a man of principle, brave in his actions to defend his principles, lives in his thoughts and theories and can think about problems even when he is in the least suitable places to do so. […] Is not happy about everything in our society, categorically rejects every manifestation of a cult. Responds sensitively to any news of ‘violation of human rights’ in the USSR. […] On the whole, Sakharov recognizes the advantages of the socialist system over capitalism, but understands many aspects of real life in Soviet society incorrectly.104

Podgorny also felt, ‘As far as Sakharov is concerned, I am of the opinion that we must fight for this person. He’s a different kind of person. He’s not Solzhenitsyn. […] He’s the creator of the hydrogen bomb.’105 Since the KGB had come to the conclusion that Sakharov was in principle for the Soviet system and only had to have the current situation explained to him, and since Andropov described him as a ‘golden mind’ who could not be simply given up to the West,106 the party and the KGB undertook various efforts to make him repent. The party’s efforts to keep Sakharov were driven both by Andropov’s assessments – even though he is widely held to have been his nemesis107 – and Brezhnev’s clear fondness for the physicist’s genius. It was Andropov who insisted with increasing vehemence between 1968 and 1973 that a member of the leadership, preferably Brezhnev himself, should meet with Sakharov and attempt to convert him. Indeed, Sakharov addressed most of his reports directly to Brezhnev, whom he knew well from his time as secretary of armament. He repeatedly requested meetings with him.108 When Brezhnev did not reply, he sent his letters to the Western press, albeit often only several months later.109 Sakharov hoped that there would be a ‘real process of transformation in the opinions and practical actions’ of even the highest leadership circles.110 Brezhnev remained silent, however, and Andropov chose a combination of warnings and punishments, with Brezhnev’s blessing. When in 1967 Sakharov defended the accused in the ‘Trial of the Four’ with an appeal addressed to ‘dear Leonid Il’ich’,111 he lost his post as the head of a department at the secret nuclear physics centre in Obninsk.112 Having not received a reply, he rang Andropov via the authority’s internal telephone network to request the release of Yuliy Daniel’, imprisoned in Mordovia. Andropov promised to

‘Developed Socialism’

257

pursue the matter.113 Shortly thereafter, Sakharov succeeded in phoning Brezhnev, informing him of the looming environmental disaster in Lake Baikal: ‘Brezhnev was very amiable and benevolent, complained about the extreme strain he was under and said that Kosygin would take care of the Baikal problem, I should go to him.’114 Sakharov was thus under the impression that the Politburo was not completely indisposed to his concerns. In January 1968, he began to write an article about the role of the intelligentsia in the modern world, eventually entitled ‘Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’. The piece was addressed to Brezhnev, and initially sent only to him.115 Although it has been repeatedly stressed that Sakharov’s ‘manifesto’ finally moved him into the category of ‘dissident’ and caused the party to give up on him,116 that was not the case. On the contrary, Brezhnev and Andropov now intensified their efforts to influence him via go-betweens.117 When this proved to no avail, Andropov called for the Politburo to receive Sakharov in order to prevent ‘anti-Soviet and anti-societal elements misusing the name of the academician Sakharov for their ends’.118 But first the party sent another go-between, Efim Slavskiy, the minister for the nuclear industry, to suggest Sakharov distance himself from his authorship of the manifesto, which had now appeared in the Western press. But Sakharov refused. He thus lost his position in the nuclear city of Obninsk, but remained at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences.119 Still the party and the KGB didn’t give up: in 1970, Brezhnev sent his confidant Trapeznikov, the chairman of the CC economics department, followed by the president of the Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, to persuade him to leave politics to the party.120 As instructed, they agreed with Sakharov that it was correct and important to democratize the country, but asked him to see that now was not the time, since the standard of living had to be raised before the people were ready for it.121 But Sakharov would not be persuaded by the party’s concessions. Since he no longer had his own internal telephone network, he sought access to the authorities elsewhere. But when he tried to ring Brezhnev, he only ever got through to his secretary.122 Ultimately, he formed the Human Rights Committee; Andropov was most alarmed and vehemently insisted on talks ‘on the highest level’ in November and December 1970:123 Sakharov thinks that the initiative to enlist him for activities benefiting the state has to come ‘from above’. At the same time, he expresses doubts and says ‘they have long since turned away from him’, pointing to the fact that he allegedly doesn’t receive a reply from the government departments he has approached with various letters.124

Andropov’s plan to arrange a meeting with Sakharov was reinforced by informers’ reports that he was disgruntled or even annoyed that he hadn’t received replies from the party leaders he had written to, particularly Brezhnev.125 When Sakharov told his friends he would soon have an audience with Brezhnev, Andropov turned to Brezhnev personally, in January 1971: ‘In this connection I ask you, Leonid Il’ich, to examine whether a discussion with him can be arranged in the CC of the CPSU in the near future.’126 When friends of Sakharov reported that it was still possible to persuade the

258

Brezhnev

dissident to repent and that there was a danger his ‘memo’ to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress might be published abroad, Andropov repeated his urgent request to Brezhnev in February 1971.127 Brezhnev’s staff hoped such a meeting would reduce tensions and help them find a modus vivendi. Anatoliy Kovalëv, one of Brezhnev’s diplomats, reports that Brezhnev had often spoken about Sakharov in the company of his staff at the Zavidovo hunting lodge: ‘It was evident that dealing with the subject pained him. Such a mind as Sakharov, and he opposes the prevailing social order in our country? Why?’128 He says Brezhnev repeatedly told them he had wanted to speak with Sakharov but had kept putting it off: ‘We gained the impression Brezhnev was simply scared to speak with Sakharov directly.’129 Bovin claims Brezhnev was not averse to talking to him, but Suslov had talked him out of meeting the renegade.130 Finally, on 26 February 1971 the Politburo decided Suslov and CC Secretary Pëtr Demichev should receive him.131 But this plan failed to materialize too, since Suslov refused to take part in such talks.132 In October 1971, the KGB told Suslov that Sakharov still hoped for talks with one of the CC secretaries.133 To Andropov’s frustration, Brezhnev withdrew and the Politburo eventually settled on influencing Sakharov via third parties.134 In his memoirs, Filipp Bobkov, who as head of the Fifth Department produced several dossiers on Sakharov, writes (presumably not entirely without the intention of absolving himself): The people who were in power knocked back this great scientist and didn’t want to listen to him, didn’t want to argue with him on eye level and reach a compromise. But the most important thing is that no one wanted to think about the nature of his views and convictions. Some declined, saying ‘He is not our man’, while others were frightened, and then there were others who were not allowed to enter into a dialogue with him.135

Warnings, defamation, banishment Andropov and Brezhnev did not change their assessment of Sakharov until the summer of 1973, when he began to turn to the West and refer to himself as an ‘opponent of the Soviet system’, initially in an interview.136 He was now no longer a genius who had gone astray – he was fouling his own nest and gradually sliding towards the ‘enemy’ camp. But even in this situation, Brezhnev’s notebooks contain two almost identical entries, of 8 and 12 September: ‘Conversation with A.N. Kosygin about Sakharov – receive him or not’.137 And once again, he could not bring himself to meet with him. Eventually, he and the Politburo approved Andropov’s proposal to launch ‘phase two’. First of all, the state prosecution service summoned Sakharov for a ‘prophylactic discussion’; the Politburo then initiated a targeted smear campaign in the press.138 But the damage it did outweighed the intended benefit: when the president of the US National Academy of Sciences, Philip Handler, intervened and indirectly threatened to break off scientific exchange with the Soviet Union, the party immediately stopped the articles.139 In the context of the Cold War, the issue of how to deal with Sakharov became a question of settling for the lesser evil: should they let him do as he pleased and accept the damage he did to their image, or put a stop to him and thereby harm the Soviet

‘Developed Socialism’

259

Union’s reputation in the world community?140 These considerations and the debacle of the smear campaign led to Brezhnev’s first disagreement with Andropov in 1975. Together with CC Secretary Dmitriy Ustinov and General State Prosecutor Roman Rudenko, Andropov had proposed Sakharov be banished to Sverdlovsk in the Urals (today known under its old name of Yekaterinburg), a city inaccessible to foreigners, where he would no longer have contact with overseas diplomats and journalists. Brezhnev and the Politburo rejected the proposal.141 Banishment would have done too much damage; Sakharov had just received the Nobel Peace Prize, Brezhnev had just signed the Helsinki Accords, which contained a commitment to uphold human rights, and the SALT II negations were in full swing.142 The Politburo settled on another smear campaign. It was not until some five years later that the suggestion to banish Sakharov to the closed city of Gorki met with majority approval in the Politburo. In the meantime, it unanimously deemed Sakharov’s behaviour to be ‘criminal’ and ‘undignified’.143 By 1980, the Cold War had reached a new boiling point with NATO’s Double Track Decision, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the postponed ratification of the SALT II agreement. The Politburo was no longer concerned about its prestige in the West.144 The crucial factor leading to Sakharov’s banishment was his speaking out against the war in Afghanistan and supporting the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, thereby daring to intervene in Soviet foreign policy.145 Brezhnev was certain that if the dissident were to have contact with the army of journalists arriving for the Olympics, it would be a public relations disaster for the Soviet Union.146 Brezhnev and the Politburo were adamant: The Academy member Sakharov, a convinced opponent of socialist order, has undertaken subversive activities against the state for over ten years. As a convinced and open enemy of socialism, he encourages the aggressive circles of the capitalist countries to interfere with the internal affairs of the socialist countries, calls for military confrontation with the Soviet Union and constantly inspires breaks with the politics of the Soviet state, which seeks de-escalation of the international situation and peaceful coexistence.147

Nevertheless, Brezhnev clearly didn’t find it easy to agree with the decision. Although the KGB had already arrested Sakharov on the morning of 22 January 1980 and flown him and his wife to Gorki the same evening, Brezhnev clearly still couldn’t bring himself to sign the order sealing his banishment.148 He still seemed to be wavering on 23 January; he wrote in his notebook: Spoke on the phone with Chernenko – about Sakharov. Spoke with Suslov M.A., also about Sakharov, what to do. Tasked Zagladin and Zhukov [his aides] with meeting Jacques Chaban-Delmas [Pompidou’s advisor] [to explain what] Sakharov has done. Spoke with Andropov about Sakharov.149

That Brezhnev was not happy with his decision is also indicated by the memoirs of Kunayev, head of the party in Kazakhstan. Kunayev claims to have openly expressed

260

Brezhnev

his outrage at this ‘unbelievable stupidity’ to Kosygin at a reception. Kosygin, he relates, told him to speak to the general secretary. Brezhnev remained silent for a long time, and avoided eye contact when replying, ‘But what are we supposed to do then? Andropov says they’re stirring this up. That they’re doing damage. Inciting the people.’150 We have no confirmation he said that, but it would nevertheless be a fair reflection of Brezhnev’s indecisive, probably ambivalent attitude towards the dissidents. Since he was uncomfortable with the subject, he left it for Andropov to deal with. Since it was more his style to encourage his comrades and give them fatherly advice, the coercive measures clearly caused him great discomfort. Force was not part of his selfpresentation as the great carer. At the same time, he valued Andropov as a cool head whose loyalty he did not want to risk losing by directly disagreeing or interfering in his department. Ultimately, the USSR’s standing abroad was important to him. He probably found it unbearable that a man who had been lauded so many times as a hero of labour should be helping the ‘imperialist enemy’ to denigrate the Soviet Union. The degree to which he wrestled with himself is also apparent from the conversations he continued to have even though Sakharov was already in Gorki. Fear of harming the Union’s reputation abroad was qualified, however, by moderate remarks by Western politicians. Whether this was intended or merely a matter of diplomacy is another question, but on 23 January the chairman of the French National Assembly, Chaban-Delmas, told Brezhnev’s emissary Zagladin that he would unfortunately have to leave following Sakharov’s banishment from Moscow, since the Western media would not accept any other response. But, he added, he had already completed all his work meetings and hence would only be missing the tourist activities. According to Zagladin, when he explained why Sakharov had been exiled, Chaban-Delmas was quite understanding: it sounded sensible and humane.151 A year earlier, US Democrat senator Joe Biden had revealed to Zagladin that the Democrats were less concerned about the fates of individual dissidents than about demonstrating to their voters that they stood up for human rights. In Zagladin’s interpretation, ‘In other words, my interlocutors admitted that it’s all a big show, that they have no interest at all in the fate of the majority of the so-called dissidents.’152 Such comments by Western politicians reinforced Brezhnev’s assumption that ‘human rights’ were not a moral issue but a smear campaign against the Soviet Union. It is unfair, then, to label Brezhnev a re-Stalinizer. He presumably saw himself and the Soviet population as Stalin’s victims and unequivocally stated on a number of occasions that no one could wish to return to such times. That critics of Stalin were nevertheless silenced and articles continued to be published marking his birthday was due to his desire for compromise. He was determined to find the middle ground, to satisfy and pacify everyone, and hence also had to please the hardliners – on whom he was dependent. He shirked dealing with the dissidents because he clearly did not feel up to challenging an intellect such as Sakharov’s. His proven method of persuasion and fatherly reprimands failed here. Andropov’s plan for him to meet with Sakharov was obviously too much for him, since there was no common ground on which he could build a dialogue. Hence he was glad when Andropov solved the problem for him.

‘Developed Socialism’

261

‘We are heroes’: the cult of the Second World War As much as the dissidents his policies created became the bane of his reign and ultimately the nails in the Soviet Union’s coffin, Brezhnev had great success in developing the cult of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, laying new foundations for the Soviet Union in the process. In this way, he also implicitly demonstrated that he was not interested in re-Stalinization, since it would have been all too easy to revive the cult of the war with the cult of Stalin. But he did not do this; just like his predecessor Khrushchev, he separated Stalin from the Second World War and placed the focus on the common people, their losses and heroic deeds. One of the ways Khrushchev had knocked Stalin off his pedestal was by devoting the larger part of his ‘secret speech’ of 1956 to the poor decisions made by the ‘generalissimus’; hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been sent to their certain deaths because he had refused to listen to the advice of the actual generals. In 1961, Khrushchev had spoken for the first time of twenty million war dead, in contrast to the seven million admitted by Stalin.153 Under Brezhnev, these twenty million – today we know it was twenty-five to thirty million – became a number and a symbol representing the Soviet narrative from invasion to victory.154 In essence, Brezhnev turned Khrushchev’s ‘anti-Stalin’ cult on its head: instead of indicting the ‘leader’ for his mistakes, he shifted the focus to the achievements of the common soldiers, thereby turning the master narrative from the negative to the positive. It was no longer about self-critical inquiry into how the catastrophic German invasion of June 1941 was allowed to happen, but creating a community by paying homage to and honouring its members.155 Reviving the cult of the war – or, more precisely, recreating it, since it did not involve veneration of Stalin – was a major coup. The people gratefully embraced the opportunity for a new identity; it became self-perpetuating and lives on to this day in many post-Soviet societies, especially in Russia. To a degree, it replaced the cult of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Not only was Revolution so long ago that only very few still remembered it, but there were no longer broad masses of people who identified with it.156 Commemorating the heroes and victims of the war was thus a triumph for Brezhnev and his advisors. In so doing, they served several clienteles: first and foremost, all the common soldiers and veterans’ organizations who were still fighting for recognition and welfare benefits during the 1960s.157 In December 1964, the Supreme Soviet increased pensions for the war wounded and war widows; the Party Presidium followed this up with further funding in the spring of 1965.158 As a dossier on the mood among invalids showed, they were unequivocally grateful.159 Brezhnev thus won over the army leadership and the military-industrial complex. But commemorating the war was also a gift to himself, and perhaps an act of wish fulfilment. Unlike the traumatized Khrushchev, who could not bear to watch war films, Brezhnev enjoyed them; indeed, they regularly moved him to tears.160 All of his contemporaries report how he was sentimental and, as we know, the war with all its horrors was a life-changing experience for him. With the cult of the Great Patriotic War, he also laid the foundation for his own cult of personality and the glorification of his modest war record, beginning in 1973. Whether he and his Dnepropetrovsk

262

Brezhnev

entourage planned this back in 1965 must remain a matter of conjecture.161 Presumably at this point, however, he still saw himself as one of millions of soldiers who had suffered and held out. He thus erected a monument to his entire generation and gave them the opportunity to write their own personal histories into the heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War.162 In 1965, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the victory, the new government declared 9 May, already a day of celebration, a public holiday.163 The day before, a new site for the Central Armed Forces Museum, which now dedicated most of its exhibition to the Second World War, was opened with great ceremony.164 On 8 May 1967, together with Nikolay Egorychev, still the head of the Moscow party, Brezhnev inaugurated the grave of the Unknown Soldier and the surrounding memorials to the Hero Cities. The latter were each represented by a block of red marble on the Kremlin Wall in Alexander Gardens. After Egorychev gave an extremely emotional speech, Brezhnev took the torch handed to him and lit the eternal fire on the Necropolis.165 It was presumably his envy of Egorychev and his self-presentation as the first ‘high priest’ of the war cult that led him to drive him out of his post just two months later. Brezhnev had entrusted none other than his good friend and wartime comrade from Dnepropetrovsk, Grushevoy, with shaping the new commemoration. He had already had him installed in the Military Council and political leadership of the Moscow Military District in 1965, positions he retained until his death in 1982. Through Grushevoy, Brezhnev not only had influence over the memory cult in Moscow, but also controlled the country’s most important military district.166 The monumental memorial site in Alexander Gardens was a great success: to this day, newlyweds have their photographs taken there and lay flowers, and the changing of the guard is just as much a spectacle for tourists as the equivalent manoeuvres at royal palaces abroad. In October 1967, Brezhnev inaugurated the eighty-five-metre statue The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, which Khrushchev had commissioned in 1959. Arms outstretched and brandishing a sword, the female figure calls on the people to defend their homeland and serves as a reminder of the Battle of Stalingrad. In his speech in Volgograd, Brezhnev connected the glory of the heroes with the duty of the generations that followed, the defeat of fascism with the wise leadership of the party, and yesterday’s fighting with today’s peace and prosperity. He thereby made the bloody war the necessary precondition for his welfare policy: If it hadn’t been for these victims and this victory, then we would not have the future into which our people stepped after defeating fascism. […] The heroic deeds of the fallen place enormous responsibility on us. It is our sacred duty to see through the cause for which they gave their lives.167

The ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ diorama, which he approved in 1966, and the Museum of the Defence of the City did not open until June 1982 and 1985, respectively.168 Such dioramas became a symbol of his rule. From 1965 onwards, they sprang up in all the country’s war museums as painstakingly designed scenes depicting the battles as realistically as possible, with lighting and sound effects. While the background was painted, figures and props in the fore- and middle ground brought the scenes to life.169

‘Developed Socialism’

263

On 8 May 1965, the Supreme Soviet awarded seven cities the title of ‘Hero City’ or confirmed their existing titles: Leningrad, Kiev, Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), Sevastopol, Odessa, Moscow and Brest. By declaring these cities sacred places, Brezhnev redrew the map of the country. He enjoyed paying his respects to them personally, taking the opportunity to bathe in the adulation of the masses. Hero City status not only gave their inhabitants the right to feel special; it also obliged them to show patriotic pride and dignified behaviour that they could demonstrate by fulfilling (or exceeding) the plan, for instance.170 In 1973, Brezhnev conferred this status on Kerch and Novorossiysk, where he had been deployed himself. Novorossiysk received the title on 14 September to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the relief of the city. Brezhnev delayed visiting, however. In May 1974, his assistant Golikov insisted now was the best time to travel, since the people were eagerly awaiting him. If he left on 17 May, he could hold the meeting on the eighteenth, attend the reception and accept his citizen of honour’s certificate and riband on the nineteenth, ahead of the festive meeting on the twentieth.171 Minsk followed in 1974, joined in 1976 by the small city of Tula, which Brezhnev also paid a visit.172 But the older and sicker he became, the more arduous he found such travels. On Victory Day in 1981, he opened his last monument to the Second World War, the Motherland in Kiev.173 When the almost grotesquely exaggerated monument to the ‘Little Land’ was inaugurated in September 1982, two months before his death, he only had photographs sent. They showed a gigantic concrete keel pointing to the sky, symbolizing the bow of a warship and housing a museum.174 But the success of the cult of the war had one drawback: it also functioned without the Communist Party. While Brezhnev stressed that the people had won thanks to the good leadership of the party, for many this was simply an empty cliché or was increasingly questioned. And with the meagre resources and long queues that characterized the latter days of the Soviet Union, the privileges for the veterans were a source of envy and resentment to the younger generations. The respect the party demanded for the generations that had fought in the war was given grudgingly by the younger members of society, who found it increasingly difficult to show shame and indebtedness to the sacrifices of their predecessors. Nor was it a suitable basis on which to build a future.175 That was the third problem with the cult: it was backwardlooking and offered no vision for tomorrow.

The BAM – the last of the Mohicans The Baikal–Amur Mainline (BAM) was supposed to provide a new vision for the country.176 Begun in 1974, exactly twenty years after the launch of the Virgin Lands project, it was intended to capture the spirit of this last great all-Union campaign, which of course was to be remembered much more for Brezhnev’s own glorious time in Kazakhstan than for its initiator, Khrushchev. But the BAM was also meant to revive the enthusiasm of the large-scale construction sites of the 1930s and manifest the socialist utopia. Its aim was to resuscitate the builder of socialism who subjugated

264

Brezhnev

nature and ventured into inhospitable regions, and to demonstrate the progress and pioneering spirit of socialism to Soviet youth. However, it is actually astounding that Brezhnev resorted to this measure, having often stated that the Soviet Union had outgrown the age of campaigns, by which he was unequivocally referring to the chaos of Khrushchev’s planning. Also, he had emphatically rung in the age of the car; a railway line, for freight at that, was hardly part of this image. Nevertheless, railways stood for the great utopias the Bolsheviks had turned into reality: the Turkestan–Siberian mainline, Turksib for short, crossing the steppe, and the Metro, the underground, were both large-scale projects of the first five-year plan (1928–1932).177 Ultimately, exploitation of Siberia’s energy resources in the 1970s made the leadership painfully aware of the lack of infrastructure. Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, head of Gosplan Baybakov would assert that the BAM had been urgently required, even if the development of the companies whose products it was supposed to transport was badly delayed.178 The construction site was thus intended to revive collective enthusiasm for building the country while serving an economic purpose.179 When the project began, the region had only one line, the Trans-Siberian Railway, whose eastern section ran dangerously close to the border with hostile China. Plans for the BAM from Tayshet to Komsomolsk-on-Amur via the northern shore of Lake Baikal had originally been drawn up in 1888. From 1932 onwards, forced labourers had worked on the first sections of the line; they became operational in 1945 and 1958. Thereafter, work had stopped. In 1967, the government ordered that planning was to be recommenced, and in April 1974 the party declared the emerging line an ‘All-Union Shock Worker Komsomol Construction Site’. At the seventeenth Komsomol Congress of 23 April 1974, Brezhnev appealed to the Soviet youth, ‘you will carry the baton of [the construction site of] Komsomolsk-on-Amur, of Magnitka and the Turksib, of DneproGES and the Virgin Lands campaign, of [the] Bratsk [dam] and KamAZ180 to new, as yet unaccessed stretches of Siberia.’181 All media organs, writers and artists were obliged to report on the BAM and celebrate it in propaganda, poems and pop music. Every work collective – including the fishing trawlers on the Atlantic – had to do their bit for the BAM.182 The propaganda declared: The BAM is enormous and sublime in the blood relations connecting all generations of Soviet people who have walked the glorious path from storming the Winter Palace to storming the heights of the cosmos. If you think about it, you cannot but help ask yourself: isn’t the character of the New Man, our contemporary, being forged here? And aren’t we seeing in its great completeness that which we call the historical community of people?183

But as Karl Marx observed, history only repeats itself as a farce. The BAM campaign seemed like a cheap copy of what had gone before. It heralded a romanticism of adventure hardly anyone still believed in, even though over half a million people, twothirds of them Komsomol members, went to work on the BAM between 1974 and 1984.184 Jokes soon did the rounds: the initials stood for ‘Brezhnev Abmanyvayet Molodezh’ – ‘Brezhnev Deceives the Youth’. Or: ‘What noise does it make when you hit

‘Developed Socialism’

265

Brezhnev on the head? – BAM!’185 A compounding factor was that in the later years of the twentieth century, the railway was no longer an exciting technology. More precisely, it was a backward step after Khrushchev had thrilled people with Sputnik and Gagarin’s flight into space. The utopia was the cosmos, not the Siberian taiga. Although the acronym BAM, like the number ‘twenty million’, characterized the second half of the 1970s, the impetus they were intended to give to society did not materialize.186 The idea was that the BAM could serve as a melting pot for the various ethnicities and as a model project fostering the equitable, peaceful coexistence of all Soviet peoples.187 Instead of stabilizing the socialist collective, the society that emerged around it was volatile to say the least. The BAM proved a breeding ground for ‘hooliganism’; alcoholism, theft and corruption flourished and women and nonRussian ethnicities were subjected to hostility and violence.188 Instead of reviving the old myth of the socialist construction site where Soviet man was forged, the BAM became an unruly space with its own laws, an area almost independent from the state. Further, when work began in 1974, the first environmentalist groups formed, serving as precursors of a civil society and protesting against the exploitation and pollution of nature.189 Young people did not head out to the BAM out of enthusiasm, but because they received bonuses for working in the Far East and could thus save up for a car more quickly.190 The workers’ credo was quite prosaic: we’ll build you the BAM, you give us a car for it. We don’t know what Brezhnev thought about the BAM, whether he realized his re-launch of construction enthusiasm had failed, or indeed whether the project was even his idea. In December 1978, he visited the building site, posed with the members of the Komsomol and seemed to enjoy himself. His notebooks contain only a single entry on the subject. On 2 November 1981, he wrote: ‘Bannikov Nikolay Vasil’yevich [First Party Oblast Secretary of Irkutsk] on completion of the BAM on the oblast’s southern section of the line’.191

Figure 25 Brezhnev and Willy Brandt on a boat trip off Crimea, 1971.

266

8

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War, or How to Play the Western Statesman

Our photograph shows Brezhnev with West German chancellor Willy Brandt on 17 September 1971 on a motor yacht off Crimea, where they spent a weekend without protocol. Both of them are wearing sunglasses, are tanned and clearly relaxed. They look as if they have forgotten the world around them and are completely immersed in conversation. Brezhnev is sitting beside Brandt, one arm slung confidently over the back of their bench, his head resting on the other, seemingly trying to read Brandt’s thoughts. Brandt is smiling impishly and obviously enjoying the scenery. Their meeting at the government villa in Oreanda near Yalta in the autumn of 1971 was one of the highlights of Brezhnev’s foreign policy. Not only had he managed to receive a state visit without the foreign minister or head of the government, but he also met Brandt in an unofficial setting as a personal friend. It was the beginning of a friendship between two men that would endure beyond Brandt’s resignation in 1974 until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. At the same time, the photo also says a lot about the way Brezhnev went about foreign policy: like his predecessor Khrushchev, he sought personal contact with leading politicians. He believed in reaching an understanding on the human level, from man to man, something that was only hindered or indeed dashed by bureaucracies, diplomats and sceptics. While in this respect he picked up where Khrushchev had left off, when it came to self-presentation he was the exact opposite. He sought to clearly distance himself from his predecessor, whose behaviour embarrassed him: ‘Khrushchev threatened – with his shoe, with tirades or missiles. We invited the English ambassador to the Bolshoi Theatre and he told us how Khrushchev had said it was no trouble for him to launch five missiles at the White House.’1 Brezhnev wanted to break with this tradition, with its fashion and conduct that was in stark contrast to his Western counterparts and that had ignored and sabotaged the Western comme il faut. When the Bolsheviks had seized power in 1917, they had disdained and banned the prevailing European diplomatic protocol with its dress codes, manners, obligatory modes of discussion, receptions and dinners as Western-bourgeois. In doing so, they overlooked that this protocol was not merely an expression of an aristocratic courtly culture, but also ensured reliability and uniform rules. All diplomacy meant was representatives of two different states seeking understanding. Two different cultures 267

268

Brezhnev

– that is, two different semantic systems and interpretative practices – came together without necessarily knowing what significance to accord to each other’s conduct. Diplomatic protocol thus served as a kind of dictionary or grammar that ascribed to every signal conveyed a set meaning and hence ideally let everyone know what they could expect and prevented misunderstandings. The Bolsheviks threw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, by rejecting the diplomatic etiquette, especially as they did not manage to develop their own code of conduct and departed ever further from the Western norm. The first people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky, had pursued a military style and propaganda speeches, and Stalin’s long-serving foreign minister Molotov boasted he was more of a party soldier than a diplomat. Stalin himself attempted to play the ‘elder statesman’, while Khrushchev seemed to take great delight in sabotaging, undermining and ridiculing Western protocol. Brezhnev decided to put an end to these experiments and to return to the Western procedure by dressing well, expressing himself appropriately and being a reliable interlocutor. He had already demonstrated this approach during his time as president from 1960 to 1964. He was by no means concerned merely with superficiality, good taste or decorum. Rather, he must have been aware – if it wasn’t intuition – that this was the only way to gain the trust of his Western discussion partners. He had to give off signals that would not be interpreted as ‘foreign’, ‘aggressive’ or ‘communist’ and stigmatize him in the eyes of the West as dangerous from the outset. With his gestures, passions and his penchant for sartorial elegance, he said: look, I am like you; like you, I love good suits, dirty jokes, fast cars, playing to the crowd and beautiful women.2 The qualities that set him apart from his comrades in the Politburo thus also helped him sell himself to his Western interlocutors. With his new style or return to the old protocol, Brezhnev pursued two goals, as ambitious as they were simple: (a) cultivate friendships with the West’s most powerful men in order to (b) secure world peace. After Khrushchev had managed to usher in an initial phase of rapprochement and détente in the Cold War from 1955 to 1959, Brezhnev was able to bring about a second phase of cooperation and communication in 1970–1974 before international relations saw a new nadir in 1979 with the NATO Double Track Decision and the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite all analyses, speculation and polemics voiced in the West, Brezhnev saw himself as a man of peace. It should not be forgotten that the general feeling in the Soviet Union, reinforced by its propaganda, was that during the Second World War it had been betrayed by Germany and left in the lurch by the West. Although there was no trace of a victim myth, the general perception was that the ‘fascist’ or ‘imperialist’ West had done so much harm to the Soviet people that there was no doubt as to who were the heroic defenders who had made unimaginable sacrifices. The strength of this sentiment cannot be overestimated.3 For Brezhnev, foreign policy was a highly emotional business. It was his fear of a third world war that motivated his conduct, stress and fear of failure that haunted his negotiations, gave him sleepless nights and led to his addiction to pills.4 He had to build trust, and distrust thwarted his efforts. As much as the modern era tends to see foreign policy as a matter of wits, interests and cold calculation, this was not the case during the Cold War. Emotions played an unusually large role. Intellect was required

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

269

to grasp the competing ideologies and the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, but it was on the emotional level that one trusted one’s counterpart to refrain from using those weapons and genuinely commit to disarmament. In his list of proverbs, Brezhnev had marked David E. Lilienthal’s warning not to depart from common sense: ‘We are a nation that believes in the intellect, but should we lose this faith and replace it with faith in the strength of our weapons, we will go under, regardless of all our nuclear weapons.’5 For Brezhnev, it was not only a question of whether his comrades and the NATO countries would see the sense of not basing security on weapons. It was also a question of whether his nerves would hold up. When he made Aleksandrov-Agentov a foreign policy aide in 1961, he told him, ‘Don’t be fooled, Andrey, by my appearing soft. If necessary, I can dish it out so hard I don’t know what’s happened to the person I’ve stuck it to, but then I myself am ill for three days afterwards.’6 The latter would prove only too true.

Concordia domi … or consensus in the East … Brezhnev did not get off to a great start in foreign policy, for a number of reasons. Initially, the precarious problem of feeding the population demanded his full attention. Then he had to consolidate his power in the Politburo. Ultimately, as general secretary he had no official authority to become actively involved in foreign policy, which was the privilege of Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko, who had held the post under Khrushchev and would remain in it until Gorbachev came to power. Besides Gromyko, Chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin and State President Podgorny were formally authorized to represent the Soviet Union abroad. It was an advantage that ties with the brother states were not treated as international relations but as a community of socialist parties and party leaders. While there was only one foreign ministry, there were several departments within the CC responsible for foreign policy, including the International Department, which took care of matters with the USA, and the First European Department, which focused on France, the Third European Department, for West Germany, and one for working with the socialist brother parties.7 As general secretary of the CPSU, Brezhnev was the first point of contact for the party leaders in the Warsaw Pact states. Relations with these leaders were shaped by two characteristics: firstly, Brezhnev very much had a patron–client relationship with the general secretaries. He treated them like the CC secretaries of the Union’s republics, and occasionally like the oblast or rayon secretaries.8 His scenario of power also came into play in his dealings with the socialist ‘brothers’ abroad: he showed the same fatherly tendencies as he did towards the Soviet party leaders, was interested in their concerns, listened patiently and tried to help wherever he could. He regularly rang the foreign functionaries to keep up to date with what was going on, and visited and received them on revolutionary holidays and anniversaries. They also went hunting together.9 He thus attempted to build trust and expected loyalty in return. The second factor was that Brezhnev also perceived the Warsaw Pact party leaders and heads of state as a ‘rulers’ collective’ and took great care not to snub his brother

270

Brezhnev

comrades but to constantly ensure he could count on them. For their part, these allies sometimes exploited this: they depended on their big brother for many resources, particularly oil and gas.10 They repeatedly threatened, relatively blatantly, that if the USSR didn’t comply with their demands, they wouldn’t be able to guarantee peace and order in their societies.11 Especially after putting down the Prague Spring in 1968 and the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, the Soviet Union felt obliged to provide large-scale supplies of food, energy and funds to keep the respective populations satisfied – for nothing in return. The Polish party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski warned his comrades in Moscow that without economic assistance, Poland would go up in flames.12 According to their own proclamation, the Soviet leadership even reduced Soviet soldiers’ bread rations so they could send more to Poland.13 As he did in the Politburo, Brezhnev tried to avoid giving the party leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries the impression he was above them. The notion that the Soviet general secretary controlled or even suppressed the other leaders has long been disproven.14 Relations between the parties were much more complex: there was a fragile, mutual dependence. Particularly the leaders of the GDR and Poland, Walter Ulbricht and Władysław Gomułka, were much quicker to call for drastic measures than Brezhnev was prepared to, for instance in the case of Prague in 1968. Nevertheless, the head of the Soviet party did have a right of veto of a kind: as long as he did not agree to an invasion, the Warsaw Pact states did not move in either. But by no means did he hold sway over them; rather, he had to secure their loyalty. Thus after deposing Khrushchev, Brezhnev and his fellow plotters did everything they could to prevent the brother states from cooking up intrigues.15 Following initial phone calls, in October 1964 Suslov travelled to Bulgaria and Podgorny visited the GDR and Hungary, while Brezhnev and Kosygin sought out their comrades in Poland, the CSSR and Romania.16 In 1965, Brezhnev and Podgorny also went to Hungary in order to shore up relations with János Kádár, disturbed by his continuing to send fruit and wine to Khrushchev.17 In 1966, Brezhnev once again travelled to Hungary as well as to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.18 In order to win their trust, the comrades from Moscow repeatedly emphasized that their aim was to maintain ‘friendlier’ relations than had previously been the case and unite the socialist camp.19 At the CC plenum in September 1966, Brezhnev declared, ‘We attach great importance to the regular meetings and conversations, the patient work with the representatives of the brother states.’20 In doing so, they were continuing the policies of Khrushchev, who had tried to achieve reconciliation with Tito, the latter never having joined the Warsaw Pact, but they were also seeking compromise with those party leaders for whom Khrushchev’s reforms had gone too far. Both Moscow and the brother states also keenly hoped the meeting of all the delegations in Moscow on 7 November 1964 to celebrate forty-seven years of the October Revolution would allow them to start afresh and find reconciliation with the renegade Chinese.21 However, while Peking hoped Moscow would return to an orthodox course, on the day of the celebrations Soviet Minister of Defence Rodion Malinovskiy told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that now they had got rid of Khrushchev, the Chinese could throw out Mao. The Chinese delegation’s last hope was crushed by Mikoyan, who stated they would not budge an inch from their positions.22 It was

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

271

hardly surprising, then, that Mao responded to an invitation to the Twenty-Third Party Congress in 1966 with an angry rant.23 There would be no reconciliation with China: on the one hand, Peking was not prepared to recognize Moscow’s supremacy, and on the other hand, Brezhnev was personally disgusted by the violent Cultural Revolution that was taking shape in 1966 and reminded him of the worst times under Stalin. Between 1966 and 1969, there were a number of bloody incidents and skirmishes along the border.24 Brezhnev wrote in his notebook: ‘We will have to devise our foreign policy under the portents of long-term differences with China.’25 Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu, who took office in 1965, aligned itself entirely with China, refused to take part in the measures against Prague in 1968 and consequently left the Warsaw Pact the same year.26 While Brezhnev got on well with Tito, Yugoslavia remained outside the Pact, and hence the organization remained a core group of five party leaders Brezhnev made every effort to keep onside, shaping its politics as ‘collective rule’. The actors were, then, the German Walter Ulbricht, whom he did not find very appealing, followed in 1971 by Erich Honecker, the CSSR’s Antonín Novotný, replaced by Gustáv Husák in 1969, the Polish hardliner Władysław Gomułka, succeeded by Brezhnev’s protégé Edward Gierek in 1970,27 and János Kádár of Hungary and Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria, both of whom had been in office longer than Brezhnev and with whom he had a good relationship. Each year, he invited them to Crimea in the summer; individually from 1968 to 1970, and collectively from 1971 onwards. Some of these party leaders often holidayed there too, regularly visiting his dacha.28 Orthodox leaders like Ulbricht, Honecker and Gomułka, or even Ceaușescu, none of whom Brezhnev cared for particularly, came only for a few hours or a day;29 Brezhnev’s photographer reports that Brezhnev greeted Ceaușescu with an embrace, but indicated behind his back that the photos were to be destroyed immediately.30 Those whom he liked, however, sometimes spent several days in Crimea in order to talk with him and recuperate.31 The unofficial ‘Crimea meetings’ established in 1971 were a regular CC-approved foreign policy strategy and offered Brezhnev the opportunity to consult and set the course with the other five party leaders without Gromyko, Kosygin or Podgorny in tow.32 The meetings were attended not just by the leaders who holidayed in Crimea anyway, but also by those who like Honecker preferred to spend their summer breaks on the Baltic or elsewhere.33 Foreign Minister Gromyko could only look on from the sidelines; party discipline demanded that he praised these meetings between the general secretary and the representatives of the brother states as being of ‘decisive importance’ for Soviet foreign policy.34 Cadre issues and collective foreign policy When leadership of the CSSR changed hands in 1967, Brezhnev considered it to be a cadre issue. He was unnerved by the Czechoslovak comrades’ attempt to involve him in their affairs and force him to take a stance, siding with either the old party boss and president Antonín Novotný, who was unpopular and considered stubborn, or the party’s young hope Alexander Dubček, who seemed affable and dynamic. As he confessed to the head of the French Communist Party Waldeck Rochet, ‘nobody

272

Brezhnev

spoke about democratization or liberalization’.35 For Brezhnev, cadre issues were not something one discussed with brother parties, dragged into the open and made the subject of popular debate. They were to be prepared quietly and then decided by the responsible party organs.36 ‘It is a matter for you’, he bluntly declared in December 1967, when he reluctantly accepted an invitation from an under-pressure Novotný to pay a visit to the CSSR under the pretext of a ‘hunting holiday’.37 He broke off his trip and fled Prague – but not without first holding long discussions with Dubček too: I think I’ve never spoken with anyone as long I spoke with Comrade Dubček. We spoke from the evening till six in the morning. I said, Alexander Stepanovich, we haven’t eaten for twelve hours, haven’t drunk anything. Let’s go and have breakfast together, drink a cup of tea together. […] I must say, I have never spoken so openly with anyone. The whole business took me by surprise.38

Back at his property in Zavidovo outside Moscow, Brezhnev vented his frustration: I thought they’ve stirred up a right old stew, and everyone’s trying to get me on his side and make me his ally. What do they think they’re doing? I told my people, get the plane ready, tomorrow we’re leaving. That’s really what I needed, them dragging me into their mess. They can sort it out themselves. They can go to h…!39

On 5 January 1968, the CPC elected Dubček Novotný’s successor as head of the party. Brezhnev made no bones about his fondness for Dubček. It is speculation, but he clearly saw in him a Czech version of himself: a young, pleasant man who was replacing an unpopular party leader considered to be difficult.40 The Moscow historian Rudol’f Pikhoya asserts: ‘From this point on, Brezhnev and Dubček remained in close contact. It can be assumed that Brezhnev felt personally responsible for Dubček’s election, which gave their relationship something of a personal character and, as we know, influenced the development of events throughout the whole of 1968.’41 Brezhnev quite clearly considered Dubček his protégé. He phoned him often42 and said of their relationship, ‘We are connected by friendly ties.’43 He had Kádár report to him of his meeting with Dubček on 29/30 January: ‘Dubček is gaunt and pale; he needs to take a rest, and calm down generally; [one gains the impression] he is an extraordinarily honest person and will represent the right line.’44 From that point on, Kádár became a close advisor of Brezhnev’s, the latter regularly ringing him to discuss the situation in the CSSR.45 While Ulbricht, Gomułka and Zhivkov soon demanded a hard line be taken against Prague, Brezhnev valued the Hungarian he had placed in office in 1956 as a prudent sounding board. Kádár had relevant experience, the Soviet army having invaded his country. Both he and Brezhnev were well disposed towards Dubček and sought to help him in their own way. Brezhnev saw Dubček as a party comrade whom he had entrusted with the responsibility for the twin states and who still had to grow into the role.46 Hence Brezhnev was repeatedly prepared to make concessions and understood their exchange as supporting and accommodating him. When on 22 March the Soviet Politburo, faced with the threat of Novotný’s being removed from his position as state president, decided to send a letter

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

273

Figure 26 Brezhnev and Alexander Dubček at the Bratislava Meeting, 3 August 1968.

of warning to the Czechoslovak CC, Brezhnev withheld the letter at Dubček’s request.47 Brezhnev nevertheless did not do anything he had not first discussed with the Politburo. The meeting of the Warsaw Pact states in Dresden on 23 March 1968 was also a concession to the ‘collective will’ of the heads of the brother parties, who were concerned about the developments in Czechslovakia. In order to placate Dubček, however, Brezhnev stressed it was a ‘free exchange of opinion’.48 Brezhnev had to keep the other party leaders happy while still winning over Dubček: We ask Comrade Dubček and the entire delegation to understand us correctly. We intend it as honest friends, as honest brothers who have cordial ties with you on a very firm basis in a political and economic respect. […] We wish to demonstrate to you our fraternal, comradely assistance, and we ask you to consider all our statements, the opinions of our Politburo, from this standpoint.49

274

Brezhnev

Brezhnev took care to avoid accusing Dubček of counter-revolution; instead he merely criticized him for letting the ‘counter-revolutionaries do as they please’.50 He still had high hopes for him: ‘We have the full authority of our Politburo to express the hope that with Dubček’s leadership, those of you who are here will be able to transform events and avoid this very dangerous situation.’51 Brezhnev had to tread carefully with both the group of five and Dubček. But he also felt his actions had to be collectively affirmed by the CPSU. During the Prague Spring, the CC met twice to approve the course taken as the party line. All the letters Brezhnev sent to Dubček were also written in consultation with the other politicians.52 The Soviet ambassador in Prague, Stepan Chervonenko, reports: We sat at the table in a row, Brezhnev opposite us. To make the letter more trustworthy, we decided not to write it on a typewriter. Brezhnev sat down and wrote it by hand. We discussed every sentence together, should he write ‘Aleksandr’ or ‘Sasha’ or ‘dear Aleksandr Stepanovich’ – that’s how Brezhnev put down the words following dictation by the members of the Politburo.53

The ‘night letter’ of 11 April 1968 would become famous: Dear Aleksandr Stepanovich! It is already late at night, but I am not asleep yet. I don’t think I’ll get off to sleep for a while. […] I would like to speak with you right now and ask you your advice, but it’s too late for a phone call. I would like to commit my thoughts to paper without thinking too much about finding the words.54

He expressly referred to the trust he had placed in Dubček: Our mutual trust has always been indestructible. It is still very strong, and I think ultimately no one will be able to destroy it or do irreparable harm to the friendship between our nations. […] The fate of your party and your state now depend directly on your actions and your personal responsibility.55

Brezhnev’s efforts to find a solution did not stop with letters. Since the Czechoslovak comrades were not enamoured with having been summoned to Dresden, Brezhnev’s next move was to arrange a bilateral meeting in Moscow on 4/5 May. He again insisted he had no intention of interfering, that he merely wished to offer well-meaning advice, but Moscow was most alarmed that the Czechoslovak leadership was allowing the ‘enemies of the Party’ to do as they pleased.56 He nevertheless dropped the first hint that these internal affairs had implications beyond the CSSR: ‘Comrades, you know that the CPSU upholds the principle of the complete dependence of all brother parties and states. But not every issue can be considered to be purely domestic.’57 A protégé gone astray The Politburo shared Brezhnev’s stance that the situation in Prague was a ‘cadre issue’. According to theory, they only had to recognize who were the ‘healthy’ and who were

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

275

the ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ in the CPC, remove the latter and help the former assert their rights. That was what they had done in Hungary in 1956, and that was what they would do this time round too. However, for a long time Brezhnev and his comrades were not certain as to who was part of a ‘second centre’, that is, the counterrevolution.58 At the Politburo meeting of 6 May 1968, Brezhnev dropped the first indication that he had lost faith in Dubček: ‘If you reflect on all the stages of our relationship since my first conversation with Comrade Dubček, particularly my first conversation with him in Prague and then subsequent ones, then you get the impression he deliberately says one thing but then does the opposite, wriggling and speaking vaguely.’59 After consulting the group of five in Moscow in 8 May, not only did Brezhnev sanction manoeuvres in the CSSR, which he recorded in his notebooks as ‘Operation “Tumour” ’,60 but he and the Politburo also began to look for people who could replace Dubček. The Politburo first sent Kosygin to Prague to establish whether they could still count on Dubček.61 Brezhnev noted, ‘Spoke with Com. Kosygin, on 21 and 22, [he] recommended treading water, that is, wait and see.’62 On 27 May, Kosygin reported to the Politburo that they had been entirely wrong in their assessment of the situation: they could forget their ideas of a ‘healthy core’; the reformers Dubček, Oldřich Černik and Josef Smrkovský were hardly any different to Drahomír Kolder, Vasiľ Biľak and Lubomír Štrougal. Since, however, no one in the country had greater authority than Dubček, Černik and Svoboda, they had to continue to rely on those cadres.63 In order to maintain contact with the ‘healthy core’ and avoid missing the right time for a change of personnel, the Politburo entrusted the head of the Ukrainian party, Petro Shelest, to keep in touch with Bil’ak via phone and conspirative meetings.64 Their growing mistrust meant that Brezhnev too increasingly addressed Dubček and the Presidium of the CPC as third-party outsiders, as representatives of another state and potential opponents rather than as friends and allies. Brezhnev’s familiar, comradely manner transformed into the cool tone of someone negotiating foreign policy. This is most evident in the ‘Warsaw Letter’ composed by the group of five on 14/15 July during another meeting in the Polish capital in the absence of the Czechoslovaks.65 In response to the ‘Two-Thousand Word Manifesto’ of 27 July,66 which the five interpreted as an ‘open call to arms against the Communist Party, against the constitution and a call to anarchy and rebellion’,67 the ‘Warsaw Letter’ did away with any comradely conviviality:68 ‘As Communists it is our responsibility to the peoples and to history that the revolutionary achievements are not destroyed.’69 It was not addressed to a comrade with whom they were fighting side by side, but a country that found itself at a crossroads: ‘Today, the question for socialist Czechoslovakia is: to be or not to be?’70 Instead of giving friendly advice, the five made clear demands: all political parties and clubs were to be shut, the mass media brought under control, and the ranks of the party purged.71 Here too, Brezhnev felt obliged to have this tougher approach and the new tone blessed by the CC. His call for a plenum on 17 July was so spontaneous that fifty delegates were absent.72 The CC approved the course, Brezhnev declaring, ‘And before we take the most extreme measures, let us, together with the brother parties, use all political means to help our Communist brother party of Czechoslovakia and the Czechoslovak people preserve and protect the socialist achievements in Czechoslovakia.’73

276

Brezhnev

Negotiations and weak nerves This growing tendency to address the Czechoslovak comrades as opponents instead of ‘part of the family’ reached its peak at the meeting in Čierna nad Tisou in late July 1968. The entire procedure was straight out of the foreign policy textbook, and hardly resembled an expanded party conference. It was an extraordinary summit, since it was the first time in the history of the party or diplomacy that two entire politburos or presidiums had ever convened.74 The meeting took place on Brezhnev’s express initiative, with support from Kosygin. Brezhnev wished to avoid ‘extreme measures’ at any price and to give his protégé Dubček one last chance.75 Andropov and other members of the Politburo considered further negotiations a waste of time, an accusation they only levelled at Kosygin, however, since it was not the done thing to criticize the general secretary directly.76 But Brezhnev insisted on 19 July, ‘There is just one question: have we exhausted the whole arsenal of political means, have we done everything before taking the most extreme measures?’77 Early that month he had jotted in his notebook: ‘We won’t find a practicable solution with Dubček.’78 At the same time, he remained uncertain as to who could replace him. While the Politburo accompanied Brezhnev to Čierna, the invasion scenario had already been planned:79 on 27 July, two days before the meeting, the Politburo sent appeals to the Soviet people and the Czechoslovak army that were to be published in the event of military intervention.80 Since the Moscow Politburo assumed the meeting in Čierna would fail and did not wish to lose any time,81 they sent a prior invitation to the group of five’s delegations to travel to Moscow for 30/31 July in order to discuss further procedures.82 As is often the case with international meetings between state representatives who don’t trust each other, there was plenty of haggling over the location. While visiting each other in Moscow and Prague had previously been a matter of course, both sides were now reluctant to set foot on ‘enemy’ territory. The Politburo proposed Moscow, Kiev or Lvov;83 Dubček suggested Košice as a ‘pleasant city in East Slovakia’ with a large airport.84 Dubček and his people wished to avoid being subject to another tribunal after Dresden.85 For their part, Brezhnev and the Politburo did not want to be confronted with mass demonstrations and other undesirable consequences of freedom of the press and assembly. They finally agreed on the Slovak border town of Čierna nad Tisou, which meant that while they would meet on Slovak territory, the Soviet delegation could withdraw over the Ukrainian border at noon and in the evening and remain in contact with the group of five.86 ‘When I heard the suggestion, I told Brezhnev I wasn’t sure whether such a small place would have the appropriate facilities. He said that was unimportant, since they were coming with their own train. My God, I thought, they want to spend the night on the train’,87 Dubček later recalled. While the delegation indeed slept in their respective trains, the railway club served as the conference room.88 The usual iron rule of international diplomacy – making things as pleasant as possible for the negotiation partners and bringing them together over dinner – was ignored: they were to eat separately too, in the railway wagons.89 The Soviet side had insisted that the press be strictly banned; instead, a joint communiqué would be published afterwards.90 However, as soon word got around

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

277

where they were meeting, Western correspondents appeared – to protests from the Soviet ambassador.91 The Czechoslovakians had other things to worry about: they were frightened their train could be hijacked over the border into the Soviet Union and were relieved to discover the tracks had different gauges.92 Although the Prague Presidium had ‘home advantage’, the team from Moscow were better prepared and had thoroughly vetted the location, as Dubček later confessed.93 In the negotiation room in the railway’s cultural centre, the KGB monitored all the doors, the interpreters’ booths and the telephones. While Brezhnev had a telephone in his train and an antenna with which to remain in contact with the outside world, Dubček was without a bug-proof line to Prague and was completely cut off, to the extent that the CC Secretariat in Prague considered whether it should provide an air bridge to Čierna in order to maintain the flow of information to their isolated comrades.94 And so the meeting of 29 July began in less than ideal circumstances. The tenseness of the situation was already evident on the platform, where locals had assembled despite the ban; some of them welcomed the Soviet delegation, while some shouted ‘Spare Dubček’. ‘As if we wanted to kidnap him’, remarked Shelest.95 Brezhnev greeted only his old wartime comrade Svoboda with a kiss; the others received a reserved handshake.96 On the second day, the tension escalated when Brezhnev addressed the crowd, who still shouted ‘Spare Dubček’; while Brezhnev received polite applause, Dubček was celebrated with great ovations and flowers. Shelest commented that the only thing missing was passport control, so hostile was the atmosphere.97 Brezhnev’s advisor Aleksandrov-Agentov reported of the difficulties: One cannot say that the external conditions for these drawn-out five days were particularly pleasant. A small, stuffy room in which all the negotiation partners could only squeeze around the table with great effort, hot train compartments, wooden huts for ‘relief ’ set up alongside the trains. The negotiating atmosphere inside wasn’t much better either.98

The tension on the street was also translated to the poky assembly room, where Brezhnev’s opening speech was perceived by some to be calm and cool, while others found it aggressive and polemical.99 While the delegations ate lunch together, despite the plans not to, that did nothing to alter the fact that that the entire day’s negotiations amounted to sparring that neither achieved rapprochement nor revealed divisions within the Czechoslovak Presidium. The Politburo had evidently banked on a split emerging between the ‘healthy forces’ and the ‘second centre’ within the CPC Presidium.100 Hence it had invited the entire Presidium in order to gain a full picture. In the event of division, Brezhnev would have had an answer to the vexing question as to who could replace Dubček. After lunch, he attempted to provoke them: What does that mean – ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’? What sort of right-wing forces are these, why don’t you say how we can help you? Why do you suddenly say you were ‘puppets’ at the meeting in Dresden? Why don’t you recognise it? Why did you award [the journalist Jiří] Pelikán a medal? Why don’t you call [the

278

Brezhnev

economist Ota] Šik to order? He’s giving me a headache. Members of your government are taking sides against you. How are you responding?101

But his attempt to sow discord was in vain; Dubček answered only with a counterquestion: ‘Comrade Brezhnev, don’t you have the impression that your questions are an intervention in our affairs?’102 On the second day, Shelest made a desperate attempt to divide his opponents, but only ended up losing his temper: ‘What right-wing forces do you have among the leadership? Name them, who are on the right, who are on the left? Comrade Kosygin is asking you. Show me one left-winger in your leadership! Probably Kolder.’103 Since the theory of ‘two centres’ could not be confirmed in practice, the Politburo were forced to change tactics. The plan to walk out on the negotiations had to be abandoned, since the Politburo was unable to blame the other side for their failure.104 This was even less of an option on the second day than on the first, especially when Brezhnev learnt that Tito, Ceaușescu and eighteen Western European communist parties had declared their support for Dubček.105 And so a Politburo delegate visited Dubček’s wagon that evening to apologize for Shelest’s behaviour over a glass of beer.106 Brezhnev was now under immense pressure: upping and leaving for Moscow was no longer an option if he didn’t want to embarrass himself in both the capitalist and socialist camps. He had to present a solution to the negotiations.107 This was pressure he was simply not up to, neither mentally nor physically; he promptly fell ill, as he had predicted to Aleksandrow-Agentow in 1961.108 Dubček later accused him of simulating ‘diplomatic influenza’: ‘When the Soviets realized I had majority support […], they decided to change tactics. This change of direction coincided with the moment Brezhnev declared he was sick. He went around in his pyjamas, but I could see he wasn’t sick.’109 Members of the Soviet delegation report, however, that Brezhnev really was ill. Shelest noted in his diary, ‘Brezhnev is extremely nervous, he is jittery, shaking with fever. He complains of severe headache and stabbing pains in his stomach.’110 In his subsequent confidential discussions with Dubček, which he conducted in his pyjamas to give them a familiar, unofficial flavour, Brezhnev attempted to get him to promise he would oust the ‘counterrevolutionaries’.111 For Brezhnev it was clear that the problems could be solved by adopting the correct cadre policy: ‘In all this time, from January of this year, under whose leadership were the press, radio and television organs? […] Couldn’t you find any honest Czech or Slovak Communists to take over this matter?’112 Disastrously, Brezhnev interpreted Dubček’s stoic silence in response to these demands in Čierna as agreement. But while Brezhnev assumed Dubček’s lack of verbal disagreement indicated he had been able to persuade him to solve the cadre issue,113 Dubček believed that the adjournment of the meeting to Bratislava and the larger framework of the five powers meant the unofficial, minuteless discussions in Čierna had become insignificant.114 In Čierna, he had also been able to persuade Brezhnev to promise that the CSSR’s internal affairs would not be on the agenda in Bratislava; rather, the Warsaw Pact countries would issue a general declaration of international solidarity between the brother states towards non-member states.115

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

279

The Bratislava Conference was another diplomatic novelty,116 since it revolved almost entirely around the work of the editorial commission. Brezhnev had already introduced this method of collective authorship at the Warsaw meeting, and now proposed the five use it again. Biľak writes: ‘It was the only consultation in my life – and I took part in many international consultations – where the outcome document was actually written from A to Z by the general secretaries or first secretaries and heads of governments.’117 It was a marathon sitting that did not end until 7.00 pm instead of 4.00 pm.118 The party leaders spent a long time arguing over formulations expressing – or suppressing – crucial aspects. Dubček recalls: I now demanded that the document should clearly express that specific domestic developments in the various countries were a matter for the respective sovereign powers. This gave rise to a heated discussion. Ulbricht and Gomułka insisted such a clause was superfluous. […] I made it clear that we would not sign the document otherwise.119

The great advantage of this diplomatic novelty was that the text was created with consensus and thus signed by everyone. Indeed the declaration, ceremonially signed on the evening of 3 August, did not contain a single mention of the CSSR. Instead, it gave the impression that the Warsaw Pact countries were concerned entirely about the situation in Vietnam and the Near East and the resurgence of neo-Nazis in West Germany.120 The document almost resembled a squaring of the circle, combining the brother states’ duty to jointly defend socialist achievements with the sovereignty of every country to choose its own path to socialism.121 Hence Bratislava was initially considered a breakthrough; the international press and ultimately Dubček believed that the danger of ‘intervention’ had been avoided.122 But while Dubček relied on the Bratislava Declaration, Brezhnev was of the view that Dubček now had to follow up their Čierna ‘agreement’ with actions. But these actions never happened.123 The final phone call Brezhnev travelled to Crimea, where he discussed the situation in the CSSR with the Politburo and Kádár from 13 to 15 August and had an eighty-minute telephone call with Dubček on the evening of 13 August.124 During this conversation, he did all he could do play the role of the understanding comrade making his last attempt to guide his errant protégé back to the righteous path with persuasive warnings: ‘The entire point of our conversation is to help you fulfil these obligations [from Čierna].’125 He left Dubček in no doubt that this was not a discussion between two statesmen, but a personal conversation. Categories such as sovereignty, independence and the inviolability of borders were irrelevant; the only things that counted were mutual trust, the fight for the common cause and keeping one’s word. He thus consistently addressed Dubček using the informal second person pronoun and almost exclusively as ‘Sasha’, the Russian diminutive of ‘Alexander’,126 while Dubček adhered to the formal pronoun, ‘Comrade Brezhnev’ and the polite ‘Leonid Il’ich’.

280

Brezhnev

During the entire discussion, Brezhnev tried to create the impression he and Dubček had a special bond. While he, Brezhnev, had always stuck by him and was the only member of the Politburo who still believed in him, Dubček now had to prove they could trust him: And we have taken everything you have promised us at face value and as friends have believed everything you have told us. I personally, Sasha, somehow can’t understand why and for what reason you are putting off solving these problems till another extraordinary plenum. We believe that the cadre issues can be solved in this Presidium today, and, believe me, one can solve them without great losses. […] It’s the last chance to rescue the matter without great damage.127

While Dubček remained evasive and repeatedly pointed out that only a formal plenum could decide, Brezhnev oscillated between understanding and threatening: ‘Sasha, I understand that you’re nervous, I understand that it’s a very complicated situation for you. But understand that I want to talk to you as a friend, I only want good things for you.’128 As much as Brezhnev distinguished between himself and the Politburo in order to underline his conciliation and generosity, he also demanded Dubček stop hiding behind the plenum and declare his personal position: ‘Brezhnev: Alright now, Sasha, then allow me to ask you a direct question: do you personally stand behind fulfilling the obligation agreed in Čierna nad Tisou or not?’129 Ultimately, Brezhnev boiled down their negotiations in Čierna and their phone call to a question of trust: […] I ask you to understand that if you don’t fulfil everything we have agreed […] then that will be it for our trust. The whole point of our meeting in Čierna nad Tisou consists, after all, in great mutual trust. All of our decisions were made on the basis of the massive trust and that’s precisely what obliges us to fulfil everything we agreed as diligently as possible.130

The conversation achieved nothing: adopting a familiar tone from comrade to comrade was unacceptable to Dubček. He insisted on being treated as the representative of a sovereign state and – much worse in Brezhnev’s eyes – he declared he was no longer responsible: ‘It wasn’t without reason I told you the new plenum will elect a new secretary. I’m considering relinquishing the post.’131 Brezhnev considered this an outrage: the Presidium no longer sought to control the CC plenum, and the party as a whole was sacrificing its own role. Unmoved, Dubček explained: […] the situation has changed. But now this question must be viewed differently. And its solution is no longer up to us. Brezhnev: Sasha, then allow me to ask you what is actually up to your CC Presidium then. […] I can only establish that your CC Presidium has no power and that we will very much regret not having known that at the conference in Čierna nad Tisou. […] That means then that our conversation wasn’t to be taken seriously.132

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

281

A solution, Brezhnev-style There were clearly a number of factors that led the group of five to consider an invasion necessary: fear that the spark of reform would leap to Ukraine, the Baltic and the Soviet intelligentsia in general;133 fear of a chain reaction that could lead other CPs in the brother states to commit suicide;134 the old historical duty to defend what had been gained at the cost of so many human lives in the Second World War;135 and the strategic importance of the CSSR in the context of the Cold War,136 which caused the Politburo to view Czechoslovakia’s western border as its own frontier.137 Compounding all this was the attitude of the USA, which had clearly indicated that it considered the Prague Spring as an internal matter for the bloc and that it would not intervene.138 However, all these arguments came down to the main risk that the CPC would first abolish the Presidium and then itself. For Brezhnev, Dubček’s explanations of 13 August were a declaration of political bankruptcy. He no longer felt responsible for his protégé, and he realized his days as at the top were numbered if he failed on the CSSR. He confided in his foreign policy advisor Aleksandrov-Agentov, ‘If we lose Czechoslovakia, I’ll resign from the post of general secretary.’139 And so on 17 August, the Politburo and the group of five decided to invade the following day.140 They thought they had found a successor to Dubček: on 3 August in Bratislava, Biľak had handed Shelest the ‘letter of invitation’. In it, eleven party leaders went behind Dubček’s back in calling on their Moscow comrades to come to the rescue of socialism in the CSSR.141 But when on 21 August the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague, the signatories refused to take over the Presidium and form a ‘revolutionary government’.142 Biľak, who was supposed to become the new chairman of the council of ministers, shouted, ‘Go on and lynch me then!’143 And Svoboda, Brezhnev’s old brother in arms earmarked to head the new government, declined, declaring that if the Politburo did not negotiate with Dubček, he would shoot himself.144 The situation was thus extremely delicate; there was no political alternative, and the soldiers in Prague found themselves in a precarious situation, since the population met them with open hostility and refused to even give them water.145 Brezhnev was thus forced to revive his old strategy of only removing cadres when there was no resistance. And so he began to negotiate with Alexander Dubček and five other leading reform communists, whom he had had kidnapped into Ukraine and brought to Moscow.146 The episode was an emotional rollercoaster for him; the Politburo, the group of five and the whole world were watching him. He had to prove that as a statesman and foreign policy representative, he was capable of getting out of this mess, all the while feeling personally betrayed by Dubček. Zdeněk Mlynář relates: Brezhnev was personally thoroughly outraged that Dubček had disappointed his trust and would not allow his every move to be approved by the Kremlin.‘I believed you and defended you against the others’, he reproached him. ‘I said, our Sasha is a good comrade. And you have let all of us down so badly!’ Melancholy rang from his breaking voice during such passages, he stammered and suppressed a sob. He seemed like a deeply broken patriarch who actually thinks it quite obvious and

282

Brezhnev

only right that his position as head of the family implies the unconditional subjugation and obedience of all other family members, since his opinion and his will naturally embody the highest authority and he only wants what’s good for them.147

The other side was no less outraged by its kidnapping and the military intervention. Dubček too missed no opportunity to express his disgust: All eyes were on Dubček, whom Brezhnev had addressed, without naming names. Everyone was waiting to see what he would say. He cleared his throat and said in Slovak, ‘Comrade Biľak, ask them what they actually want.’ Dubček spoke Russian at least as well as his mother tongue. I hesitated a moment and then repeated in Russian what he had replied. Brezhnev took a deep breath, but calmly repeated himself word for word. I looked at Dubček: ‘Did you understand or should I translate it into Slovak for you?’148

The extremely tense negotiations lasted from 23 to 26 August and eventually came to an impasse, since each party rejected the other’s draft as an unacceptable ‘ultimatum’.149 While Ponomarëv threatened the Czechs, ‘If you don’t sign now, you’ll sign in a week. If not in a week, then in two weeks, and if not in two weeks, then in a month’,150 Brezhnev was aware that they needed a rapid solution. Hence he once again resorted to his proven method of the editorial commission. If they couldn’t agree on a document, then they would write the text together. So it was that they sat side by side and went through it point by point in the familiar fashion.151 With this procedure, Brezhnev asserted himself against the other members of the Politburo as well as the group of five, who were also in Moscow. While the latter did not attend the negotiations, most of them demanded a revolutionary government be imposed by force, or at least that Dubček be deposed.152 Brezhnev’s calculations proved correct; the Czechoslovak representatives carried the consensus and signed the document, since ultimately all of them but František Kriegel rejected the idea of refusing to sign, as Mlynář relates: ‘They realized that this would only be a private solution and not a solution for the problems of the political situation, for whose development they shared responsibility, responsibility they could not shirk.’153 Dubček remained in office and returned to Prague triumphant,154 but the CPC Presidium remained under the control of the Moscow Politburo. As a result, Dubček eventually resigned on 17 April 1969 and was expelled from the party in 1970.155 Brezhnev’s tactic of forming consent via editorial commissions had ultimately won through in the foreign policy arena too. But overcoming the ‘Prague Crisis’, as it was called in Moscow, cost him another year of intensive telephone calls, meetings and political pressure. He had put all his eggs in one basket and emerged triumphant. He had had every phone call, every letter, every move approved by the Politburo and afterwards by the CC plenum to avoid becoming isolated.156 And yet it had been his very specific debut on the international stage. His aide Aleksandrov-Agentov remarked, ‘Brezhnev solved this problem the Brezhnev way – not by organizing a

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

283

“putsch” or putting down the population, but with cautious, skilful manoeuvring over the course of a year, at a time, then, when the new CPC leadership had built up its position with Gustáv Husák.’157 Brezhnev himself was clearly convinced that he did the right thing in having Dubček replaced by Husák: ‘Dubček does not realize he is a puppet being used by the right-wing forces for their ends. […] For over a year, no one has explained what “socialism with a human face” is supposed to be. (They declare it’s a secret).’158

… foris pax, or peace with the West The intervention in Prague marks an important caesura in Brezhnev’s foreign policy. He had proven himself to the group of five as a calm, prudent, circumspect leader. He had shown how a brother state could be kept in line with minimal force but maximum political pressure. He made use of this authority when he persuaded Ulbricht to leave office in 1970 and also moved the equally unpopular Gomułka to resign in the face of the riots in Poland.159 But not only did his persuasive style consolidate the group of five; as the man who put an end to the Prague Spring, he was now finally regarded as a foreign policy figure and opponent to be reckoned with by the West. That gave him a great advantage; unlike his predecessor Khrushchev he did not have to court recognition abroad and fear a lack of respect.160 What Brezhnev announced in Pravda in September 1968 and at the October Plenum161 was thence known in the West as the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’: Now everyone must have understood that the words of the CPSU and the Soviet Union on firm resolve, never allowing a member to fall from the socialist community, are not merely a purely propagandistic declaration. This is the expression of our real political line and our preparedness to exhaust the entire power of the Soviet state to defend the interests of socialism and progress in a critical moment.162

Brezhnev himself dictated to his aide Chernyayev the basic premise for his speech to the April Plenum of 1973: ‘Had it not been for Czechoslovakia – there would have been neither Brandt in Germany nor Nixon in Moscow nor détente.’163 He earned the domestic and foreign respect which allowed him relatively free rein.164 Thus began Brezhnev’s most active foreign-policy era – and with it his addiction to pills. From the mid-1970s onwards, it would ruin his health and cause his foreign policy to stall. During his fraught and drawn-out dealings with Dubček, he had begun to take tablets in order to calm down at night. Insomnia had already tormented him during the Stalin era; now, in August 1968, he increased his dosage of sleeping pills – leading to outright addiction.165 His bodyguard Ryabenko and Shelest both report that he once lost consciousness during the negotiations in Čierna. The doctors established an excessive dosage of sedatives. It would not be the last such diagnosis.166

284

Brezhnev

Fear Brezhnev himself missed no opportunity to stress that his efforts for peace, détente and disarmament were a result of his experiences during the Second World War.167 Like Khrushchev, he was so deeply scarred by the war that he wished to avoid another one at any price. His first great aim was to secure a better standard of living for the population; his second was to remove their fear of a new war.168 He wrote in his notebook in 1965: ‘International politics – its basis is the politics of peaceful coexistence, the fight for peace.’169 He never tired of declaring this publicly. ‘The party has done everything to enable the Soviet people to work in peace, it has actively stood for maintaining peace throughout the whole world’,170 he proclaimed at his first party congress in 1966. In 1971, he declared at the March Plenum, ‘Our people have already been living in conditions of peace for more than twenty-five years. We consider this the greatest achievement of our party’s foreign policy. Humanity has been spared a world war for a quarter of a century.’171 In his list of proverbs, he had put a mark next to Guy de Maupassant: ‘Any government has as much duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.’172 All the statesmen who had dealings with him confirmed that he constantly referred to the war when speaking of peace. Brezhnev himself said, ‘I try to keep my emotions in check, even if, quite honestly, it’s not easy for me.’173 Willy Brandt, however, found his emotional displays off-putting: What I didn’t buy from Brezhnev was the reminiscences he served up about the day of the invasion in June 1941: […] As secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast committee, on the first day of the war he was entrusted with stopping the transports bound for Germany. […] This was followed by memories of the front, with melodramatic appeals to the ‘comrades from the other side’. This style of mobilizing sentimentality didn’t so much impress as horrify me.174

But Brandt did have to concede that Brezhnev teared up during one of the chancellor’s speeches at a dinner in Bonn in 1973, when he read from a letter a fallen soldier had written to his parents after the invasion of the Soviet Union.175 He certainly never doubted Brezhnev’s desire for peace.176 ‘He trembled when it came to world peace.’177 Brezhnev soon found an understanding on this level with Helmut Schmidt, who himself had taken part in the Russian campaign: he had tears in his eyes when he met Schmidt during his first visit to Bonn in 1973 and the two of them realized they might have shot at each other during the war.178 In 1974, he told Schmidt there was a natural reason for the ‘emotional side’ of what he had to say: ‘A large part of the territory of the USSR had been destroyed during the war. Millions of people had lost their lives, millions lived under almost inhuman conditions in the hinterland. […] He, Brezhnev, had seen too much during the war. Hence this problem moved him emotionally.’179 In Schmidt’s later assessment, ‘That exchange of bitter war memories probably had a large impact on the mutual respect that characterized our relationship.’180 He summarized, ‘I had no doubts about Brezhnev’s concerns about the possibility of war; his love of freedom was unmistakable.’181

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

285

This was also the impression gained by US President Gerald Ford when he drove with Brezhnev through Vladivostok in 1974: ‘And that’s when the strangest thing happened. Brezhnev reached over and grabbed my left hand with his right hand. He began by telling me how much his people had suffered during World War II. “I don’t want to inflict that upon my people again”, he said.’182 Ford was certain that ‘Brezhnev wanted to go down in the history books as a peacemaker’.183 He agreed with French president Georges Pompidou, who said, ‘I honestly believe that the Soviet Union wants peace and that it needs it.’184 Looking West Brezhnev needed allies for his policy towards the West. Since he could not dictate a new strategy to Foreign Minister Gromyko and Gromyko hermetically shielded his Foreign Office from anyone who was not from his cadre school, Brezhnev had to find a way to circumvent him and Chairman of the Council of Ministers Kosygin. Here he found an unexpected ally in Andropov, who had advocated renewed rapprochement with the USA immediately upon Khrushchev’s dismissal, but had had his proposal blocked by Shelepin and Kosygin.185 Hence Andropov decided to back Brezhnev, and since he was totally loyal and Brezhnev needed allies, together they began to bypass the Foreign Office in developing a new Western-looking foreign policy.186 They agreed that the Foreign Office did not display ‘the necessary range of opinions, far-sightedness and the necessary sense of responsibility’.187 They thus worked in tandem to recruit a staff of aides from the CC Department for International Affairs, headed by Boris Ponomarëv, and the CC Department for Collaboration with the Brother States, headed by Andropov himself from 1967 onwards, forming a counterweight to the Foreign Office and Gromyko.188 The aides were characterized by a liberal and Westernoriented attitude and perceived themselves as real children of the sixties who had no desire to return to the Stalin era.189 Sharing Brezhnev’s interests, they quickly recognized he was only interested in peace: ‘The basic idea in Brezhnev’s life was the idea of peace. That’s what he would like humanity to remember him for. In practical politics, he prioritizes real matters in this area over any ideology.’190 Brezhnev made good use of the abilities of Andropov’s clients. They proposed strategies, presented him analyses and wrote speeches for him.191 This think tank included CC apparatus members Aleksandr Bovin, Anatoliy Blatov, Nikolay Shishlin and Vadim Zagladin. But Brezhnev also recruited the head of the Institute of USA and Canada Studies, Georgiy Arbatov, and the director of the Institute of Global Economics and International Relations, Nikolay Inozemtsev, who shielded his liberal aides.192 He made no bones about his uncertainty and inexperience in dealing with Western heads of state and was not ashamed to ask for advice.193 His aides appreciated that he listened to them even if he was of a different opinion and allowed them to tell him what to do, that he asked them questions and was open to new ideas. He repeatedly urged them, ‘Imagine you are members of the Politburo, argue among yourselves – and I’ll listen.’194 When in August 1968 Bovin dared tell him why invading the CSSR was inadvisable, he heard him out and then calmly told him the Politburo had already made its decision, but Bovin had a right to think what he wanted: ‘Either go, leave the

286

Brezhnev

party, or fulfil the resolution that has been made. That’s what the statute stipulates. You decide. Now excuse me, I have things to do.’195 These young, westward-looking men’s reactions to Brezhnev’s decision to intervene in Prague ranged from disappointed to horrified.196 They had placed great hopes in him when he had announced that the ‘tone’ of his foreign policy mattered to him: ‘Only speaking for oneself, not taking responsibility for the entire socialist system. Not interfering in the domestic affairs of the brother states. Not criticizing any aspect of their development. Speaking about China with great restraint, showing patience.’197 They all agreed that if it hadn’t been for Prague, Brezhnev would have been amenable to much further-reaching measures, more open to experimentation and less afraid of upsetting the hardliners.198 He was thus motivated not only by fear of a new war, but also by the fear that opening up society too much could cause the population to demand more rights and cause the orthodox members of the Politburo to withdraw their support for him. But intervention in the CSSR gave Brezhnev the standing he required in order to implement the peace process and the rapprochement with the West he had his think tank develop. Two processes provided impetus for him and his team: in 1969, they were able to begin negotiations on strategic nuclear weapons, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I and SALT II); he was able to sign the corresponding treaties with Richard Nixon in Moscow in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in Vienna in 1979. Parallel to the Moscow SALT I treaties, there were also extensive economic agreements with the West and collaboration in science, technology and space projects. Brezhnev sold this rapprochement and limitations on armament to the CC as great gains for the Soviet Union. He argued firstly that they were acting from a position of strength, since in all categories of weapons, the Soviet Union was superior to the USA,199 and secondly that the population benefited since the savings made on armament were available for producing consumer goods.200 The degree to which he had to justify his new course is evident in the way he explained to the CC plenum on 19 May 1972, three days before the summit with Nixon, that any deterioration in relations with the USA would only harm the Soviet Union and that limiting armament was a sign of strength, not weakness.201 In emphatic terms, he tried to prove that he was by no means conciliatory towards the Americans: ‘He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon. […] Strength – that’s exactly the language the American imperialists understand best.’202 At the same time, he declared he wanted to weaken NATO: his course sought to support France, and other countries that acted independently within NATO were also to be supported.203 It is possible that this was more than just lip service designed to placate the orthodox communists and reflected his own thinking that, as a structure, NATO was aggressive and dangerous. In order to reduce its influence in Europe and advance a genuine peace process, he revived an idea of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov from 1954, namely forming pacts of non-aggression with other European states. This was the second process he set in motion. The idea to hold a ‘Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’ (CSCE) thus emanated from the Soviet Union. However, for a long time the West dismissed it as propaganda, partly due to the Berlin and Cuban crises. From 1965 onwards, Brezhnev made great efforts to move it on.204 While

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

287

Kosygin signed the first bilateral agreements with British prime minister Harold Wilson and French president Charles de Gaulle in 1966, Brezhnev’s think tank ensured that Committees for Security and Cooperation were formed throughout Europe to organize forums and congresses propagating the idea of pan-European peace.205 After NATO had also advocated such a European dialogue in 1968, in 1969 preparations began for the consultations, which finally took place in November 1972 and would lead to the signing of the Helsinki Accords on 1 August 1975, establishing the inviolability of the European borders, extensive cooperation and human rights. With this project, Brezhnev’s aim was nothing less than to symbolically end the Second World War and establish a new form of international cooperation in Europe. It was clearly his sincere – albeit vain – ambition to go down in history as Europe’s greatest peacemaker and builder of bridges: ‘We do not conceive [of this meeting] as a unique act, but as a significant beginning to a series of further steps aiming for peace to reign in Europe and ensuring that every people has the right to its free and independent development. It seems to us that achieving these aims will be of historical importance.’206 In August 1970, French president Georges Pompidou received a message from Moscow: twenty-five years after the 1945 Potsdam Conference that determined the post-war European order, it was time to lay new foundations for the continent’s security.207 In his reply, Pompidou refrained from pointing out that the French had not been in attendance at Potsdam in August 1945, writing, ‘I share your conviction that broad international cooperation and mutual understanding between the states can only be in the interests of world peace.’208 Trust But a long path was ahead before Brezhnev could announce to the CC in November 1971 that Willy Brandt and Georges Pompidou had agreed to the peace process.209 It took a long time to win their trust and convince them that his efforts for peace were genuine and not simply for propaganda purposes, that he was genuinely interested in limiting armament and was transparent in the information he provided on his own arsenal of weapons. He was up against the worst possible conditions, since the systems, ideologies, media discourses and defensive alliances were systematically designed to find and uncover the enemy’s wicked intentions. Mistrust was the basis and vanishing point of all interactions; those who trusted were considered stupid and naive. Brezhnev was fully aware that it would be a long time before people would no longer speak of the ‘Soviet Union’s alleged aggression’ and the ‘communist peril from the East’.210 It was up to him to send a new message and allow the West to project its desires onto him. He had to ensure that the Russian bear was no longer seen as the aggressive ‘problem animal’ from the East, but as gentle, cuddly and friendly. If it is true that statesmen normally represent their country pars pro toto, then the trick was not to appear to be the representative of a competing system, but to use one’s personality as a distraction from conflicting political positions.211 Brezhnev actively sought to avoid being seen as the supreme communist; rather, wherever possible he wished to give the impression he was a statesman in the Western mould, or at least a ‘common man’ made of flesh and blood. In this respect, there were three reasons he

288

Brezhnev

sought personal access to the statesmen of the West. First, it had been the tradition since Stalin, and Molotov had advised him to do so;212 second, he had to bypass the government, but above all Kosygin and Gromyko;213 and third, if he was to penetrate the many layers of mistrust and present himself as a ‘Western-style’ partner for discussion, it had to be done in person. It was thus a very delicate operation requiring great tact, tactical acumen and good advisors. He later admitted to Helmut Schmidt that ‘the role of statesmen grows under difficult conditions’.214 What Brezhnev began in 1969 was thus certainly a rarity in foreign policy: with both Nixon and Brandt he established a ‘confidential channel’ connecting statesman on both sides via a mere handful of trusted individuals, away from governments and foreign offices. He also suggested such a channel of private exchange to French president Pompidou, but relations between France and the Soviet Union were already so close and amicable following Charles de Gaulle’s visit in 1966 to sign an agreement between the car manufacturers Renault and Moskvich215 that Pompidou said they did not require formal arrangements; they would always find trusted individuals via whom they could communicate directly without the risk of indiscretion.216 It was to this end that Brezhnev replaced the less approachable ambassador to Paris, Valerian Zorin, with Pëtr Abrasimov in 1971; Pompidou was immediately taken with him, as he informed Brezhnev.217 Not only was Abrasimov soon paying regular visits to Pompidou in the Élysée Palace with updates on Brezhnev’s foreign policy activities,218 but Brezhnev himself received Pompidou’s aide, the head of the President’s Office, Michel Jobert, privately no less, in Crimea, so that they could discuss world politics without interference from others.219 Brezhnev had greater difficulties gaining the trust of West Germany and the USA. Tellingly, both sides attempted to establish direct contact with each other almost simultaneously in order to penetrate the ‘wall of mistrust’, as Andropov put it.220 While Andropov entrusted his staffer Vyachelav Kevorkov with the task of creating a direct channel between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic, Willy Brandt wrote to Kosygin on 19 November 1969, just a month after becoming chancellor, announcing he was open to an exchange of views, although such an exchange had to be ‘confidential’: Here I like the image your foreign minister used in conversation with my friend Helmut Schmidt during his visit to Moscow in the summer: one must bore into the mountain from both sides if one wishes to dig a tunnel, and one must be certain that the two tunnels will also meet. My governments’ politics will make sincere undertakings to reduce the mountains of mistrust and make peace more certain.221

The ‘journalist’ Valeriy Lednëv took a copy of this letter to Secretary of State Egon Bahr on Christmas Day 1969; Bahr would have happily thrown him out until he saw the letter. Lednëv kept talking about his ‘friends’. It was not until later that Bahr realized he meant Brezhnev rather than Kosygin; later still, he realized Lednëv had been sent by the KGB.222 The emissary told him, ‘The Soviet side was open to a confidential exchange of opinions, of which it could be said with certainty that neither

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

289

the occurrence nor the content would ever be made public, no matter what the circumstances.’223 This channel functioned, on the one hand, via post: Kevorkov gave the journalist Heinz Lathe, stationed in Moscow, cryptic letters, which he sent to the editor-in-chief of the Frankfurter Neue Presse, Robert Schmelzer, who passed them on to Bahr. From 1971 on, the messages were also sent via the new ambassador in Bonn, Valentin Falin, who reported directly to Aleksandrov-Agentov.224 On the other hand, they often met in the federal chancellor’s official villa in Dahlem, West Berlin. Here Bahr received Lednëv, who did not require a visa for West Berlin. This communication took on an incredible dynamic, the ‘advance trust’ enabling things that would hardly have been possible through the regular channels. Within half a year, Bahr negotiated the Moscow Treaty against the use of force and recognition of the German borders, including the GDR and the Oder–Neiße line, all without public scrutiny or the involvement of government bureaucracies. Just how important this confidentiality was became clear in mid-June 1970, when the magazine Quick published the content of the treaty, causing uproar that German interests were being betrayed.225 The channel not only demonstrated that too many authorities could destroy trust, but also gave both sides the opportunity to speak openly about who or what harmed the exchange: when Federal Foreign Minister Walter Scheel finally made an official trip to Moscow in July 1970 in the late stages of the treaty, he had no contact with Gromyko. Bahr reported to Brandt: Unfortunately our minister could not get in touch with his partner. That is, he has not replied to Gromyko’s arguments, whereupon the latter has assumed agreement, as is the international practice. On Tuesday this caused the first difficulties when it was a matter of establishing who is lying. Scheel was honest, Gromyko too. But Scheel did not notice what was going on. […] [Secretary of State] Frank and I oscillated between indignation and despair until we considered whether he might be removed from the negotiations, as always.226

This irritation could be settled via the special channel.227 Brandt and Brezhnev also used this method to communicate via their ambassadors in the same fashion as Brezhnev and Pompidou. When it was reported the German ambassador to Moscow, Helmuth Allarth, did not speak Russian and was unsuitable for the negotiations, Bonn sent ambassador Ulrich Sahm in his stead. Lednëv soon conveyed from Moscow, however, that Sahm was too close to the conservative Christian parties (CDU/CSU).228 In November 1970, he also related that Moscow would be sending an expert on Germany to Bonn in Valentin Falin, while the party secretary from Tula lined up for East Berlin had no idea about German politics and would therefore not interfere.229 This was not Brezhnev’s only indication to Brandt that the Federal Republic was to be prioritized over the GDR, which would have to get used to it.230 He also kept Brandt informed about what Ulbricht and later Honecker were up to in East Berlin and how it was to be assessed. In late March 1970, Brezhnev had Lednëv report that Ulbricht was doing everything he could to prevent compromise between Moscow and Bonn. The ovations that greeted Brandt’s visit to Erfurt could have been the action of Stasi provocateurs; at any rate, Ulbricht was

290

Brezhnev

certainly using it as an argument against Bonn. In order to calm things down, Brezhnev suggested that when the GDR’s chairman of the Council of Ministers, Willi Stoph, visited Kassel, it would be good if ‘certain elements’ had the opportunity to return the compliment.231 Finally, Brezhnev even used the channel to provide insights into the internal structures of the Politburo, which were then a complete mystery to the West. Bahr learnt via Lednëv that Podgorny was an adversary and there were tensions between Brezhnev and Kosygin.232 In late April 1970, Moscow reported: The political preliminary decisions leading to reinforcement of Brezhnev’s position have been made. Along with the known reshuffles, a number of other changes in personnel can be expected. This should take place in at least two stages in late summer and late autumn in connection with the party congress in November, in civil fashion from the angle of rejuvenation. It could be expected to affect, among others, Podgorny, Kosygin, Suslov and (inasmuch as he will miss out) Shelepin.233

That was after the power struggle between Brezhnev and Suslov, from which Brezhnev had emerged victorious by postponing the spring plenum to the July and travelling to observe military manoeuvres. This was qualified by Lednëv in November 1970, however: In the summer, however, Brezhnev appears to have been blocked from making a big leap in the ranks. Nevertheless, his position is strong with regard to the congress. There are no changes expected within the troika. It is likely that Suslov and Pel’she will leave on the grounds of age, but with all honour.234

As we know, they were not dismissed from the Politburo; instead, the Politburo was merely enlarged, albeit by four of Brezhnev’s clients. Sharing such internal information was thus a high-risk strategy and a particularly strong sign of trust. Indeed, Bahr wrote of the channel: Over the course of the years I realized that I received assessments and insights that proved to be true, that changes in personnel and positions became ‘seeable’ and understandable, my questions were answered as well as my partners could or were permitted to or wanted to, but certainly deception was never attempted. And so a tender and sensitive plant slowly grew into trust in human reliability and friendly ties.235

Tête-à-tête However, the ‘channel’ was merely Brezhnev’s first step towards gaining Brandt’s trust and showing himself to be open to discussions. In the summer of 1970, he might have won the test of strength in the Politburo, but he still did not have a mandate to pursue foreign policy. The Moscow Treaty between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

291

was originally supposed to be signed on 12 August 1970 by the foreign ministers. But at the last minute, only five days before its signing, Brezhnev was able to ensure Brandt was also invited to Moscow.236 As party leader, Brezhnev was neither entitled to collect Brandt from the airport nor to put his signature to the treaty. But he attended the ceremony as if its patron, stood behind Brandt and Kosygin on the photograph and finally had the opportunity to meet the federal chancellor in person. In a four-hour conversation, Brezhnev told him not only how the Politburo worked, but also proposed an open, ‘undiplomatic’ exchange. By extensively informing Brandt of the length of the Politburo’s meetings, their preparation and procedure, he demonstrated transparency and made it clear that what went on inside the Kremlin was by no means ‘witchcraft’, but was essentially no different to Western cabinet meetings. He thus presented himself as a ‘normal’ politician who was not driven by ideology and revolutionary fervour, but was a practical decision-maker. While he did not put it in so many words, he wanted Brandt to see him not as a communist, but as a realpolitiker operating under the same practical constraints as his interlocutor. What he did express openly was that he would rather avoid communicating with Brandt on the formal level of diplomacy: As far as the way we conduct our conversation is concerned, I suggest that we don’t proceed – as they say – diplomatically. After all, I would only draw the short straw there. But if we speak as representatives of our parties and our states, if we speak fully aware of our remit, then I believe our conversation will be open, interesting and useful.237

In later years too, Brezhnev stressed that ‘His side did not speak the language of Western diplomacy. In the West it was always difficult to infer what people actually meant when they said something.’238 In contrast to Khrushchev, he did not make such comments in order to provoke or snub anybody, but in order to appeal for direct exchange. He emphasized that personal encounters were invaluable and the only way to solve mutual problems. He gave a little taste of what was to come when he declared, ‘Since I assume that some of our conversation will be published, I must officially stick to the old stance on the Berlin issue. Unofficially, however, I would like to emphasize that an acceptable solution is possible.’239 As their staff and confidants noted, they took to one another immediately, even if Brandt did find Brezhnev’s two-hour speech, a lot of which was read out, to be tiring and put his long explanation of how the leadership worked down to his uncertainty in dealing with Western partners.240 But he was pleasantly surprised by Brezhnev’s undogmatic attitude.241 Brandt writes, ‘As long as he was not visibly suffering from his failing health, the squat Brezhnev appeared lively or even bubbly, when he wasn’t reading things out. He enjoyed hearing and telling jokes enormously.’242 Bahr was mystified by Brezhnev’s liking for Brandt,243 but Brandt had spent the war in the Resistance and in exile.244 Also, they were both clearly ‘men of the world’, chainsmokers who loved company and had a weakness for women. After their first meeting, their aides decided it would be ‘psychologically beneficial […] if both men retain the feeling they still have something to tell each other’.245 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Lednëv

292

Brezhnev

and Kevorkov exulted to Bahr, ‘Once a foundation of trust was developed between the two men, much would become possible in Europe.’246 Brezhnev and Brandt agreed to continue to use the ‘secret channel’ for direct, trustful exchange and to meet once a year in future.247 Andropov would later observe, ‘Five to seven such channels to heads of the leading states and we would have solved the world’s most pressing problems within a year.’248 The new ‘Big Four’ Brezhnev was determined to give Europe a new peaceful order and thought he could achieve this on the basis of personal trust together with Brandt and Pompidou for Europe and Nixon for the USA.249 Just as the ‘Big Four’ of Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle and Roosevelt had sealed the post-war European order and started the Cold War, this new ‘Big Four’ would end it, beginning a new chapter in European history.250 Brandt had hardly left in the August when two months later, on 6 October, Georges Pompidou began a two-week tour of the Soviet Union, visiting, like de Gaulle before him, Siberia, Kazakhstan and even the Baikonur cosmodrome.251 While in Brandt’s case the official invitation had come from Kosygin, Brezhnev had managed to extend the invitation to Pompidou himself and indeed to officially welcome him to the Kremlin, bypassing Kosygin, Gromyko and Podgorny.252 Brezhnev repeatedly demanded more time to speak with him and told him straight out, ‘We have nothing to hide from you’,253 but his rivals put the brakes on: ‘We don’t have a lot to say.’254 It was not until the end of Pompidou’s visit, on 13 October, that Brezhnev managed to arrange a tête-à-tête with his guest so that they could finally speak freely. Pompidou must have struck a chord with him when he said: We have signed minutes of our consultation. I take that very seriously. It means that we will regularly and freely share information on all areas of French politics. You will have noticed that I am not a career diplomat and that I prefer to speak openly. I hope you are in agreement.255

Brezhnev will not only have been in agreement. He must have been inwardly delighted when Pompidou declared they concurred that the most important political question was Germany: ‘There are still enough people in France who want to tie France to the USA and Germany with her. I don’t want Western Europe to become a military bloc.’256 He even showed understanding for Brezhnev’s precarious situation of not being allowed to sign the international treaties himself. But Brezhnev reacted with modesty: he had done his bit, received Pompidou, negotiated with him and accompanied him for part of his tour. ‘That compensates for the absence of my signature. I make no bones about how much I would have liked to have signed such a document, however. Incidentally, during the ceremony I will stand behind you, the photographers will see me and the whole world will know I agree.’257 It was the beginning not only of a very close exchange, but also of a great personal friendship.258 As Pompidou put it, ‘I congratulate myself not only for our having exchanged many ideas, but even more for now having got to know you better.’259 In a

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

293

Figure 27 Brezhnev and Brandt on a boat trip off Crimea, 1971.

highly unusual act of diplomacy, in November 1970 Brezhnev, together with Kosygin and other Soviet leaders, performed a symbolic act of respect for the deceased General Charles de Gaulle and with it for France: they drove unannounced to the French embassy in Moscow, where they held a minute’s silence and signed the book of condolence.260 No less unusual a step was Brezhnev’s attempt to grow his friendship with Brandt in 1971: he invited him to spend a weekend in Crimea.261 For both men, this was a novelty and a risk: Brandt was under attack from the CDU/CSU for his Eastern policy, the Christian conservatives accusing him of selling out Germany, while for Brezhnev it was the first time he had dared go it alone with respect to foreign affairs. Neither the foreign minister nor the chairman of the Council of Ministers was present. Brezhnev had received the party’s blessing for his Western course and secured a mandate for his ‘peace programme’ at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in April 1971. Andropov was now a candidate in the Politburo too.262 Nevertheless, it was an affront to Gromyko, Kosygin and Podgorny that on 16 September he alone received a state visitor at Simferopol airport, where he entertained him for several hours – to ‘drink him under the table’, Brandt was certain.263 Brezhnev told him plenty of jokes, including anti-

294

Brezhnev

Soviet ones, before spending a whole weekend with him at his government dacha in Oreanda.264 What enabled Brezhnev to exclude the other members of the government was a source of indignation for the West German press: it was an ‘unofficial visit’ without protocol, a working meeting. While Brandt and Brezhnev talked about all the current problems in world politics for a total of sixteen hours, save for a joint communiqué they said nothing about the content of their talks.265 Critics of Brandt’s new Eastern Europe policy were particularly alarmed that he appeared in casual clothing, went on a boat trip with Brezhnev and finally went swimming with him in the Black Sea and a seawater pool. He was thus performing, they said, a ‘political striptease’ for Brezhnev.266 Fortunately, the press did not discover what Brezhnev told his photographer Musael’yan: he had lent Brandt a pair of swimming trunks.267 Since the public were excluded, the only thing to go on was the photos showing the two men talking animatedly, smoking, posing with a female reporter, taking a boat trip, bathing together and clearly getting on splendidly.268 Diplomatically, the bathing holiday in Crimea might have been something of a curiosity, but Brezhnev was probably right when he said it was a ‘historically important encounter’ that would go down in ‘European history’.269 The trip pursued a strategy of glasnost that was as simple as it was effective: if removing jackets and ties was an unusual thing to do in 1971, appearing in swimming trunks emphatically demonstrated that this was a meeting between two men who had nothing to hide from each other. In the course of this weekend, Brezhnev repeatedly showed Brandt how important it was to him that both sides developed a ‘sense of trust’.270 The two politicians thus laid the foundations of their personal trust and with it their common foreign policy.271 They spoke intensively about the Moscow Treaties, whose ratification by the Bundestag was still in doubt, about the Four Power Agreement on Berlin the victors had signed a fortnight earlier, and the stances of the GDR and China. But they also talked a lot about personal matters: their families and their different experiences as members of the same generation.272 ‘We laughed quite a lot’, remembers Brandt.273 Brezhnev’s antiSoviet jokes demonstrated once more that he was not an obstinate apparatchik but that he shared Brandt’s sense of humour. For Brezhnev, the meeting forged a personal basis of trust which meant he sought Brandt’s advice even after he had long since retired. Brandt himself visited Brezhnev in Moscow in 1975 and met with him whenever he was in Germany. Sending a message With the Moscow Treaty of 1970 and his meeting with Brandt in 1971, Brezhnev laid the first cornerstones of his new Western policy. Only six weeks after Brandt’s visit to Crimea, Brezhnev embarked on his first state visit to the West, to Pompidou.274 It was both his debut in the West and a mission for the second key aspect of his foreign policy: getting the CSCE underway. It was crucial to present himself correctly to the Western public right from the start and to send the message that he was not a dull apparatchik. As with his idea for the bathing weekend with Brandt, he thus departed from the norm: after thorough consultation with his photographer Musael’yan on which photo to send the French press ahead of the visit, he opted for a remarkable

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

295

Figure 28 Brezhnev and Brandt swimming in Crimea, 1971.

image showing him in sunglasses, a blue tracksuit and a white T-shirt, nonchalantly leaning against the side of his yacht off Crimea. He himself said of the photo, ‘I look like Alain Delon.’275 He could not have made it any clearer that he wanted to appear Western, loose, attractive and ‘cool’. Having thus prepared the ground for his trip, he used his after-dinner speeches, an interview with Le Monde and a television address

296

Brezhnev

Figure 29 Brezhnev on a Black Sea boat trip: ‘I look like Alain Delon’, 1971.

to the French people to advocate a new Europe in which peace was not just a break between wars but something enduring.276 As a guest of Pompidou’s, he now had the opportunity to do what he had been prevented from doing by his Moscow comrades – from whom he merely said hello, since Kosygin was unfortunately in Canada.277 Along with a few official appointments that he would have preferred to have cancelled and a day trip to Marseille, he had four long tête-à-têtes with Pompidou, speaking about his son Yuriy’s success as minister of trade and the early death of his father as well as France’s withdrawal from the military structures of NATO in 1966. Brezhnev: ‘For us it is important that you exited the NATO bloc.’ Pompidou: ‘We’ll never re-enter.’278 Above all, however, he presented himself to Pompidou as he had to Brandt, as a simple, open man who asked to be addressed not by his official titles but simply as ‘comrade’ or ‘Monsieur Brezhnev’, since he was ‘at war with protocol’. Just as Pompidou had stressed a year earlier, he too now demonstrated that they should encounter one another not as diplomats but as simple men who had great responsibility for the whole of Europe.279 Entirely in the

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

297

Figure 30 Brezhnev and Georges Pompidou during a tête-à-tête at the Château de Rambouillet, 1971.

spirit of glasnost or straight-up exchange, they agreed to speak openly about their respective countries’ domestic politics.280 Brezhnev received updates from Pompidou and reported to him candidly that in the Soviet Union they were unable to deliver on their aim to improve the standard of living and were hence forced to buy consumer goods from abroad to satisfy the basic needs of their own people. In 1972, the Soviet Union sought to import three to five million francs’ worth of goods from France: ‘For we are celebrating fifty years of the Soviet Union and for this occasion I would like to offset the trade deficit […]. That’s still a secret at the moment. I hope that you agree.’281 The discussions were so intensive and detailed that he jokingly told him upon his return he would have to tell his comrades in Moscow that he had seen nothing of Paris.282 The two men were so familiar with each other they slept at Trianon Palace in Versailles and shared a car to Paris each day for the negotiations in Paris.283 Not only did Brezhnev have Pompidou all to himself, but this time he could also personally sign a cooperation agreement and a declaration of intent in which they both confirmed their desire for the continent to grow together and warned that this process should begin as soon as possible.284 While Brezhnev thus pursued his second foreign policy vision, he was worried about the fate of his first act: the ratification of the Moscow Treaties by the German federal parliament.285 And here too he was prepared to take completely novel measures, even if they had to remain secret. He was painfully aware that Brandt’s position was perilous, and in 1970 he told the CC plenum that although the Soviet Union sought cooperation with the Federal Republic on many levels, ‘we won’t be shouting it from

298

Brezhnev

the rooftops, since we are aware of the special situation facing Brandt’s government’.286 But, he said, they had to do everything within their power to help Brandt.287 Presumably he was just as worried for Brandt as he was about his own position. In later years, too, he made it clear to his Western interlocutors that the Soviet Union’s policies towards the West were entirely dependent on him and that if they failed his position would be in jeopardy.288 To protect Brandt, he eventually suggested various measures via the secret channel.289 His first idea was to publish a confidential report from 1962 in which Adenauer had proposed a ten-year truce to the Soviet ambassador Andrey Smirnov.290 But Bahr and Kevorkov agreed that this would be considered a breach of trust and could do even more damage.291 Publicly, Brezhnev attempted to drum up support by calling the treaty ‘a decision on war and peace’ and permitting a group of Russian Germans to travel to the Federal Republic. When Nixon’s security advisor Henry Kissinger visited Moscow in 1972, he even told him the USA had to do something to support Brandt.292 Finally, with Brandt facing the possibility of a vote of no confidence on 27 April 1972, Brezhnev resorted to extreme measures, sending a suitcase full of dollar bills to Bahr for him to buy a CDU deputy, but Bahr refused.293 In the lead-up to the federal parliament’s vote on Brandt’s future, on 19 May 1972 Andropov received regular live telephone updates from his man in Bonn, Kevorkov.294 The tension felt by Brezhnev is evident in his venting his frustration to the CC plenum on the day of the vote: because they were for the Cold War, the German opposition leaders Rainer Barzel, Franz Josef Strauss and company had stopped at nothing: ‘They’ve used lies, disinformation, blackmail and other methods German imperialism was well-versed in back in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.’295 The CDU had bought two deputies of the social-liberal coalition while in Moscow they had done everything they could to support Brandt’s government.296 Brandt won the vote – almost two years after they had been signed, the Moscow Treaties were finally in the bag.297 Preliminaries Brezhnev had won over Pompidou and Brandt and now set out to convince US President Nixon about his peace plans. A cooperation agreement with the USA complete with arms limitations, written recognition that the USSR was a superpower with the same rights and securing peaceful coexistence would be the third pillar and indeed the zenith of his foreign policy. On the one hand, Brezhnev needed Brandt and Pompidou personally as allies and as confidants who could indicate whether Nixon was serious about peace.298 On the other hand, the Moscow Treaties demonstrated to Washington that the Soviet Union was ready for further cooperation agreements. With the Four Power Agreement on Berlin, Brezhnev had already proven he was prepared to make concessions. As Aleksandrov-Agentov wrote in a note to him: ‘Having created a basis for discussion with Brandt, we can move on to actively “working” Washington.’299 The same held for Pompidou: having won over the Frenchman independent from NATO, the Politburo hoped the USA would be more conciliatory.300 US President Johnson had shelved his plans for 1968 after the invasion of Prague.301 Brezhnev may not have been too displeased that the summit planned with the USA

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

299

had been postponed indefinitely insofar as, in 1968, Johnson’s partner would have been Kosygin and not him.302 Given the war the USA was waging against the Communists in Vietnam, the advances Nixon had made towards Mao and the proxy war in the Middle East, relations with the Americans were much more complex than those with West Germany; in the latter case, Brezhnev only had to deal with the miffed East German leadership.303 Nixon’s reaction was similar to Brandt’s; in February 1969, after only a month in office, he communicated to the Soviet ambassador to the USA, Anatoliy Dobrynin, that he would like to establish a direct connection between the White House and the Kremlin. When the Soviet side hesitated, Nixon applied pressure via his secret visit to Peking and the corresponding diplomatic upgrading of China in the summer of 1971 – and Moscow relented.304 As with Bonn, the channel functioned on two levels: as long as Nixon and Brezhnev were not in direct contact, Dobrynin and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger led the exchange. Dobrynin and Kissinger soon became very close friends.305 Like the Bonn channel, the new conduit sprang into action whenever regular negotiations – such as the Berlin Agreement or SALT – hit a brick wall.306 But Nixon wanted more: he sought a meeting with Brezhnev, hoping that with Moscow’s help he could bring an end to the Vietnam War, which was becoming an increasingly contentious issue in America.307 But while Nixon openly wooed the Soviet leadership with the prospect that negotiations on the highest level could be ‘the meeting of the century’,308 Brezhnev still had to sell the idea of a summit to the party.309 The Politburo feared a meeting with the ‘class enemy’ could offend not only North Vietnam, but also their allies ‘in the Arab world’.310 Indeed, Egypt ended its cooperation with the Soviet Union following Nixon’s visit.311 Brezhnev also had to ensure that it was he and not Kosygin who would negotiate with the president and that it was he and not Gromyko who was the first to receive his messages.312 It was only once the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress had approved his Western policy in the spring of 1971 that Brezhnev dared inform his foreign contacts that in future all letters should be addressed to him and not to Kosygin.313 And it was only then that Nixon understood who was the most powerful man in Moscow. In November 1971, Brezhnev finally sold the summit to the CC plenum as a sign of Soviet strength: Nixon was only coming because the socialist camp was so strong and its course for peace was so persuasive.314 After the CC’s decision, nothing stood in the way of his meeting with Nixon. But before Nixon arrived in Moscow in May 1972, he sent National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger,315 just as Willy Brandt had sent Egon Bahr two years previously. And just as Brezhnev had won over Bahr as Brandt’s alter ego, he welcomed Kissinger ‘ebulliently’ upon meeting him on 20 April 1972 for secret preparatory talks in Moscow ahead of negotiations on Vietnam and the remaining questions concerning the SALT agreement.316 Even if it hadn’t been Brezhnev’s strategy to erase all ideological reservations with personal warmth, Kissinger couldn’t have found him more different to Mao: ‘Obviously torn between the advice he must have received to behave discreetly and his own gregarious impulse, he alternated between pummelling me and wearing a grave mien’.317 What Kissinger took to be typically Russian, ‘crudeness and warmth; at the same time brutal and engaging, cunning and

300

Brezhnev

disarming’,318 was Brezhnev’s attempt to be seen as a human and not as a communist. He proudly showed him the Tsar’s chambers, which would serve as Nixon’s accommodation; it was an honour, he said, to have the American president staying at the Kremlin.319 What Kissinger interpreted as a sign of uncertainty and striving for recognition was for Brezhnev another demonstration of how freely and undogmatically he dealt with the Tsarist past.320 These personal ties were reinforced over the following two years, which saw Brezhnev and Kissinger repeatedly come together for pre-negotiations. In May 1973, Brezhnev even invited the American to his hunting lodge in Zavidovo, a special honour which had been bestowed upon the French ambassador a year earlier but on hardly any other Western guests.321 Brezhnev not only treated Kissinger to dangerously fast motoring and boat trips, always taking the wheel himself and always reducing the two of them to their physicality, but Kissinger also received the dubious pleasure of going hunting with Brezhnev.322 One afternoon he found a hunting outfit in his rooms, a gift from his host. Although he disliked hunting, he had no option but to go along with it. Brezhnev countered his objection that he had never killed an animal by saying he could just watch. Together with interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev they perched in a raised hide, and after Brezhnev had shot two wild boars he opened his rucksack and produced Zakuskiy – Russian entrées – and a bottle of vodka, which Kissinger passed off as ‘beer’ in his memoirs.323 Sukhodrev thought, ‘At this moment it was no longer statesmen sitting in a hide with their interpreter, but simple fellows, hunters taking a break.’324 Even if Kissinger had mixed feelings about the hunting trip,325 it seems that with this personal touch, Brezhnev sought to nip in the bud any doubts his guest might have had that he stood for anything other than himself. He used his physicality to underline he was not a place holder for a hostile world view; rather, as he stood before Kissinger, flesh and blood, he was a man just like him who sought peace with every fibre of his body. The Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky described Brezhnev as a ‘“bear-hug” type of man’ who sought physical contact with every guest.326 And Kissinger too warned Nixon ahead of his visit about Brezhnev’s impetuous embraces: ‘He will be polite sometimes to the point of excessive warmth, including physical contact.’327 Body politics Brezhnev did indeed practise his ‘body politics’ with Nixon upon his arrival in Moscow on 22 May, three days after Brezhnev had reiterated at the May Plenum that normalizing relations with the US in the interests of ‘developing peace’ would only benefit the Soviet Union.328 Brezhnev left the elements of protocol he was not entitled to perform to Podgorny and Kosygin, and it was they who greeted Nixon at the airport. But no sooner had their American guest set foot in the Kremlin than Brezhnev rushed him into his office for a private conversation attended only by his own interpreter.329 For Brezhnev, it was vital to immediately make personal contact, show he was approachable and affable and allow no doubts as to his genuine intentions for peace. He wanted Nixon to get to know him as a person before they encountered each other in the context of official ceremony. Nixon welcomed the invitation to speak with Brezhnev face to face and not via the apparatus: ‘If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats we will never achieve any

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

301

Figure 31 Richard Nixon and Brezhnev between officers of the Black Sea Fleet, 1974.

progress.’ Brezhnev agreed: ‘Then we would simply perish.’ The president confirmed: ‘They would simply bury us in paper.’330 Their silent agreement was twofold: my bureaucratic machinery is different to yours, but both are just as cumbersome; we’ll only solve problems by speaking man to man. Nixon then spoke of the cooperation between Stalin and Roosevelt during the Second World War and Brezhnev was happy: they agreed to maintain such direct, personal relations and circumvent their bureaucrats.331 Finally, they shared their problems with each other: Brezhnev could not negotiate without Podgorny and Kosygin, while Nixon was yet to inform State Secretary William P. Rogers that during his stay in Moscow he would sign the Basic Principles for the avoidance of a third world war.332 They thereby turned it into a case of them against us: the two ideological opponents were now partners and their companions were the enemy. Against this background, the five days of negotiation in Moscow were predominantly symbolic in nature, demonstrating not only to the excluded international public but also their own governments that competitors were now working together.333 But this too was a learning process supported by many small gestures. Like Bahr, Brandt and Kissinger, Nixon was treated to anecdotes showing his host was anything but dogmatic. At dinner in the Kremlin, they sat opposite a painting of the Last Supper. Brezhnev remarked it was apparently the Politburo of its day, and Nixon replied by saying that must mean he had plenty in common with the pope. ‘Brezhnev laughed and reached over and shook my hand.’334

302

Brezhnev

What Brezhnev communicated non-verbally, Nixon said of himself quite openly at the negotiations’ very outset: I know that my reputation is one of being a very hard-line, cold-war oriented, anti-communist. […] It is true that I have a strong belief in our system […] but at the same time I respect those who believe just as strongly in their own systems. There must be room in this world for two great nations with different systems to live together and work together.335

They thus agreed not only to discuss everything personally, but also to put aside all potential ideological differences. That is not to say that their five days of tense negotiations on the remaining questions of the SALT and ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty were without tough exchanges concerning the number of ABM sites, silo size, missile volumes and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.336 But on the personal level, each conflict could be overcome. Brezhnev demonstrated how close he was to Nixon and how confident he was they could solve the problems in tandem when he virtually abducted his guest during his third visit, to the horror of his bodyguards. The programme included a trip to the countryside, but instead of waiting for the official convoy, Brezhnev proposed they leave immediately, and ushered him into his car, which hurtled off at high speed.337 While the secret service was still trying to establish the address of the government dacha, Brezhnev invited Nixon to join him on a hydrofoil; Nixon relates that the helmsman powered down the river at a breakneck speed of ninety kilometres per hour.338 Brezhnev clearly wanted to ensure they had a physical experience and distract him from the grey apparatchiks Podgorny and Kosygin. He told interpreter Sukhodrev he couldn’t stand their miserable faces, that was not his idea of hospitality.339 Thus Nixon experienced a curious shift between Brezhnev’s intoxicating cheerfulness and aggressive, dogmatic reproaches for Vietnam in the presence of Podgorny and Kosygin.340 Nixon had no way of knowing that the three hours of hostile Vietnam rhetoric that followed the boating trip were a concession to the Politburo and Hanoi. The North Vietnamese capital was informed the Soviet leadership had told Nixon the tale.341 Kissinger, however, suspected it was a ‘charade’: ‘They were speaking for the record, and when they had said enough to have a transcript to send to Hanoi, they would stop.’342 Nixon recalled, ‘I momentarily thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when Brezhnev, who had just been laughing and slapped me on the back, started shouting angrily […].’343 Indeed, after his performance of the orthodox party politician, at dinner Brezhnev was quite a different person and once again showed himself to be an affable joke-teller. In the company of Nixon and Pompidou, he formed a habit of making their ministers and advisors the butt of the joke; they bonded by taking the mickey out of their allegedly incompetent stooges.344 The jokes, the laughter, the touching and the spontaneity were characteristics that clearly distinguished Brezhnev from Podgorny, Kosygin and Gromyko, who did fit the mould of the narrow-minded party politician. Nixon noted, ‘Kosygin is really all business, a very cool customer with very little outward warmth. He is by Communist terms an aristocrat; while Podgorny is more like a Midwestern senator; and Brezhnev

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

303

like a big Irish labor boss […].’345 Even if Nixon did not necessarily read Brezhnev’s signals as those of a ‘Western statesman’, he found him ‘very warm and friendly’.346 Acting the Western statesman Brezhnev was at the peak of his power. In November 1972, the second strand of his foreign policy began to take shape with the negotiations to establish a permanent conference for peace and cooperation in Europe. These negotiations were the result of persistent talks with his friends Brandt, Pompidou and Nixon. But while the Nobel Peace Prize went to Brandt in 1971 for his Eastern policy and to Kissinger for negotiating a ceasefire with North Vietnam in 1973, Brezhnev went empty-handed. He is said to have been aggrieved he did not receive the award together with Brandt.347 Instead, he was presented with the Soviet equivalent by his party, the Lenin Prize for Peace. The CC thereby recognized that Brezhnev had made a ‘personal contribution’ to securing peace.348 Of no less importance was that the CC members at this plenum in April 1973 elected Andropov, Gromyko and Minister of Defence Grechko to the Politburo, retiring Shelest and Gennadiy Voronov, sworn opponents of Brezhnev’s Western policy.349 He thus continued to increase his power over his rivals Kosygin and Podgorny. For Brezhnev, the election of Andropov, universally interpreted as strengthening the power of the KGB, principally meant securing his foreign policy course, which Andropov had played a key role in developing with him.350 He had also forced Gromyko and Andropov to put aside their rivalry and work together in this area; Gromyko for his part had plumped for Brezhnev in the power struggle between the general secretary and Kosygin.351 Together with the acknowledgement of his personal achievements, the addition of Gromyko to his camp, forcing out Kosygin and Podgorny, was a major coup: it allowed Brezhnev new room for manoeuvre and a certain autonomy in the further development of his foreign policy. He told Brandt he had ‘swum free’ in the April – that is, at the CC plenum.352 He now had the opportunity to present himself entirely as a Western statesman and finally follow up his stay with Pompidou with visits to his West German and American friends in the capitalist world. The year 1973 was thus a busy one for Brezhnev in terms of foreign policy; indeed, he barely had time to take care of anything else.353 Having met Pompidou in White Russia in the January for informal discussions on the final phase of the CSCE process,354 he visited Bonn for talks with Brandt, which he hoped would be ‘as in Oreanda’: not too much of a programme and plenty of time for personal exchange. This time they dined in a relaxed atmosphere and the best of moods in Brandt’s garden.355 Brezhnev returned from Bonn in such high spirits he had two kilograms of black caviar sent to Brandt for his sixtieth birthday.356 In the June, Brezhnev stayed with Nixon at Camp David and was a guest at his private ranch in San Clemente, California; he insisted on staying at Nixon’s house, and further developed a closeness to his host over a private dinner and conversations about children and grandchildren.357 On the way home, he paid a visit to Pompidou in Paris, to tell his friend all the news from the USA. The consensus in Bonn was that the Soviet general secretary was using his trip to the Rhine on the one hand as a demonstration of power on the domestic front,

304

Brezhnev

showing he had tamed the aggressive West Germany with his peace policy and tapped into its economic strength for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Indeed, Brezhnev did hope to gain more loans, imports and technological assistance with harnessing the energy resources in Western Siberia, and he sought the most-favoured-nation clause from the USA.358 On the other hand, the West German Foreign Office thought his main objective was to improve his image in the West.359 The opinion at the top was, then, that Brezhnev was attempting to strike a Western pose. And he did indeed attach great importance to press contacts and used his interview with the West German broadcaster ZDF to joke around with interviewer Knut Terjung, ribbing him and showing himself to be a relaxed, easygoing fellow.360 Assessing his enthusiasm for presenting himself to the press, giving interviews and making speeches in front of the television cameras, Nixon also noted, ‘like a skilled actor or a born politician, he knew how to hold center stage’.361 He certainly hit the nail on the head: Brezhnev was playing a role he clearly enjoyed. His aide Arbatov came to the same conclusion: ‘Sometimes I noticed he was “playing” roles during meetings with foreigners (and not at all badly).’362 His personal doctor Chazov also said of the way he spoke, joked and was eager to please, ‘One can thus say back then Brezhnev was a typical American “politician”.’363 Just as he had made his first impression with his ‘Alain Delon photo’ in 1971, he repeatedly used his appearance to indicate he was ‘Western’. When he was gifted a windbreaker with ‘Camp David’ emblazoned on it during his visit in 1973, he wore it the whole time he was there.364 Both his posing in a casual tracksuit or demonstratively sporting his Camp David jacket and the tasteful suits he otherwise wore, together with his groomed appearance, were signs of his ‘Westernness’. Nixon and Brandt did indeed take notice; they observed the contrast between Brezhnev’s outfit and the poor lounge suits worn by Khrushchev and other Soviet cadres.365 Nixon went so far as to remark, ‘Brezhnev was even something of a fashion plate in his own way.’366 But Brezhnev’s efforts were certainly not limited to appearances. To avoid any association with a dogmatic socialism, quite often he shunned the Communist Party leaders in the countries he visited. In Bonn he spent more time talking to the anticommunist Franz Josef Strauss than with the German Communist Party; he even walked Strauss to his car.367 In France, he preferred Pompidou to the French Communist leader Georges Marchais, whom he considered a fantasist removed from reality.368 Brezhnev was convinced: On the one hand, Pompidou for his part (like Nixon and Brandt too) understood very well that we only use ideology on the domestic front, that is, where we can put it into practice with state resources. We aren’t such idiots that we would get involved in ideological exercises in trade and state relations with those who could tell us to go to … at any moment.369

The speeding statesman In his efforts not to come over as a hardliner, Brezhnev overlooked, however, that for Western statesmen, dignified behaviour went hand in hand with a certain comme il

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

305

Figure 32 Brezhnev getting into the Mercedes he had just been given, on the Petersberg outside Bonn, 1973.

faut which he repeatedly transgressed with his clumsy gestures – occasionally leading to a lot of headshaking. In playing his role, Brezhnev ‘hammed’ somewhat by taking liberties that were not only untypical of a Soviet party leader, but also broke with the etiquette of diplomacy. The Western heads of state themselves interpreted these ‘exaggerations’ as ‘typically Russian’ or a sign of insecurity or nervousness.370 Nixon

306

Brezhnev

observed, ‘His conduct and humor were almost impish at many of his public appearances. Whenever possible, I acted as his straightman on these occasions, but it was sometimes difficult for me to balance politeness against dignity.’371 Nixon put into words what several of his Western interlocutors probably felt: that in his attempts to please and impress, Brezhnev often overstepped the boundaries of good taste or statesmanly behaviour. It seems he thought the characteristic that set him apart from his comrades in the Politburo also made him appear ‘Western’: his passion for fast cars, his eye for the ladies and his ability to joke and flirt with people.372 This is probably the root of many of the legendary anecdotes about Brezhnev, for instance how in 1973, when visiting West Germany and the USA, on both occasions he surprised everyone by jumping in the driver’s seat of the limousine allocated to him and hurtling off at breakneck speed. One might say his temperament got the better of him; however, it also sent a not entirely unconscious message: I’m not a stiff apparatchik, I share your values. Whether Brezhnev really understood his behaviour was a breach of etiquette and his clumsy performance was far from that of the Western statesman remains uncertain. In preparation for his visit in 1973, the Foreign Office in Bonn noted, ‘His hobbies are hunting, football and cars. President Nixon thus gave him a “Cadillac” during his visit to Moscow, Pompidou a “Citroën-Maserati” ’ in Paris.373 Indeed, in October 1971, Pompidou had fulfilled a lifelong wish of Brezhnev’s by allowing him to visit the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt – an honour that had been withheld from Khrushchev in 1960. Moreover, not only had Brezhnev been given a car there,374 but Pompidou had also surprised him with a Maserati. Brezhnev had appeared overwhelmed: ‘I’m speechless. I’m a great car-lover. I’ve driven almost every make, state and private cars. Above all I love […] Citroëns: they’re smooth, comfortable, without being too big, one can relax very well in them.’375 And so the German federal government splashed out and honoured its guest, who was staying on the Petersberg outside Bonn, with a Mercedes 450 SLC coupé. The then ambassador Falin recalled, ‘Without saying a word, the general secretary sat behind the wheel, revved the engine and as his astonished bodyguards looked on, drove down the winding road and, turning at the bottom, back up again, turned the engine off, slammed the door, placed a hand on the bonnet and said, “Good motor”’.376 Falin was discreet enough not to mention, however, that in pulling out of the hotel forecourt, he drove over a kerbstone and tore open the oil sump. There are many variations on the legend of how he drove over another kerb on the narrow winding roads, again damaging the car.377 It was in fact only a demonstrator model. Afterwards, however, Brezhnev almost drove the protocol department and the Mercedes-Benz factory in Sindelfingen to despair when he could not decide which model to choose and kept changing his order via the channel, until finally opting for a four-door 450 SE in metallic blue.378 While Brandt did not share the ride with his racer guest, Nixon was not quite as lucky. After he had taken a black Cadillac to Moscow in 1972, the one in which Kissinger was forced to endure Brezhnev’s rampage, Washington had indicated that there was no budget for a second vehicle. However, Moscow had insisted and eventually Ford donated a dark-blue Lincoln Continental with black velvet upholstery

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

307

Figure 33 Brezhnev behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental with Nixon in the passenger seat, Camp David 1973.

and a greeting engraved on the dashboard.379 When Nixon handed Brezhnev the keys at Camp David, he ‘did not attempt to conceal his delight’, as Nixon recalled: He insisted upon trying it out immediately. He got behind the wheel and enthusiastically motioned me into the passenger’s seat. The head of my Secret Service detail went pale as I climbed in and we took off down one of the narrow roads that run around the perimeter of Camp David. […] I could only imagine what would happen if a Secret Service or Navy jeep had suddenly turned a corner onto that one-lane road. At one point there is a very steep slope with a sign at the top reading, ‘Slow, dangerous curve.’ Even driving a golf cart down it, I had to use the brakes in order to avoid going off the road at the sharp turn at the bottom. Brezhnev was driving more than fifty miles an hour as we approached the slope. I reached over and said, ‘Slow down, slow down,’ but he paid no attention. When we reached the bottom, there was a squeal of rubber as he slammed on the brakes and made the turn. After our drive he said to me, ‘This is a very fine automobile. It holds the road very well.’ ‘You are an excellent driver,’ I replied. ‘I would never have been able to make that turn at the speed at which we were traveling.’380

308

Brezhnev

It was encounters like this that made it difficult for Nixon to maintain the balance between politeness and dignity while Brezhnev succumbed to his Western, but hardly statesmanly passion and did not seem to notice he was upsetting others. The people’s statesman Brezhnev also occasionally caused more bother than was befitting a Western statesman with his urge to show he was a down-to-earth politician who enjoyed playing to the crowd. In both Bonn and Washington, he repeatedly disrupted the programme set out in the protocol with such escapades. It would seem he had enjoyed riding in an opentop car, being cheered by the people lining the street at the Arc de Triomphe during his visit to Pompidou in Paris.381 In Bonn, he wanted to repeat the experience and get out of the car en route to the Chancellor’s Office to greet the people lining the street. However, because the entire convoy could not be halted, he opened up the roof to wave to the people. As he explained to his ambassador, Falin, it was very much his intention to draw attention to himself with such stunts: ‘People will certainly remember something unplanned. Otherwise I’m just jumping from one event to another as if programmed.’382 He sought, then, to break out of the corset-like role that was imposed upon him, a role that suppressed his spontaneity and closeness to the people. Nixon too had to endure it when he hosted him at the White House: As we came to the end of the front line of troops [forming a guard of honour] and were about to walk by the rear ranks, Brezhnev could no longer suppress his animation and joviality. He waved enthusiastically at the spectators, who were applauding and waving American and Soviet flags, and then strode over to them just like an American politician working the crowd at a county fair. He shook hands with several people and grinned broadly as they reached out to him until I reminded him that we had to complete the ceremony. As we walked back to the South Portico, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘See, we’re already making progress!’383

While Brezhnev was delighted with his own progress when it came to Western publicity, not only his interlocutors but also the protocol departments groaned as their Soviet guest repeatedly upended the programme. In the most unstatesmanly fashion, he simply failed to show up to scheduled meetings without giving prior notice – or let them know at unexpected times.384 Although he had begun his trip to the USA by spending a weekend on his own at Camp David in order to acclimatize, he was clearly suffering from the difference between the time zones.385 At Nixon’s ranch he thus asked if they could bring dinner forward so he could go to bed earlier – only to demand negotiations on the Middle East at ten at night, when the president himself had gone to bed.386 It shows how much trust Nixon and Kissinger had already placed in Brezhnev that they did not interpret this blatant breach of protocol as deliberate provocation but put it down to their guest’s jetlag.387 In this respect, they had realized that he was not representing the ‘enemy’, but still needed a few lessons in statesmanly etiquette. They saw the delight he took in greeting

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

309

the Hollywood stars invited in his honour, how pleased he was with the Colts he was given by the western hero Chuck Connors and the sincerity with which he presented his own private gifts, including a hand-sewn scarf for the first lady:388 ‘ “It is a modest gift,” he said, “but every stitch in this piece of fabric represents the affection and friendship which all the people of the Soviet Union have for the people of the United States and which Mrs. Brezhnev and I have for you and President Nixon.” Tears again came to his eyes as he spoke.’389 The virile statesman However, Brezhnev took his own wife neither to Bonn nor to the USA, offering health problems as an explanation.390 Viktoriya Petrovna accompanied him to Paris in 1971, but it was the first and only time.391 It is speculation, but it seems Brezhnev feared that like Khrushchev’s wife Nina Petrovna she could seem like a ‘dumb peasant’ and thus detract from his charm offensive as a ‘Western politician’. Kevorkov certainly characterized the Soviet ‘first lady’ as ‘An immobile lady suffering from several complexes who preferred to stay at home’.392 If Brezhnev’s interpreter is to be believed, he was not only concerned about his smart Western image. He claims Brezhnev told him that travelling with one’s own wife was like taking coals to Newcastle. In Camp David, he had lived in a summer house with a Soviet flight attendant, whom he quite openly introduced to Nixon.393 Even if Nixon remained silent, it would be in keeping with Brezhnev that he paraded his virility, both for its own sake and to shake off the shadow of the po-faced apparatchik. Kissinger reports that after he had brought his secretary to negotiations in Moscow, next time Brezhnev came accompanied by two young women, as if it were a competition.394 Helmut Schmidt too confirms that, on the one hand, Brezhnev displayed a very patriarchal attitude, believing that there was no place for women in politics and that they should not even be present at signing ceremonies – as Schmidt’s wife Loki once discovered, to her great frustration. On the other hand, Schmidt noted, he enjoyed playing a Casanova, occasionally even plundering the table decorations to give a lady a rose.395 Brezhnev made no attempt to hide his opinion that a politician had no reason to be ashamed of his virility – indeed, it was something to be proud of. When Kissinger joked in 1972 that if he stayed in Moscow too long for the pre-negotiations, people would think he had a girlfriend, Brezhnev replied, ‘We hand out prizes for that, especially concerning men as old as I. If that were to happen to me I would get a medal. After 65, one gets the “order of the badge of honor” for one’s ability.’396 What was meant as a joke here became a deeply serious matter upon Brandt’s resignation amidst rumours of extra-marital affairs. Brezhnev was furious: you didn’t resign over alleged photos with girlfriends, if they even existed. ‘And if they did exist, I’d pay good money for them, especially if I looked like a real man on them. But I would certainly not resign.’397 Even if acting like a womanizer breached the code of conduct of the ‘Western statesman’, at least officially, for Brezhnev it was clearly part of the Western politician’s repertoire. It is speculation whether Brezhnev’s message that he was a ‘normal man’ with ‘natural needs’ – following bourgeois double standards rather than socialist

310

Brezhnev

prudery – actually impressed the Western heads of state. There is no record, however, that they were put off by it either. Presumably every sign they thought they really understood was welcome and helpful for establishing trust. At least Willy Brandt and Georges Pompidou will have understood his eye for the ‘fairer sex’. Nixon is said to have told the flight attendant in Brezhnev’s summer house: ‘Take good care of him!’398 After all, Brezhnev had told Nixon and Kissinger quite openly that he found them easier to talk to than his comrades Podgorny and Kosygin.399 His aides wondered how he would be able to speak the appropriate language with the leaders of the brother states after this ideological U-turn.400 The end of the ‘Big Four’ Brezhnev’s first visit to the USA was a great triumph. He not only secured a huge increase in grain supplies, but he and Nixon also signed the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.401 He could point to political successes and had reinforced his friendship with Nixon.402 It was a promising start on all counts. When he visited Pompidou for a couple of days en route to the USSR, he was able to talk to him like an old friend. He felt very much at home at the Château de Rambouillet, where he stayed and had three extensive discussions with the French president. Brezhnev underlined that he had not prepared any questions so he could speak completely freely, and mischievously apologized for forgetting to say hello from Podgorny and Kosygin. Before leaving for Moscow, he told Pompidou in all sincerity, ‘We were extremely open with each other and, as we say in Russia, without trust there is no love.’ Pompidou replied, ‘And without love there is no trust.’403 Their next meeting was already planned: like Brandt three years previously, Pompidou was to travel to Crimea or to Pitsunda on the Caucasian coast to recuperate, as Brezhnev suggested: ‘I have a villa there you can have the run of. […] That would also be a political gesture: the President of the Republic of France comes to us on holiday.’404 But while 1973 went to plan for Brezhnev, 1974 was a disaster. By the end of the year, Brandt and Nixon had resigned, Pompidou had died and Brezhnev’s addiction to pills was beginning to show. The year began auspiciously: on 12 to 13 March, Pompidou visited Pitsunda on the Abkhazian Black Sea coast, where Brezhnev collected him from the airport in person. The two happily noted it was the sixth time they had met, and Brezhnev was again late to say hello from Podgorny and Kosygin, having done all he could to leave them behind in Moscow.405 The discussions took place in a relaxed atmosphere. They agreed to be the engine for a peaceful Europe. As Pompidou put it, ‘Your country lies far to the East and we lie far to the West. Whatever is in between, it won’t have genuine stability without agreement between our countries.’406 Less than three weeks later, on 2 April 1974, the French president suddenly died of septicaemia as a result of his hushed-up Waldenström disease. At their meeting in Paris in 1971, Pompidou had already told Brezhnev, ‘You’ll bury me.’407 Brezhnev had taken it as a joke in response to his remark that everyone in his family had lived to a ripe old age. Only twenty-two days later, Brezhnev received more bad news from Bonn: the chancellor’s aide Günter Guillaume had been arrested as an East German spy.

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

311

Brezhnev had already been worried about Brandt’s political career before 1974. Firstly, he was afraid of the power of the CDU/CSU, and secondly, it was no secret that East German leader Erich Honecker was deeply angered by Moscow’s policy of rapprochement with Bonn. Andropov knew that his East German comrades had placed informers in the Soviet embassy in order to be kept abreast about everything that was going on between the Union and the Federal Republic.408 But clearly no one in Moscow had any idea the Stasi had directly infiltrated the chancellor’s office. Nor had Andropov or Brezhnev thought it possible that the arrest on 24 April would cause Brandt to resign just ten days later. Brezhnev considered it a personal affront that Honecker had not withdrawn his spy after the Kremlin had established contact with the chancellor, and would never forgive him.409 He was incensed when Andropov put him in the picture: Now please tell me, Yura, what’s going on there. For years the general secretary of the CC of the CPSU has been doing everything together with the federal chancellor to build relations between our countries that could change the situation in the whole world, and suddenly a little fuss is made about women and photos … And who came up with the idea? Our German friends, of all people!410

The day after Brandt’s resignation, the channel got in touch and shared Brezhnev’s reaction: The resignation is a severe blow to the politics of peace. […] He was very sorry. The resignation would make European politics, but also world politics much more difficult. It was a great blow. It was a severe blow for him too. It was completely unexpected. He spoke very emotionally and swore dreadfully about Honecker. There would be consequences.411

But Brezhnev was also furious with Brandt for not having stuck out the crisis: ‘You can tell immediately that Brandt was never in the war. If he’d gone through this bloody massacre, he would have crushed the intrigues of his camarilla with his bare hands like an irritating fly.’412 Brezhnev took Brandt’s drama personally: ‘He felt as if the camera had looked not into Brandt’s bed, but into his own.’413 After the loss of Pompidou and Brandt, Brezhnev was determined to do everything to ensure Nixon’s political survival. The Watergate affair was already underway when he visited the USA in 1973; for Brezhnev, it was an irritation to which he remained demonstratively indifferent.414 In 1974, he upheld Nixon’s invitation to a tête-à-tête in Moscow and Crimea not despite, but because of his impending impeachment. Nixon was moved by Brezhnev’s declarations of solidarity and used the meeting and the pictures with Brezhnev to show that he was indispensable for peace with the Soviet Union.415 When Nixon landed in Moscow on 27 June, Brezhnev demonstratively picked him up from the airport despite the fact that in terms of protocol, it was still not his job to do so, and immediately whisked him away for one-to-one conversation.416 In Crimea, in the grotto of the summer residence, they had intensive and confidential discussions attended only by the interpreter.417 As with Willy Brandt, Brezhnev took Richard

312

Brezhnev

Nixon on a boating trip, put his arm round the president and told him, ‘We must do something of vast historical importance. We want every Russian and every American to be friends that talk to each other as you and I are talking to each other here on this boat.’418 Although they didn’t sign any new agreements, they both deemed the summit to have been a success.419 On 3 July, Brezhnev said goodbye to his friend at the airport; on 8 August, Nixon announced his resignation to avoid impeachment. The severity of the blow of losing all three partners should not be underestimated. It was a disaster for Brezhnev’s foreign policy. His warnings via the channel to Bonn and Washington sounded almost helpless: ‘There had been the new big four for the politics of détente: Pompidou is dead, Brandt gone, Nixon’s fate uncertain; Brezhnev is alone.’420 ‘Nixon, Brandt, and Pompidou were the three with whom that relationship was strongest. Now all three are gone.’421 But despite his great despair, Brezhnev now had one main question: how were the three successors to be assessed? Would there be continuity? ‘What, the question is asked repeatedly, is this man’s [Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s] stance on the Soviet Union, on Eastern policy, how will he influence it, what will his directives be?’422 Brezhnev was determined not to allow a break in the relations; under no circumstances could the structures of mistrust return to cloud personal friendships. With the energy that derives from desperation, he invited Helmut Schmidt to Moscow as early as the October, received the new US president Gerald Ford in Vladivostik in the November, and in the December he travelled to Paris to meet French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Stress Brezhnev was under great stress. He had put all his eggs in the ‘peaceful coexistence’ basket and knew that Podgorny, Suslov and Kosygin were just waiting for him to fail; they were only too pleased to see Nixon fall.423 In November 1973, there had been conflict in the Politburo, once again revealing the battlelines.424 As Brezhnev would later write to Brandt, ‘Life subjects us politicians to unusual burdens, requires all our strength and demands that we completely exhaust ourselves […].’425 Stress and sleeplessness had constantly dogged him ever since the Stalin era and the negotiations with Dubček. And his Western interlocutors certainly noticed his great unrest. On the one hand, they explained his behaviour as being due to his ‘southern’ or ‘sanguine’ temperament or the fact that he was very emotional, as Brezhnev himself readily confessed to being: ‘I’m a very impressionable man and I was very moved […].’426 On the other hand, they certainly saw the political pressure he was under.427 Kissinger briefed Nixon: He is nervous, partly because of his personal insecurity, partly for physiological reasons traced to his consumption of alcohol and tobacco, his history of heart disease and the pressures of his job. You will find his hands perpetually in motion, twirling his watch chain (gold), flicking ashes from his ever-present cigarette, clanging his cigarette-holder against an ash tray. From time to time, he may stand up behind his chair or walk about.428

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

313

Brezhnev’s hands clearly always needed to be occupied with something. He once even took a toy cannon to negotiations with Kissinger, playing with it all the while.429 When he wasn’t fiddling, he smoked. For self-discipline, he had a cigarette box fitted with a mechanism that could only be opened once an hour.430 But he always had a back-up packet with him.431 After his doctors had forbidden him to smoke, he asked his aides, and sometimes Helmut Schmidt, to smoke in his presence and blow into his face.432 While he smoked by day, he took sleeping pills to relax at noon and at night. He had even openly told Pompidou, ‘The analyses show that the composition of blood is constant. My blood pressure is around 80–120, apart from when I’m very tired. So my doctor is unconcerned and never gives me anything apart from sedatives.’433 It is hard to say when exactly his use of sedatives spiralled out of control. The unapologetic tardiness encountered by Kissinger in Zavidovo, Brandt in Bonn and with Nixon at Camp David are thought to have been due to excessive use. The respective protocol departments were simply surprised and put it down to Russian bluntness, Brezhnev’s moods or Soviet allures.434 He managed to get through Helmut Schmidt’s visit to Moscow in October 1974 without any faux pas.435 After being ‘in high spirits’ during this encounter, he travelled on to Vladivistok in a very tense mood to get to know the new American president. His bodyguards and doctors saw he was at his limits, and feared a breakdown.436 Unlike the discussions with Schmidt, the purpose of this meeting was not only to secure friendship. There would also be crucial negotiations on ballistic missiles, multiple warheads, submarines and bombers – the issues that had remained unregulated by SALT I and now had to be dealt with in order to conclude SALT II.437 Relations between Washington and Moscow were also taking on a new complexion. Brezhnev was concerned that the USA was again increasingly laying claim to being the strongest world power. In 1974, Democrats Henry M. Jackson and Charles Vanik had also pushed through a law restricting trade with countries that did not allow their Jewish population and other would-be émigrés to leave. Brezhnev found both factors deeply irritating.438 However, things got off to an auspicious start with Ford on 23 November. Despite the very Spartan improvized accommodation in a sanatorium for members of the military (which reminded Ford of an abandoned youth camp), the two immediately hit it off when they realized they were football fans. Brezhnev could also take up his ribbing of Kissinger – ‘Why did you have to bring him with you?’439 – and discovered that they were better than the Americans at clearing snow: ‘ “That’s our first agreement”, he said, “We’ll send you Soviet snowploughs.” ’440 Nevertheless, a chain-smoking Brezhnev was very tense during the subsequent negotiations.441 As a concession, he said the cap on 2,400 missiles and 1,320 multiple warheads would not have to include the USA’s European missiles. In return, he demanded the USA stop building Trident submarines and B-1 bombers, but Ford refused.442 While they repeatedly took breaks, they skipped dinner and did not retire until midnight before starting again the next morning.443 After a tour of the city with Ford, Brezhnev lay down and did not wake up; he had clearly taken pills. When his doctors finally woke him, they urgently recommended he cancel further negotiations, but their patient was having none of it and insisted they kept the incident a secret.444

314

Brezhnev

He was able to bid Ford a proper farewell before embarking on his next trip, to Mongolia. He collapsed again on the train.445 While the American press proclaimed Ford had pulled off within three months what Nixon had not managed to achieve in five years, the president did not dare to sign SALT II ahead of the elections scheduled for late 1976. He also began to avoid using the word ‘détente’ and abolished the American–Russian Commercial Commission.446 Just as the two years of uncertainty over whether the Moscow Treaties would be ratified ate away at Brezhnev’s health,447 he now faced another nervous wait. Would his efforts pay off, would he ever get to sign SALT II? He hoped Ford would be re-elected – but wished Nixon were back.448

The return to mistrust When Brezhnev arrived in Paris for his inaugural meeting in 4 December 1974, he was no longer on top of his addiction. In Vladivostok, Ford was evidently unaware of his breakdown, but in Paris he could not hide his condition from the new French president. With Schmidt and Ford, he had been able to continue his policy of building man-to-man relations, but he was at risk of failing with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in December 1974. The president’s staff made every effort to enable personal encounters, and even suggested to Brezhnev that he go hunting with Giscard. But Brezhnev’s advisors declined – probably due to his nerves – and generally made it clear that the programme was too ‘full’; there should only be a ‘maximum’ of discussions.449 But Brezhnev was not even up to this ‘maximum of discussions’. He risked throwing away his trump card, personal relations, when he left the French president waiting for hours in the Château de Rambouillet. In the symbolic world of diplomacy, where every minute someone is left waiting is considered a calculated affront, Brezhnev’s inability to control when he woke and fell asleep was a disaster. Nixon, Brandt and Kissinger had overlooked his minor delays, since they knew and liked him. But when he repeatedly asked Giscard to postpone their first discussion on 5 December – initially from 5.00 pm to 5.30, then to 6.00 and a little later to 6.30, Giscard was so annoyed that he insisted on 6.00. He feared there would be a scandal if the press got wind of these delays; they would say Brezhnev was putting him in his place.450 When Brezhnev finally showed up, he had difficulties walking and speaking: ‘His gait is uncertain, by no means sovereign, as if he has to find the right direction with every step.’451 As Giscard correctly assumed, the Soviet entourage largely consisted of doctors. Giscard had no inkling, however, that no one had been able to wake Brezhnev due to sedatives and that his doctors feared he could collapse any minute.452 While that didn’t happen, over the course of the four-day visit Brezhnev repeatedly got up and stumbled out of the room, mumbling his apologies for having to take a rest.453 Their health was not the only thing separating the two men: the refined Giscard expected the usual diplomatic formulations, while the straightforward Brezhnev rejected classical diplomacy. Giscard spoke freely, while Brezhnev stuck to his prepared papers.454 It was no basis on which to recreate the camaraderie he had enjoyed with Pompidou. Brezhnev did manage to achieve his goals; the president

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

315

agreed to sign a CSCE agreement at a summit, and also signed several economic agreements.455 But the French secret service are alleged to have been so alarmed by Brezhnev’s condition that they bugged his toilet, diagnosing him as at death’s door without establishing the actual reason.456 Brezhnev found himself in a vicious circle: the stress of potentially failing in the area of foreign policy had driven him to addiction to pills, which in turn undermined his strategy of rapprochement via male bonding. Since the true reason for his health was kept as secret as possible, his discussion partners interpreted his cancellations and no-shows as an affront, provocation or a change of direction in the Politburo. A year later, when Giscard visited Moscow in October 1975, Brezhnev kept him waiting a whole day.457 Again, a scandal loomed as Giscard’s staff were outraged: ‘You can’t have that! The journalists have already been informed. They’re phoning Paris to report Brezhnev is snubbing you.’458 Giscard was faced with a choice: ‘I weigh up the pros – Brezhnev’s health – and the cons – my position of power.’459 He saw a Brezhnev who on the one hand continued his ‘body politics’ by leaving the room hand in hand with his French guest, but on the other hand was physically ailing having been given, he suspected, strong injections.460 Giscard decided to accept the wait, but the press went to town over it.461 Brezhnev’s infirmity meant that the two of them only met every other year and not annually as he had with Pompidou. In 1977, it was Brezhnev’s turn to visit Paris, but there was a long back and forth over whether Giscard might not go to Moscow instead – a discussion which Paris considered undignified, Giscard’s staff rejecting the offer as ‘totally unacceptable’ – and ultimately over when the visit would take place, if at all. Finally, it was arranged that Brezhnev would pay a two-day visit to Rambouillet, the only place he was prepared to stay, and where he read out papers no one understood.462 The president told his Council of Ministers: ‘It seems nothing is possible any more: they keep changing the time, the programme and the subjects.’463 In 1979 Moscow left Paris hanging for two months, claiming Brezhnev was getting over a cold.464 He was painfully aware how disastrous such postponements and the resultant speculation were, and personally collected Giscard from the airport. In the car, he came straight out with it: ‘ “I would like to tell you that I’m very ill.” I hold my breath. I can’t help imagining everything this sentence, broadcast by the media, could trigger. Does he know that the Western press makes assumptions daily about the state of his health, about the time he’s got left?’465 He didn’t tell him he was addicted to pills; instead, he said he had injured his jaw, and hence had difficulty speaking clearly – he was receiving radiation therapy and the doctors were upbeat. In typical fashion, he placed a hand on Giscard’s knee and confided, ‘But I’ll soon be back on my feet. I have the constitution of a horse.’466 Doctors instead of diplomats Brezhnev’s addiction was also the reason signing the Helsinki Final Act establishing the CSCE on 1 August 1975 was not a triumph leading to greater détente, but the dawn of a new era of mistrust.467 He had tirelessly fought to have the document signed by the heads of state instead of on the ministerial level, and now his own participation

316

Brezhnev

was in danger. After getting through his visit to Giscard in December 1974 and making almost daily public appearances in the November and December, in January/ February 1975 he withdrew for seven weeks, followed by another four in May/June. ‘Today it is considered a fact that the first two breaks were due to complicated operations on his jaw and possibly further health grounds. Clearly these operations have not restored Brezhnev’s health’, the West German embassy reported to Bonn.468 In fact, however, he was either in rehab in the Barvikha clinic outside Moscow – from which he fled as soon as he considered himself ready – or at his hunting lodge in Zavidovo, where he relapsed.469 His doctors had a tough job getting him fit for Helsinki. To ensure his condition remained under wraps, the entourage was kept small. The Soviet Foreign Office was outraged that only Brezhnev’s bodyguards and doctors were allowed in the conference room instead of diplomats. But more disastrously, the heads of state Ford, Schmidt and Giscard were prevented from holding the one-to-one discussions Brezhnev had once preferred. To avoid embarrassing cancellations or breakdowns, Gromyko and Chernenko were to be in attendance at all the meetings with foreign politicians so that they could intervene in time.470 Precisely this cautionary measure undermined Brezhnev’s policy of personal contacts and aroused suspicion. His physical weakness was interpreted as political distance. Schmidt did not have a chance to forge a close relationship with Brezhnev when they met in Helsinki;471 the constant presence of Gromyko – ‘Mr Nyet’ – prevented the friendly familiarity he had cultivated with Brandt.472 With Gromyko in attendance, Ford also encountered a thinner, paler Brezhnev than the one he had met in Vladivistok – and a Brezhnev who was not prepared to make any concessions on the remaining SALT questions. Since they could not communicate how many weapons they each possessed, they did not make any progress and a new distance grew between them.473 The mood was correspondingly low at the ceremony; Brezhnev’s advisors even had to persuade him to remain for the state banquet.474 He had accepted ‘basket three’ on the inviolability of human rights to avoid jeopardizing his coup in establishing the European borders and ensuring peaceful collaboration beyond the bloc divide.475 While the dissidents throughout Eastern Europe would henceforth cite ‘basket three’ when demanding freedom of opinion and information, thus enjoying unforeseen impetus,476 for Brezhnev Helsinki, which he had once conceived as the triumphant pinnacle of his foreign policy, signalled the end of his personal mission to build trust and present himself as a Western politician. Re-ideologization Mistrust grew not only in the West, but also in the Soviet Union when in 1976 the Democrat and new American president Jimmy Carter sacked Secretary of State Kissinger and, to Brezhnev’s outrage, abolished the ‘channel’.477 Despite Carter’s proffered interest in direct exchange, the foundations of the prior trusting collaboration were crumbling.478 American foreign policy was not only depersonalized and ‘restructured’, but also re-ideologized, since Carter began to use Helsinki against

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

317

Brezhnev, demanding the Soviet Union uphold human rights.479 Carter consciously departed from realpolitik in international relations, openly endorsing an approach guided by principles. He defiantly declared that people expected the USA to pursue a policy promoting human rights: ‘To those who doubt the wisdom of our commitment to human rights, I say: be it Cambodia or Chile, Uganda or South Africa, Nicaragua or Ethiopia, or the Soviet Union, governments know that we in the United States are not indifferent.’480 For Brezhnev, this was unadulterated populism. In Vienna in 1979, he would tell Carter that their relations with the USA were not dependent on its unemployment figures, racial discrimination or disadvantaging of women.481 He was incensed, since a) it was a breach of the agreement to keep foreign policy free of ideology, b) Helsinki was ‘his baby’ and c) in his view, the USA had enough human rights issues of their own with segregation and discrimination against women.482 And he was ultimately horrified that Carter questioned the SALT II framework that had been agreed with Ford in Vladivostok.483 In his memoirs, Carter himself later reflected that to the Soviet leaders it must have seemed like he was undoing all prior agreements.484 Indeed, Carter’s personality and his aims were a mystery to Brezhnev. He bombarded Brandt, Schmidt and Giscard with questions as to how he was to take him.485 He complained to Giscard: He writes all these letters. And at the end of the week I hear he is travelling to some or other backwater in the Midwest or a university. And there he attacks me. He insults me so much I simply can’t accept it. He probably thinks I’m not informed. But I get all his speeches. He probably thinks I can be messed about with like that. Just what sort of person does that? Who does he think he is?486

In his notebook, Brezhnev wrote that according to Schmidt, Carter didn’t have any clear policies but had created a new ministry with an annual budget of ten billion dollars that was developing an electron bomb.487 Brezhnev was also disappointed with Carter’s playing the anti-Soviet card and reviving the ‘Cold War’ in order to whip people up on the domestic front and win the elections.488 While in the Politburo Brezhnev proposed warning Carter against a new arms race in an anonymous article in Pravda, Carter himself, with support from Schmidt, was eager to finally meet Brezhnev in person.489 However, that presented Brezhnev and his entourage with a problem: he was no longer physically up to flying to the USA, but since Ford had recently visited the USSR, it would be Brezhnev’s turn to travel. And hence communication suffered largely due to the fact that from 1977 to 1978 Carter and Brezhnev only wrote each other letters while the latter’s addiction meant the negotiations were led by ‘Mr Nyet’ Gromyko.490 ‘I was surprised at how uncooperative Gromyko was’, Carter recalled.491 Diplomacy by crib sheet Meanwhile, Brezhnev travelled to Bonn in May 1977 to complain to Helmut Schmidt about Carter’s delaying tactics in the SALT II negotiations.492 To Brezhnev’s great

318

Brezhnev

relief, Schmidt had kept the ‘channel’ open, but things were never as convivial between them as they had been with Brandt.493 Here too, it was due to Brezhnev’s frailty that the two had not met for three years.494 His decline was clear to see when he alighted from the plane on 4 May 1978; Schmidt thought it would be his last visit.495 Their relationship too was overshadowed by the re-ideologization of foreign policy in the wake of the demands of human rights activists and corresponding broadcasts by Deutsche Welle, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.496 Brezhnev was increasingly uncertain as to whether the Schmidt government’s ‘wavering and zig-zag course’ was only due to pressure from the ‘right-wing opposition’ or whether Schmidt had actually started to vacillate.497 The issue of missiles increasingly drove a wedge between them. Helmut Schmidt genuinely believed that with the new SS 20s, the Soviet Union would gain superiority over NATO, while Brezhnev insisted that by exchanging their old SS 4s and 5s they were only achieving parity with the West. This was the subject of tense discussions between the two of them at Gymnich Castle.498 A healthy Brezhnev would presumably have been able to create the old closeness and familiarity and with it understanding. But the general secretary had difficulties even following the conversation. While Gromyko prompted, Brezhnev’s aides were busy supplying him with the correct notes. This called for intensive preparations and immense presence of mind. They had to anticipate the topics, situation and potential questions and prepare answers in advance. They placed these answers in extra large writing on his notes so they could be passed to him as required.499 Inevitably, there were hiccups. Not only did Aleksandrov-Agentov give Brezhnev a note he read out to members of the German Communist Party even though it was intended for Willy Brandt, but they had not expected Schmidt to prefer ‘open discussion’. In the absence of other texts, Brezhnev stoically read out the note that was intended for the press conference afterwards, and then faced the press without his manuscript. Once again, millions watching on television, including in the Soviet Union, saw the general secretary helplessly read out notes without complete sentences.500 Schmidt made every effort to overlook the fact that Brezhnev was hardly able to get up on his own or didn’t know why he had been handed his memoirs, having forgotten they were intended as a gift to the chancellor.501 But elements of the old policy of familiarity remained: Schmidt had invited Brezhnev to visit his terraced house in Hamburg-Langenhorn before he left, clearly in the hope that an intimate setting would counter the mistrust that had developed and rekindle the old spirit of the one-to-one discussions. Brezhnev had accepted the invitation against the wishes of his aides, who feared he might collapse in Schmidt’s living room.502 But Schmidt managed to ‘abduct’ Brezhnev, who in the federal chancellor’s tiny study was visibly impressed with the modest and petty bourgeois lifestyle of the most powerful man in Germany. This was exactly the gesture and politics of personal contact he would have liked to have adopted himself.503 Kisses in Vienna While Schmidt was at least able to lure Brezhnev into his terrace, Jimmy Carter no longer enjoyed such proximity. However, in April 1979 he was finally able to forge an

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

319

agreement and arrange the first summit for the June.504 Since Brezhnev was no longer up to long-haul flights, Carter had to fly to Vienna in June 1979 for his first meeting with Brezhnev after three years in office. The man he encountered was a wreck. Tellingly, Carter was warned by his security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski that there was currently no basis for ‘personal trust’: ‘Expecting Western leaders to act against their class or national interest would subject a Soviet leader to ridicule, if not worse, in the Politburo.’505 These lines were probably the product of Brzezinski’s own mind; only an idealist or an idiot could think the Soviet leaders might make concessions. Brzezinski thereby provided an apt diagnosis of how both sides had withdrawn into their ideologies and walled themselves in with their projections of the enemy. There was no longer any chance of personal diplomacy during the signing of SALT II. Carter had been informed by Schmidt and Giscard that Brezhnev often seemed absent and relied on his notes. The president’s welcome was an early taste of what was to come: Brezhnev came bounding up to him, but there then followed a long pause until Carter friendlily reminded him he was to speak first, whereupon Brezhnev said he had only prepared a reply to the Austrian president’s speech. It was only after this speech that Brezhnev read out his.506 He then immediately demonstrated what surprising things he could come out with when he didn’t have his notes: he placed a hand on Carter’s shoulder and told him, ‘ “If we do not succeed, God will not forgive us!” ’507 Momentarily, he had been gripped by his old passion for peace. Although the Soviet side had hitherto rejected only one-to-one discussions, they now insisted on truncating joint concert visits or banquets too; the waiters were told to bring and clear the food on the run.508 Brezhnev’s aides were not only worried he might collapse, but also that he might let his moods get the better of him under the influence of tablets. If he lost interest in an event, it was not unheard of for him to simply up and leave without consideration for whether he was offending his guests or hosts.509 In November 1975, attending the Seventh Party Congress of the Polish Communist Party heavily drugged, he had conducted along to the ‘Internationale’, recalled Gierek, who like everyone else present was somewhat embarrassed: ‘He puffed his cheeks and clapped his hands. From afar, he looked drunk, but in fact he was stuffed full of pills.’510 Brezhnev’s aides were thus glad when he told Carter he was too tired to accompany him to the opera on the welcome evening. But Carter was able to persuade him to at least take in the first act, only to see him repeatedly nodding off.511 The next three days’ meetings were only arranged for the hours between 11.00 am and 1.00 pm and 5.30 pm and 7.00 pm. Brezhnev had to rest in between.512 He read out the prepared notes his assistants passed him, but occasionally he was able to offer spontaneous comments, to Carter’s delight.513 To show the world the general secretary had all his mental faculties and could act independently, a special meeting had been organized, attended only by the heads of state and their interpreters.514 Brezhnev’s interpreter Sukhodrev had the task of quickly fishing out the many answers Aleksandrov-Agentov had prepared and handing them to Brezhnev. But when he struck out the lower half of one of these ‘crib sheets’ because it was of no relevance to the question, Brezhnev read it out before stopping halfway and asking so that everyone could hear, ‘What, don’t I have to read out the second half?’515 Even without this performance, the US president could clearly see how bad a state he was in.516 He tried

320

Brezhnev

to show consideration for him, suggesting they remained seated during the toast at the banquet in the US Embassy.517 Ultimately, Brezhnev tried to compensate for his shortcomings in his own way by expressing closeness to the American president with his ‘body politics’. When they signed the SALT II treaty in Vienna’s Hofburg on 18 June 1979, he used their shaking hands as an opportunity to embrace and kiss Carter like a party comrade.518 He was not up to anything else: when Carter suggested a one-to-one meeting, Brezhnev declined, saying he was too tired.519 Carter had no choice but to say goodbye and invite Brezhnev to the USA once again, presumably knowing full well he would not be fit enough – although Brezhnev assured him he would be.520 Isvestiya correspondent Melor Sturua recalls: ‘A final test of endurance was L.I. Brezhnev’s official departure ceremony from Vienna to Moscow. Brezhnev had to walk along the red carpet to the plane and climb the gangway – without the help of his boys. Everyone was wondering, “Will he fall or not?” […].’521 The entire world watched on television as Brezhnev swayed over the red carpet. Brezhnev’s physical condition had thus finally become a political issue. Whereas he had once drawn attention to himself and his body to distract people from the ideological system and present himself as a ‘simple’ man made of flesh and blood, it proved his undoing when his body failed him and was no longer under his control. At best, his infirmity was associated with the decline of the Soviet Union, but most Western analysts interpreted his withdrawal from the foreign policy arena as a political correction to his former course of rapprochement and trust. Helmut Schmidt encountered him in a dreadful state in November 1981, when he visited Bonn for the last time, a year before his death. The visit was a desperate attempt to get SALT II ratified by the US Congress, receive pointers for assessing the new US president Ronald Reagan, and to tap into the former glory and success of his détente policy of the 1970s. But he again read out everything his aides passed to him, and was barely able to follow the discussions; he let Gromyko reply for him.522 Given he was not only shot physically, but hardly seemed to be with it mentally, Schmidt and Bahr increasingly wondered whose answers they were now getting from the ‘channel’.523

Faltering foreign policy Brezhnev’s addiction to pills allowed structures to once again outweigh personal contacts; the omnipresent discourse of general mistrust returned. Both Brezhnev’s comportment as a Western statesman and his self-marketing as a human like any other had come to an end. The Western politicians once again increasingly interpreted him within the parameters of the enemy, the other, the alien and the threatening. This was not just due to Brezhnev’s physical ailments or the change of governments in Paris, Bonn and Washington, however. Another factor was that from the mid-1970s onwards, the Soviet Union began to export the revolution to Africa.524 Hence the USA and the USSR were not only locked in several proxy wars with each other, but the West also saw the interventions as proof of re-ideologization and the aggression of Soviet foreign policy.525 While the US presidents pointed to the civil war in Angola,

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

321

Brezhnev was turned off by the American human rights propaganda.526 The question of how to offset long-range bombers, multiple warheads, submarine-launched ballistic missile bases and intermediate-range ballistic missiles against each other remained unresolved. Fear that the other party was stronger militarily and sought to expand its position won out. As Egon Bahr would later put it, ‘I too was infected with the political missile poison.’527 Ultimately, Brezhnev was disturbed and offended that the Americans had abandoned the notion of balance, both Carter and Reagan declaring the USA had to be the world’s strongest power.528 All these contradictions and conflicts could have been hemmed in and cleared up on the basis of personal trust. But with an ailing Brezhnev and sceptical heads of state in the West, they reinforced the logic of suspicion and undermined what little trust did exist. In the end, both sides accused each other of having given up on détente. Tellingly, the great speech settling scores with the USA in June 1980 was given not by Brezhnev, who was clearly no longer up to the task, but by Gromyko. Gromyko complained that the US was claiming the USSR had changed its politics and was threatening the West and its interests with its actions: ‘Not a day goes by without Washington trying to revive the spirit of the “Cold War” and stoke militarist passions.’529 Just as Brezhnev had to make way for Gromyko due to his ill health, he was hardly in a position to keep the military-industrial complex in check and stand up to the military men. The generals thought SALT I and SALT II were a mistake. Minister of Defence Grechko had attacked Brezhnev in the Politburo for endangering national security with his arms limitations.530 In Vladivostok, Brezhnev had spent an hour on the phone with Grechko arguing over the concessions he had made to Ford.531 This was repeated in 1976 with the Vienna negotiations on both countries’ reducing their military presence in Europe; the Soviet Union had agreed to withdraw a thousand tanks, to which Grechko strongly objected.532 As general secretary and a Second World War veteran, Brezhnev had the authority to lock horns with the minister of defence, but as his health increasingly failed him, he lacked the strength to reign in militarism in his own country and to disagree with the generals.533 In December 1975, he told the Politburo, ‘I’m against the arms race, that is only natural and honest. But if the Americans announce an increase and the Ministry of Defence tell me they can no longer guarantee security. As chairman of the Defence Council. What to do? Give them 140 billion or 156?’534 Given Brezhnev’s weakness and his frequent absences and cancellations, the foreign policy actors developed a troika consisting of Foreign Minister Gromyko, KGB chief Andropov and Dmitri Ustinov, who became minister of defence when Grechko died in office on 26 April 1976.535 These three took over foreign policy from Brezhnev. Afghanistan 1979: invasion against his better judgement It was long considered a proven fact that neither Brezhnev nor the majority of the Politburo were involved in the decision to invade Afghanistan dated to 12 December 1979.536 It is difficult to reconstruct the exact chain of events, but it would appear that this assessment is incorrect, since the decisive two meetings clearly took place, one two days before the decision was made, and another the day after. On 10 December,

322

Brezhnev

Brezhnev received Gromyko, Ustinov and Andropov at the Kremlin to speak about Afghanistan.537 It is very likely they were already preparing to send troops at this point and were perhaps waiting to see how the NATO vote on stationing Pershing II missiles in Europe panned out, since two meetings took place in the Kremlin; one four-man affair at noon, and another in the evening with a total of twelve Politburo members and candidates.538 There was clearly no meeting on 12 December, the official date adorning the Politburo’s resolution approving the ‘measures’ proposed by Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko and entrusting the troika with their implementation.539 In fact, on 12 December Brezhnev was in the Kremlin, working ‘on the documents for the Politburo meeting’, which he personally chaired the next day, the 13th.540 It thus seems that on 10 December there was a one-and-a-half-hour consultation, on the basis of which Chernenko handwrote the ‘authorization’ for the troika, which was presented to Brezhnev on 12 December and approved by the Politburo on 13 December. Only eight members attended this meeting on the 13th; three signed the resolution post factum on 25 and 26 December and Kosygin never signed it at all.541 It is correct that only three members of the Politburo proposed the invasion and were entrusted with implementing it. But is not true that the resolution was not considered at length within the Politburo or was only discussed in Brezhnev’s absence. On 26 December, a day after troops crossed the border, Ustinov, Gromyko, Andropov and Chernenko visited Brezhnev at his dacha to keep him abreast of the events and obtain his approval for further actions.542 However, his aides doubted he knew what he was signing at this stage: ‘Strictly speaking, Brezhnev no longer had to be persuaded, since by then he had little idea what he was being told.’543 The main issue, then, was not his occasional absence, but his overall condition resulting from his addiction to pills; he was no longer in charge of foreign policy, he was allowing the troika to lead him. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December 1979 was and still is considered the Soviet Union’s ultimate foreign policy sin and a ‘Soviet Vietnam’. For the first time since 1945, the USSR sent its own troops into a bloody war, a war that would delegitimize the Soviet leadership and thus contribute to the collapse of the Union.544 The West took the military intervention as proof of the USSR’s aggression, and immediately responded by boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow in the summer of 1980. But this was only the symbolic expression of the damage to foreign policy. It was thought to have been Brezhnev’s decision, and hence he lost the last vestiges of the trust and understanding he had built up with Western politicians. The policy of détente he had begun exactly ten years earlier was finally declared bankrupt. His progressive aides were horrified and tried to work out who was to blame for the invasion: Arbatov thought Gromyko had pushed it through, while most of them suspected Andropov.545 They thought Ustinov wasn’t bright enough to be able to foresee the political consequences. ‘I cannot understand how Gromyko and especially Andropov could make such a political mistake’,546 said Arbatov. Against the Revolution Afghanistan signalled the end to hopes for a new peaceful order in Europe until Gorbachev took up office. But this was not the only reason it represented a low, and

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

323

indeed a turning point, in the history of Soviet foreign policy. The great tragedy is also that the West suspected the Soviet Union was aggressively pursuing its own interests, whereas in fact the Politburo had rather stumbled into this conflict and had ultimately sought to avoid war at all costs. Unlike in Africa or Southeast Asia, the CPSU had not supported revolution in Afghanistan, but had cultivated good neighbourly relations with the king or the president since the days of Lenin. The USSR lent assistance with many infrastructure projects, funded Afghan gas, developed the education system and provided a healthy stream of tourists. The Politburo was thus neither informed nor pleased when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) toppled President Mohammed Daud and Nur Mohammed Taraki installed a Stalin-style terror regime in April 1978.547 Brezhnev was appalled by the terror; he considered it regression to a long-ago era the Soviet Union had successfully overcome. When the bloody suppression of large swathes of the population triggered an armed rebellion in March 1979, Taraki called on the Soviet Union for military assistance. But the Politburo refused to send troops, both in the March and in response to subsequent requests, despite great concern and Gromyko’s assertion that ‘Under no circumstances can we lose Afghanistan.’548 The Politburo settled on supplying grain and weapons,549 since they were well aware of the damage intervention would cause in the sphere of foreign policy: Everything we have worked so hard to build, especially détente, would be set back, the SALT II negotiations would fail, the agreement – and that is presently our most important political action – would not be signed, a meeting between Leonid Il’ich with Carter would be in doubt, the visit of Giscard d’Estaing would be endangered and relations with the Western European countries, especially the Federal Republic of Germany, would be spoilt.550

When Taraki travelled to Moscow on 20 March 1979, the members of the Politburo told him they couldn’t attack the American invasion of Vietnam and then do the same thing themselves.551 Brezhnev, to whom Taraki was granted access for half an hour, told him, ‘We have considered this question from all angles, carefully weighed it up, and I’m telling you directly: we can’t do it. It would only play into the hands of the enemies – both yours and ours.’552 He also gave him a very clear lecture, explaining that he would have to exhaust all political and economic measures to gain the support of the Afghan people.553 The Afghan government asked Moscow to send troops no fewer than twenty-one times between March and December 1979. Each time, the Politburo refused.554 The sea change came very quickly, when Taraki’s deputy, Hafisullah Amin, organized a putsch against him in September 1979 and had him murdered shortly thereafter.555 Brezhnev was said to be devastated; he liked Taraki, and had seen him in Moscow shortly before he was killed.556 However, there was still no talk of sending troops. The Politburo made the best of a bad job, sending congratulatory telegrams and continuing to send weapons and foodstuffs.557 Their stance is also evidenced by the fact that the Afghan issue was not even mentioned at the CC plenum in the late November of 1979.558

324

Brezhnev

Things only changed when the Politburo learnt Amin was establishing contacts with the USA and was in touch with the CIA. The troika considered this a danger to Soviet influence in a geopolitically important region and made their fateful decision on 12 December.559 On 25 December, Soviet troops crossed the border and stormed the presidential palace on 27 December, murdering Amin. He was replaced by Babrak Karmal, the representative of the moderate arm of the PDPA.560 The NATO Double Track Decision Despite the Politburo’s evident fear that the global balance of power could shift and an immediate neighbour could switch to the US sphere of influence, it is still remarkable that they were prepared to accept everything they themselves had foreseen: the final break with the West, the cancellation of high-level state visits, anti-Soviet propaganda, irreparable damage to the country’s image and the US Senate’s refusal to ratify SALT II. There are two possible explanations: one is that the Politburo felt relations with the West were at a low point anyway and things could hardly get any worse. Indeed, while only half a year had passed since the Vienna summit, the USA had not seemed interested in ratifying SALT II from day one.561 Brezhnev had returned from Vienna with the impression that Carter was too weak politically to push through ratification against the ‘hawks’, and later told Helmut Schmidt that the USA’s delays had begun the moment they signed.562 Brandt thought Brezhnev was ‘sincerely devastated’ when he realized a president’s signature meant nothing.563 This frustration was later compounded by a second blow below the belt that made the Politburo realize relations with the West were irreparably broken: the NATO Double Track Decision that meant Pershing missiles would be stationed in Europe and could thus reach the Soviet Union. Typically, both camps had completely different assessments of the presence of 600 missiles: while NATO claimed it was to keep the Soviet Union and its SS 20s in check, for Brezhnev and the troika it was definitive proof that the USA sought a position of military superiority.564 The move gradually eroded trust in Schmidt and Giscard, both of whom had advocated the Pershing strategy.565 In a speech in East Berlin on the thirtieth anniversary of the GDR on 6 October 1979, Brezhnev gave an emphatic warning against these measures while also announcing the unilateral withdrawal of troops from the country.566 On 11 October, he wrote to Giscard, imploring him to believe the Soviet Union was not dominating Europe militarily.567 A month later, he also renewed correspondence with Willy Brandt and asked the rhetorical question that if the Soviet Union was now pulling 20,000 soldiers and 1,000 tanks out of the GDR and had said it was prepared to reduce its intermediaterange missiles and the West responded with rearmament and then wanted discussions – what then was the West’s real policy?568 But Brandt simply repeated that the West was merely matching the Soviet Union and said it would be years before the missiles were in place.569 Clearly, the old personal trust was still there, but Brezhnev was no longer able to solve political issues on this level. The private and the political were once again two different things; political doubts now stood in contrast to personal affection. Schmidt’s and Brezhnev’s personal assertions they had never deceived each other no longer had any influence on their political actions.570

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

325

The assessment of Brezhnev’s aides Aleksandrov-Agentov and Blatov was that the West wrongly believed the Soviet Union would make a little bit of noise about the Pershings, puff out its chest and then go over to the SALT III negotiations.571 They were mistaken, just as the USSR was wrong in thinking NATO would kick up a bit of a fuss about Soviet troops in Afghanistan before returning to the old agenda. In the later November of 1979, Aleksandrov-Agentov and Blatov had no idea what to do about the NATO Double Track Decision anticipated on 12 December. Apart from the unilateral withdrawal of troops, increased Warsaw Pact propaganda and Honecker’s warning to Schmidt that there would be no meetings for the foreseeable future, they could not think of a solution.572 On 3 December, Gromyko paid another visit to Bonn specially to warn the federal government of the consequences of a NATO Double Track Decision.573 Meanwhile, Lednëv had Bahr smuggle him into the SPD party conference, where he saw for himself that the majority of the governing party were for the resolution.574 It is probably no coincidence that the Politburo dated the decision to invade Afghanistan to 12 December 1979, the day the NATO states met in Brussels to approve the stationing of almost 600 missiles in Western Europe.575 In their eyes, it was NATO that cut the cord. At the same time, the Politburo tried to limit the damage. Lednëv again visited Bahr over Christmas, but this time it was to tell him they had invaded Afghanistan and were surprised the USA hadn’t responded yet.576 On 28 December, Brezhnev rang Carter to ensure him the invasion was only a temporary measure; on the 29th he followed up his call with a letter explaining that Amin had requested his assistance and that as soon as the situation was stable, the Soviet government would withdraw their troops.577 It is quite possible that Brezhnev, the troika and the Politburo actually believed intervention in Kabul would be as swift and bloodless as it had been in Prague eleven years earlier. That might have been the second reason they brought themselves to invade: they projected their experience with Prague onto Afghanistan and overlooked the fact that the country had been in the midst of a bloody, confusing civil war for the best part of a year.578 It was only half a year after the invasion that Brezhnev and Gromyko told the CC plenum, in June 1980, ‘The Soviet act of assistance for Afghanistan is not based on self-interest. We had no other choice but to send in troops.’579 They could hardly have anticipated the guerrilla fighters they were up against. The hopeless war lasted nine years. Fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers and over 1.2 million Afghans lost their lives.580 As if Brezhnev had finally come to his senses in the late December of 1979 and realized what he or his troika had done, during the last two years of his life he undertook relatively active, albeit desperate, steps to reduce the damage to Soviet foreign policy. Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov and Ponomarëv thought they could get to the USA and NATO by applying careful pressure to France and West Germany.581 But the French ambassador to Moscow whom Zagladin visited to this end was less than enamoured with his advances, demanding the immediate withdrawal of troops and even declaring quite undiplomatically, ‘The current president [of Afghanistan] was brought in by you on a cart towed by your tanks.’582 Brezhnev was still able to persuade Giscard to meet him in the May and Schmidt in the June, both on ‘neutral’

326

Brezhnev

ground in Warsaw.583 He again corresponded intensively with Willy Brandt, who also visited him one last time, in June 1981.584 But Brezhnev could neither prevent the boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow nor gain any more than polite interest in his proposal for a world peace conference and zero solution, i.e. complete disarmament.585 As long as Soviet troops were fighting in Afghanistan, all diplomatic efforts were in vain. Brezhnev’s foreign policy, his attempts to win personal trust and present himself as a Western statesman had failed. The situation was tenser than when he had begun his foreign policy drive in 1969. Poland 1981: the invasion that never happened In Poland, Brezhnev acted against the backdrop of his experiences with Dubček on the one hand and the intervention in Afghanistan on the other. While in Brezhnev’s eyes, Prague had been a successful operation, Afghanistan represented quite the opposite: escalation and a foreign policy legacy in ruins. This is the only explanation as to why the Moscow Politburo and the Warsaw Pact countries showed much more patience with their Polish comrades than they had with the Czechoslovaks in 1968. Whereas they had intervened in the CSSR after half a year, in Poland they looked on for one-and-a-half. And this time they stuck to their policy of non-intervention. In Poland, the August strike at the Gdansk shipyard under Lech Wałęsa had forced the Polish government to relent and on 31 August 1980 they allowed the formation of independent trade unions. This was the basis for the formation of Solidarność, which rapidly grew into an increasingly broader movement for more democracy.586 While the East German Erich Honecker and the Czechoslovak Vasiľ Biľak advocated a swift invasion, since they feared the unrest might infect their own populations, and Kádár and Ceaușescu vehemently opposed it,587 Moscow took a moderate position throughout. Given the nadir in international relations, the Politburo had no interest in being responsible for another armed conflict. Since the Soviet army was tied up in Afghanistan, this time the Poles would have to ‘pacify’ themselves.588 Compared to the invasion of Afghanistan, Brezhnev took a relatively active role in response to the crisis in Poland in 1980/81.589 Just as he attempted to make amends for the damage Afghanistan did to foreign policy, he also did whatever he could to avoid losing more international prestige over Poland.590 Unlike in the case of Afghanistan, he was quick to report to the CC plenum: ‘The Communists and all workers in Poland can rely on their friends and allies. We won’t leave our Polish brothers in the lurch!’591 As far as his health permitted, he phoned the Polish party leaders for fatherly chats and used the full range he had exercised with Dubček, from friendly persuasion to verbal pressure and indeed thinly veiled threats. This time, the Moscow Politburo was even prepared to dip into the state reserve to help the Polish comrades escape the financial crisis.592 As in the response to Afghanistan, to ease the burden on Brezhnev the Politburo created a ‘Poland Commission’ in August 1980 headed by Suslov and comprising the troika of Andropov, Gromyko and Ustinov, plus Chernenko and four other CC members.593 As in Prague in 1968, the cadre issue was key for Brezhnev and the Politburo. When the Polish leader Gierek bowed down to the shipyard strikers, he fell out of

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

327

favour with Brezhnev and Suslov’s commission. The latter sought a suitable candidate and were initially pleased when Stanisław Kania forced out Gierek in September 1980.594 As was his wont, Brezhnev now felt it was important to establish what sort of person Kania was and to set him on the ‘right’ path. On 31 October, they met in Moscow, where Kania made a favourable impression; Brezhnev found him to be a serious, reflective man.595 Kania presumably had an entirely different impression of Brezhnev, who told him to declare a state of emergency. Kania declined, saying they would do fine as they were.596 The Politburo was satisfied with this explanation, although it considered the situation in Poland to be ‘explosive’. At this point, Moscow’s only move was to provide 150 million dollars so that Poland could repay its immense debts of 500 million to the West.597 Fighting rebellion with economic aid The first, amicable meeting was followed by stronger threats in Moscow on 5 December 1980. The representatives of the Warsaw Pact states did without the usual fraternal kisses and welcoming chitchat.598 Like Dresden in 1968, it was a meeting intended to demonstrate to their Polish comrades that they were about to leave the community of brother states. While Brezhnev spoke in his usual urbane manner of an ‘exchange of opinion’ with their ‘Polish friends’, he accused Kania, like Dubček before him, of playing down and misjudging the situation. He also rebuked him harshly for the desolate financial situation: ‘It’s easy to offer the solution: Give every worker a car! But these promising slogans remain pipe dreams and that inevitably leads to discontent.’599 However, Brezhnev did not go any further than to issue urgent warnings: ‘We are for the most extreme measures only in the most extreme emergencies […].’600 However, Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski understood this to mean ‘if the situation gets worse, then we’ll do it!’601 But the Moscow Politburo did nothing of the sort. Rather, it only upped the political pressure via personal discussions and phone calls. Given the concessions Kania and Jaruzelski made to Solidarność on 31 March 1981 in order to prevent the general strike announced in Bydgoszcz, Moscow was worried their Polish comrades would be afraid to step in and would instead relinquish one position after the other. Brezhnev warned Kania over the phone, ‘The peaceful path you’ve chosen could cost you bloodshed.’602 As with Dubček in Čierna, Andropov and Ustinov met Kania in a railway carriage on the Soviet–Polish border, but without the ailing Brezhnev, in order to explain to their Polish comrades the meaning of martial law. The meeting took place in secret, at an undisclosed place during the night so that nobody in Poland or the West could claim Warsaw was kowtowing to Moscow.603 Once again, Andropov and Ustinov had to establish which cadres the Politburo should back. Even Jaruzelski, now minister of defence and premier and assumed to be reliable, had given in to Solidarność, while Kania was drinking increasingly heavily.604 They found Kania and Jaruzelski to be extremely tense, nervous and weary. When the Moscow emissaries presented them with pre-prepared plans for imposing martial law and demanded signatures from them confirming they were familiar with the measures, the Poles declared that the events of Bydgoszcz had shown that the

328

Brezhnev

counter-revolution was stronger than they were, but that neither an invasion nor martial law would solve matters.605 Just as Dubček had deferred to the CC plenum, they said that the Sejm – the Polish parliament – would have to vote on martial law.606 Moscow had no choice but to wait and sent further emissaries in Suslov, Gromyko and Marshal Kulikov.607 Brezhnev called for ‘constant pressure’ to be exerted on the Poles and repeatedly got on the phone to them himself,608 but in late April 1981 he soberly noted, ‘There is little trust in them, for although they listen to us, they don’t do as we advise them.’609 At this point, the Politburo arrived at the assessment that the opposition had already gained a majority within the party and were in a position to seize power at any time. The only thing stopping them was their fear of a Soviet invasion.610 The Politburo was helpless: as long as the aim was to avoid armed conflict at all costs and there were no cadres in sight who could replace Kania and Jaruzelski, the only option was to provide generous economic aid.611 Verbal pressure Meanwhile, Moscow increased the verbal pressure. In early June 1981, the Politburo sent a letter not just to the general secretary, which was the usual procedure, but to the entire Central Committee. The same tactic had been used for Prague, and was intended to demonstrate distrust and send a warning to Kania.612 Kania was alarmed – not only by this gesture, but by Brezhnev’s refusal to answer his phone calls for several days. It is uncertain whether Brezhnev was again indisposed or was deliberately trying to demoralize him: ‘As you know, for a long time I didn’t wish to speak with Kania, but he forced his way through to a call: he rang daily from Friday to Monday.’613 Kania was quick to assure him they would now take sterner measures against the ‘counter-revolution’. But Brezhnev didn’t believe him: ‘Comrade Kania, how often did I tell you to do that at the very start of this whole business?’614 This phone call was followed by others in the manner in which Brezhnev had spoken with Dubček: his tone was fatherly yet accusing: while he used the informal second person pronoun, Kania kept his replies formal. Brezhnev insisted they should now show Solidarność ‘that times have changed. There is no more capitulation. Do you agree to this? – Kania: Entirely. – Brezhnev: On these conditions, you, Stanisław, can be assured of our support and solidarity. – Kania: I’m not sure what you expect of us. […] We will grab the counter-revolution by the throat.’615 Brezhnev finally received the Polish comrades one more time, on 14 August 1981 in Crimea,616 where he had already consulted the members of the Warsaw Pact and put Ceaușescu, who called for urgent action, firmly in his place: ‘Why are you constantly after “action, action”. Poland is a constant headache. But you only say we should act. Then act, suggest something!’617 If he quarrelled with Ceaușescu, he was no friendlier towards Kania. He had worked through the material on Poland for three days618 and doubted he could trust him.619 This time, the magic of Crimea in the summer did not represent an unofficial, secret meeting between brothers. An ailing Brezhnev read out his prepared speeches, insisting the ‘terror of the Whites’ had to be countered with the ‘terror of the Reds’.620 Jaruzelski assumed this was not Brezhnev’s own rhetoric.621 Brezhnev also asserted that the Soviet Union had subsidized Poland to the tune of four billion US dollars and yet they had still not got their problems under control.622

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

329

But although the Poland Commission reckoned with open rebellion at any moment during the summer of 1981 due to the poor economic situation, they only proposed manoeuvres, financial support and propaganda.623 Brezhnev’s aide Shakhnazarov, now responsible for communication with the brother states and himself a member of the Poland Commission, laconically noted in a status report that there had always been crises throughout the history of the socialist movements and that they had always passed.624 Brezhnev finally lost the will to deal with Kania upon reading the ‘Appeal to the Peoples of Eastern Europe’ issued by Solidarność in the early September – in his eyes a call for rebellion and chaos. He repeatedly stated in the Politburo that he was tired of phoning Kania. But the Politburo ultimately remained toothless and the only counter-measure they chose was propaganda.625 A change of cadres It was Honecker who urged Brezhnev in the mid-September to move along the muddled cadre issue: the Warsaw Pact states should finally demand Kania’s resignation.626 Kania did indeed resign on 18 October, but Brezhnev no longer trusted his successor Jaruzelski to turn things around: ‘I don’t believe Comrade Jaruzelski will do anything constructive. It seems he is no longer brave enough.’627 Jaruzelski thought he detected some of the old fondness Brezhnev had shown for him when he took on the party leadership in the October. Brezhnev not only sent him a telegram, but rang him too.628 He addressed him using the familiar pronoun, as he had Kania, while Jaruzelski responded with the polite form and obsequiously assured him that he would not have taken on the responsibility without his support. They would now make the right cadre decisions and keep Moscow informed about everything.629 Although Brezhnev only said very generally that they now finally expected decisive measures against the ‘counter-revolution’, and twice wished him ‘good health and success’,630 Jaruzelski felt he was being issued with a clear warning: ‘We will not leave Poland in the lurch in an emergency.’631 When Jaruzelski met with Solidarność shortly thereafter and their meeting was celebrated in Poland as ‘historic’, Brezhnev sent an urgent warning: how did Jaruzelski intend to preserve the party’s power this way? He demanded ‘staunch battle with the class enemy’, but again avoided threats.632 Jaruzelski received a final phone call from Brezhnev on 7 December 1981; Brezhnev warned him, ‘The counter-revolution is breathing down your necks. If you don’t take decisive measures, it will be too late.’633 Jaruzelski then made a pact with Brezhnev: he promised to ensure it wouldn’t come to a ‘counter-revolution’ if they could still reckon with economic support from the Soviet Union. In other words, he imposed martial law in Poland in exchange for payment in the form of oil and meat. Hence he also got Brezhnev to send the head of Gosplan, Baybakov,634 who arrived in Poland the very next day to ensure Jaruzelski didn’t change his mind, as Jaruzelski himself saw it.635 Baybakov reported that Jaruzelski seemed entirely uncertain and wavering.636 But all the members of the Politburo who convened for another consultation chaired by Brezhnev on 10 December in Moscow agreed that they did not want to force Poland to impose martial law under any circumstances.637 They certainly considered it

330

Brezhnev

downright shameless of Jaruzelski to combine the political situation with economic aid, an act tantamount to blackmail. But if they didn’t deliver, said Andropov, then Jaruzelski could always claim the Soviet Union was to blame for everything.638 They agreed they had no other option. Whether and when their Polish comrades decided to launch ‘Operation X’ was a matter for them alone. Andropov declared, ‘We will not insist on it and we will not talk them out of it.’639 Konstantin Rusakov, head of the CC Department for Cooperation with the Brother States since 1977, was unsure whether ‘Operation X’ would take place between 11 and 12 December, on 13 December or on 20 December.640 Suslov remarked, ‘The Poles say outright that they are against the invasion. If troops march in, it will be a catastrophe. I think we are all agreed that there can be no talk of sending troops.’641 Under no circumstances could they now risk the West continuing to plot against them and imposing political and economic sanctions.642 Once again, the main motivation was to preserve the prestige of the Soviet Union and avoid damage on the foreign policy front: ‘International public opinion will not understand us.’643 The success of Brezhnev’s visit to Schmidt only two weeks earlier and their last peacemaking missions would be undone by sending in troops, Suslov observed.644 On 3 December, Jimmy Carter had indeed written to Brezhnev warning him against invading Poland and threatening consequences if he did.645 Finally, in the night between 12 and 13 December, Jaruzelski had martial law declared and Solidarność banned – a decision he claimed was all of his own making and for which he alone was responsible.646 For Solidarność and their many supporters, it was a disaster, to Western observers it was a victory for the long arm of Moscow, while for Brezhnev and the Poland Commission, it was ultimately a small triumph. The old three-card trick of fatherly persuasion, clear warnings and banking entirely on the cadre issue had proven its worth once again. They had managed to bring their Polish comrades into line without resorting to violence and persuaded them to ‘clean up’ after themselves. Brezhnev had not brought peace or built bridges but, given the situation in late 1981, it was enough to have maintained the status quo without bloodshed. A ‘lack of leadership’ The last head of state Brezhnev met with was Indira Gandhi, whom he held in very high regard. She visited him in Moscow one last time in September 1982, two months before his death. She noted ‘the complete lack of leadership in Moscow’: An atmosphere of drifting and uncertainty […] prevailed. Brezhnev was showing obvious signs of decline, especially an inability to concentrate. He clearly required constant medication. His physical deterioration was most evident in his face. In contrast to earlier encounters, Brezhnev was slow to react. He never spoke freely, always read out. Even then he had difficulties that caused him to check with Foreign Minister Gromyko, treating the latter not particularly friendlily, but clearly like a subordinate.647

His addiction was now visible to outsiders, then, his health beyond repair, and nothing remained of his esprit or his successes in the politics of détente. In 1976, the Foreign

Emotions and Pills in the Cold War

331

Office in Bonn had already warned that if Brezhnev’s ‘weak condition’ continued, ‘a vacuum could emerge’.648 It further observed that foreign policy was and remained dependent on Brezhnev’s personality and would rise and fall with it: ‘However, his age (70) and the high average age of the entire Politburo (66) means there is an everincreasing element of political instability.’649 This proved to be a most accurate and entirely correct prognosis, except for the fact that it wasn’t so much Brezhnev’s age that was the cause of his lethargy as his addiction to pills. Brezhnev had made himself, his personality, his humanity, his ability to play the Western statesman and his trustworthiness the central factor of Soviet foreign policy. With it, he took all before him and then, after 1975, lost it all again. He had pledged himself, as it were, as a guarantee of trusting collaboration and then withdrawn, thereby creating a vacuum that was filled with mistrust. His ‘body politics’ of personal proximity and emotionality became his downfall when his body began to fail him and he was no longer able to use it to convey emotions. Bahr and Brandt would later regret the missed opportunities; they thought they could have achieved much more with Brezhnev in the first half of the 1970s, before he became fossilized as an apparatchik and inaccessible to them.650 ‘I told both Nixon and Pompidou that I saw such a chance. Nothing came of it. But what would be the use of reproaching someone with hindsight for not having done sufficient justice to their mission!’ said Willy Brandt upon Brezhnev’s death in 1982.651 The remark was doubtless a sideswipe at his successor Helmut Schmidt, who could never bring himself to engage in trusting collaboration with Brezhnev. But then Schmidt no longer had the same opportunity to do so after 1974. He thus ‘read’ and assessed the Soviet leader with the old clichés: ‘Leonid Brezhnev was a Russian, with all the characteristics we generally ascribe to the Russians: strong, able to hold his drink, hospitable, sentimental, hearty, generous and at the same time distrusting of inscrutable foreigners, tactically circumspect and calculatingly cunning, power-conscious, even brutal when necessary.’652 Nixon, however, like Brandt, credited himself with having done everything within his power and during his time in office. Unlike Schmidt, he had experienced Khrushchev and could appreciate the difference between the two party leaders: ‘They do not have to brag about everything in Russia being better than anything anywhere else in the world. But they still crave to be respected as equals, and on this point I think we made a good impression.’653 Nixon held Brezhnev in high regard for having stuck by him during Watergate and offering moral support. He told the Soviet ambassador Dobrynin that one day historians would speak of a ‘Brezhnev– Nixon doctrine’ on the basis that the leaders of the two states had done everything they could for lasting peace.654 The great tragedy is that historians never wrote of such a doctrine; as the four protagonists died, resigned or became increasingly frail, their politics too were forgotten or reversed. Egon Bahr neatly summed up the tragedy of Brezhnev, who banked everything on personal trust and ultimately lost it: ‘History is also made up of personal fates and lost opportunities.’655

Figure 34 Brezhnev walks a guard of honour held by the Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, 1978.

332

9

Craving Glory and Physical Decline, or the Loneliness of the General Secretary

There are a number of photos showing how Brezhnev physically deteriorated towards the end of his life. The medium of television meant that his physical decline could not be hidden from either the Soviet people or the world whenever he stumbled down a red carpet or was barely able to ascend a gangway by himself. Remarkably, however, even the official photo album marking his seventy-fifth birthday in 1981 included pictures clearly showing his frailty; for instance, one from 1978 captures a bloated, helpless-looking Brezhnev walking a guard of honour formed by the sailors of the Pacific Fleet, appearing so lost that the officers returning his salute seem to be concerned about him.1 He looks no less helpless, indeed almost lifeless, in another photo in this album, from 20 February 1978, when he was awarded the highest military honour, the ‘Order of Victory’, which Mikhail Gorbachev would later personally ensure was posthumously withdrawn.2 Brezhnev is standing behind his desk, appearing to prop himself up with it. His expression shows no sign of pride or pleasure, but looks tired and absent. The grey jacket of his uniform with its gold epaulettes and all the medals appears oversized, the sleeves completely covering the backs of his hands. This photo does not depict the brave general and hero of the Great Patriotic War it is clearly meant to, but a sad figure of a knight of the sorrowful countenance. Chernyayev bitterly remarked that Brezhnev looked like a ‘living mummy’.3 This shot was a public relations disaster; instead of vitality and decisiveness, it conveyed resignation and infirmity. It almost openly revealed that he was no longer up to the demands of the office. In contrast, a photo of him sleeping in a reclining chair in Crimea two months before his death remained unpublished. The background shows the impressive Crimean coastline; behind the headrest stands a member of staff, bending slightly over the general secretary, apparently watching over him as he sleeps.4 It is a photo radiating peace and tranquillity. Unlike in the published pictures, here at his dacha he did not have to live up to a role he was no longer capable of fulfilling. Stretched out, his body seems to fit into the landscape, blending with it into a harmonious whole. Many of his contemporaries later expressed the view that if he had retired ‘at the right time’ – upon his seventieth birthday in 1976 at the latest, but preferably in 1975 after Helsinki or ideally together with Brandt and Nixon – he would have been remembered as an energetic and successful proponent of peace and prosperity.5 333

334

Brezhnev

Figure 35 Brezhnev in his marshal’s uniform in his office in the Kremlin, 1978.

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

335

Figure 36 Brezhnev with a member of staff in Crimea, 1982.

However, the mid-1970s introduced seven years of decline: his own personal decline, the decline of the Soviet economy and the decline of détente. These were the years that meant his term in office was later labelled an era of ‘stagnation’. The gentle economic upturn during his first decade and the five years of his new Western policy were completely overshadowed by his thirst for glory and his physical decline.

336

Brezhnev

As difficult as it always is to assess the mood and perception of the population, in this case it is made easy by the jokes that were told during the Brezhnev era. There was probably not a single shortcoming the people didn’t make fun of. Above all, his thirst for glory and his inability to speak without crib sheets were the subject of ‘anecdotes’: ‘Brezhnev opens the Olympic Games in Moscow: – 1980! O! O! O! – His aide says to him: Leonid Il’ich! Those are the Olympic rings. The script starts below!’6 A particularly profound joke suggested the Soviet Union was stuck between Stalinism and stagnation: ‘How many leaders does the CPSU have? – Two. One eternally living and one eternally ill.’7 There were other takes on Brezhnev’s never-ending infirmity: ‘Have you heard Brezhnev’s dead? – Honestly? Personally?’8 Another gag took aim at his ambitions to go down in history as a leader equal in greatness to Lenin, with whom he shared his patronymic: ‘After Brezhnev comes to power, correspondents ask him how he is to be addressed: as leader, as the genius of all times and peoples, or as our natural father? – Just call me Il’ich.’9 The people also joked that after his death he wished to be interred in the mausoleum, where the devil alters the inscription ‘Lenin’ to read ‘Lënin’, meaning ‘Lënya’s’.10 Brezhnev’s obsession with military decorations inspired the joke proclaiming that in the Soviet Union, the purpose of breast enlargements was to make room for more medals, or, as another one went: ‘After getting another medal, Brezhnev says: Comrades! They say I’m collecting too many honours and can’t suppress this vice. That’s not true. I recently turned down the highest award of the state of Mauretania – a golden nose ring!’11 His personal physician Chazov later recalled, ‘What a life, what a fate! If I could have known then this person would undergo such a metamorphosis before my eyes and it would be impossible to recognize in this senile, decrepit old fellow the former stately, good-looking man.’12 The people showed a black humour in listing Brezhnev’s daily routine: ‘9:00: reanimation. 10:00: intravenous breakfast. 11:00: mask for the banquet. 12:00: banquet. 13:00: honours ceremony. 14:00: receive medal. 15:00–17:00: recharge batteries. 18:00: evening banquet. 20:00: clinical death. 9:00 in the morning – reanimation …’13

The cult of personality After Stalin’s death, the members of the Party Presidium had condemned the Stalin cult and sworn they would never again allow anything like it to take root. They insisted the same thing after Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964: never again would they tolerate such a cult of personality, even though the cult of Khrushchev had differed substantially from that of Stalin. Propaganda had not celebrated him as superhuman, nor had cities, factories or streets been named after him. Nor were people arrested or shot for making disparaging remarks about him. But the members of the Presidium accused him of having himself feted for every success, permanently wanting to see his speeches and photograph in the newspapers and increasingly refusing to consult the Presidium.14 Nevertheless, fewer than ten years later, the members of the Politburo and the CC apparatus again began their veneration, this time of Brezhnev. Between 1973, when he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, and his death in 1982, a cult

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

337

developed that didn’t take on the negative excesses of the homage paid to Stalin, but seemed even more bizarre given the discrepancy between the physical decline of the man himself and the dashing heroics of the fictional figure. How could this come about? The cult of personality is clearly a structural element inherent not only to Soviet communism, but to most dictatorships. It is principally an instrument of securing power and a surrogate for democratic or indeed dynastic legitimacy.15 The person is placed on a pedestal, elevated above the masses and takes on the nimbus of a unique and indispensable figure. Doubts and criticism are nipped in the bud; a discursive and symbolic protective wall is built around the ruler, with the effect that he seems impossible to replace, and any attempt to do so would amount to a putsch. Ultimately, the cult of personality is a different form of a scenario of power. It too attributes certain qualities to the leader that are praised using all available means and media. There are nevertheless two differences: firstly, a scenario of power ascribes to the ruler qualities that, while clearly defining him, are not grotesquely exaggerated. The praise for the individual unfolds within the context of the overall concept, be it the tsar’s rule by divine right or the party leader as an heir to Lenin. The selected leitmotiv is a variation on this legitimation of hegemony, but not its exaggeration as in the cult of personality. Secondly, scenarios of power differ from the cult of personality in the form of interaction between the ruler and his entourage or the people. A scenario of power allocates active roles to the inner circle surrounding the leader, and hence the members of this circle also feel ‘sublime’. In contrast, the cult of personality elevates the ruler above the inner circle as well as the common people, largely allowing both parties only passive acclamation. And it is here that the paradox of the Brezhnev cult lies: his uniqueness rested on his depiction as a normal man. The Politburo venerated him for being an individual person who embodied collective rule; the mass media praised him for being the exemplary homo sovieticus. His comrades may have awarded him the title of Marshal and the highest military honours, but he was celebrated for his comradeship, for having pulled soldiers out of the water and fired a machine gun. He may have received the Lenin Prize for literature, but it was for simple prose that characterized him as an everyman. He may have received the Lenin Peace Prize, but he was celebrated for having taken care of the country’s reconstruction and supplying the population with food after the war. The ideal image that was propagated of the general secretary from 1973 onwards was closer to the American model proclaiming every child can grow up to become president. The propaganda strategists didn’t even use the assassination attempt on Brezhnev on 22 January 1969 to turn him into a martyr. Brezhnev escaped uninjured, since the assassin shot at the wrong car in the convoy that was bringing several cosmonauts from the Soyuz 4 and 5 flights to a festive reception in the Kremlin. The only death was that of a chauffeur.16 The fact that Pravda only reported it in passing, presenting the cosmonauts as the target instead and without even mentioning Brezhnev, shows just how much times had changed and that every effort was made to avoid suggesting there was dissatisfaction with the general secretary.17 The attempt on Lenin’s life in 1918 had been used to justify the ‘Red Terror’ and make him a living martyr. One shudders to think what would have happened had Stalin survived a murder attempt and decided to use it as a pretext for a new wave of terror. But as sober as Brezhnev’s

338

Brezhnev

response was – he didn’t even mention it in his notebooks and is said only to have cursed at the idiocy of staging a shootout at the Kremlin18 – it had little impact on his image. He remained the ‘normal Soviet person’ – an assassination attempt did not fit the image and was of no use to the cult. Unfortunately, nothing is known about the ‘big bang’ of the Brezhnev cult – that is, we do not know whose idea it was to award him the Lenin Peace Prize and thereby emphasize, at the party plenum in April 1973, his ‘personal contribution’ to securing peace in the world. It would be interesting to know whether Brezhnev dropped his own hints or openly expressed his wishes or whether it was his entourage that had come up with the idea. Ultimately, however, its authorship is not of great relevance, since the cult was a pas de deux within the Central Committee: a coordinated interaction in which the dominant role shifted between the two parties. Presumably, there wasn’t a ‘master plan’ for the development of the cult; rather, a systemic dynamics was at play which, once set in motion, could no longer be stopped. Initially, the intention was undoubtedly to protect Brezhnev’s peace policy against the few remaining critics. The Peace Prize was thus both a ‘stop sign’ for all those who might have wished to undo détente with the West and a kind of carte blanche for Brezhnev should any opposition have arisen to his course. The move thus offered mutual reassurance: the initiators of the award forced all CC members to bow down to Brezhnev and assure him of their support whether they wanted to or not. Brezhnev thereby gained new symbolic capital reinforcing his leadership. In this form, the cult of personality was at once both an act of submission on the part of Brezhnev and a device empowering him to demand the same submission from the Politburo and the CC. The cult thus bought the leadership elite extra stability – but one could also say it reinforced and conclusively solidified Brezhnev’s scenario of power as a patron and carer. While he thereby gained twin foundations for his activities in the Politburo, he laid himself open to attack from the people and brought about a new kind of Scissors Crisis: the older and more incapacitated he seemed, the more medals, honours and glory the party bestowed upon him – and the emptier and sillier it looked. ‘… and Leonid Brezhnev personally’ When at the April Plenum of 1973 all speakers except Kosygin praised for the first time what had been achieved not only by the great party of Lenin but by ‘Leonid Brezhnev personally’, the brakes were off; it became standard practice in all speeches. The severe consequence was that plenum speeches now had an even firmer framework than was already the case. Now Brezhnev could not even be criticized indirectly, since every speech had to amount to a small eulogy to him. Moldavia’s Party Chairman Bodyul gave the first taste of things to come in December 1973: Leonid Il’ich, who embodies the wisdom of the party, ensures the correct orientation in view of the complex events of our century, he demonstrates the far-sightedness of the outstanding theorist and politician and with his organizational talent he works determinedly for the timely resolution and implementation of the pending problems of domestic and foreign policy.19

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

339

What was already an extremely ritualized culture of speechmaking stagnated in verbal rites of submission: ‘Comrades! With a feeling of immense satisfaction and the greatest pride we have listened to the profound speech by the general secretary of the CC of the CPSU, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Comrade Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev. […] His speech […] is a new, great contribution to Lenin’s doctrine on the issue of agriculture’, announced Azerbaijan’s Chairman Geydar Aliyev in July 1978, and everyone else agreed or tried to surpass his homage to Brezhnev.20 In February 1981, the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, Tikhonov, went so far as to proclaim that Brezhnev had played an outstanding role in developing and realizing Lenin’s course for the party and that the party and the people thus saw in him a ‘wise and experienced leader’ who was leading the wonderful homeland forward towards communism.21 Brezhnev, however, remained true to his primus inter pares scenario of power, insofar as he didn’t adopt such manners himself. Upon receiving the Peace Prize, he even interrupted Podgorny, correcting him by saying it was an award for the entire party,22 and in future too he always said ‘we’, meaning the Politburo as a whole. He was not tied to this discourse and continued to take the liberty of expressing his criticism jokingly: ‘That is to say then, that when I worked in Moldavia, maize wasn’t controllable, and now it is controllable [amusement in the room].’23 Brezhnev could, then, stand apart from his comrades with humour and wit – as long as he was physically capable of doing so. In October 1976, when Kazakhstan’s party leader Dinmukhamed Kunayev declared how much Brezhnev’s visit had inspired and delighted his countrymen and insisted they were concerned as to when the general secretary ever got any rest, Brezhnev casually replied, ‘Meetings are recreation too’, and laughed.24 The party followed up its talk of Brezhnev as the ‘true and worthy heir to Lenin’ with actions: to mark the party membership book reform of 1973, Brezhnev symbolically presented Lenin with book number one, himself receiving book number two.25 This gesture, which many of his party comrades considered tasteless, was also intended to cement his irrefutable claim to be Lenin’s heir. Correspondingly, a series of ‘cult artefacts’ honouring the general secretary soon emerged, fashioned by workers’ collectives from throughout the Soviet Union: portraits, vases, tapestries and even a violin with his face on it, decorated editions of his trilogy etc. – all these things were presented to him at ceremonial events.26 It would appear he liked it, since he hung up one or two pieces in his home. While he presented himself as Lenin’s irreplaceable heir, his entourage worked to raise his profile as a military man and an important officer during the Second World War. He received over forty military decorations – most of them after 1976. The published minutes of the Politburo meeting at which it was decided he would be awarded the title of Marshal reveal that the new ‘Brezhnev-speak’ had also taken root in the Politburo. Defence Minister Ustinov opened proceedings by praising Brezhnev’s ‘gigantic work to strengthen the country’ and suggested awarding him the rank, whereupon everyone joined in with the laudations and unanimously supported the proposal.27 Together with the placing of a bust in the city of his birth, Dneprodzerzhinsk, making him a marshal launched the celebrations marking his seventieth birthday in December 1976, which lasted nearly the entire year. A first photo album and a first

340

Brezhnev

biography appeared. Television showed a fifty-minute documentary entitled The Tale of a Communist, tying his life to events and achievements in the Soviet Union with almost unsurpassable pathos.28 A theatre play followed, the Tretyakov Gallery presented a life-size portrait of him in an officer’s uniform, and the artist Il’ya Glazunov designed a Brezhnev poster.29 For his birthday itself, all the Eastern Bloc leaders travelled to Moscow, Podgorny presented him with two more medals and Suslov held the laudation.‘[…] all territorial princes spoke and the other representatives of the twenty-seven-man Kremlin leadership formed the décor and backdrop’, as the West German embassy reported.30 Half a year later, in June 1977, his appointment as president was followed by another week of celebrations and wall-to-wall television coverage.31 Once he was awarded the Order of Victory on 20 February 1978, there were no more political or military ranks to which he could be appointed. In this respect, it is not surprising the strategists now turned to the arts and awarded him the Lenin Prize for Literature on 31 March 1980, for his memoirs published in 1978. This was doubly absurd, given that the memoirs were neither a reflection of his memories nor his own work. Yet even if many Soviet people ridiculed these three volumes, they were still a masterpiece of propaganda. The ghostwriters wrote Brezhnev into the history of the Second World War, thereby making him part of the Soviet Union’s second founding myth. Volumes Two and Three were a monument to his efforts in the reconstruction of industry after the war and reforming agriculture, thus crediting him with laying the foundations for the prosperity and economic success that had been achieved. With the fourth volume, published in 1981, the authors presented Brezhnev as the exemplary New Man: someone from a workingclass family who had worked his way to the top from the very bottom, from worker to engineer to leader of the party. On the one hand, today it seems grotesque that libraries were given guidance on how the memoirs were to be plugged with exhibitions, evening readings, talks, discussion circles, readers’ conferences etc.32 On the other hand, there are many readers’ letters and notes to the CC in which Soviet people report how they had been greatly inspired by the memoirs and had been moved to tears. This held particularly for television and radio programmes featuring readings by state-decorated actors such as Yuriy Kayurov, who had played Lenin in many films.33 Even if some of these letters were organized by the trade union committees or works meetings, Brezhnev’s generation in particular contained many people who really did rediscover their own experiences during wartime or the immediate post-war years and were thankful for the meaning the publication lent them: ‘I am grateful to Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev for the memories of the Little Land, for the precise and clear narration, for it is not only narrated, it was experienced, suffered by everyone who found themselves in the Little Land in 1943.’34 The cult of personality reached its zenith with the celebrations marking Brezhnev’s seventy-fifth birthday in December 1981, just under a year before he died. The West German embassy reported: The 75th birthday of Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev was an occasion for a cult of personality, the extent and intensity of which could hardly be surpassed. Along with the ‘main programme’ with medals and speeches, the ‘framework programme’ was also evident

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

341

in the press and on television, with a photo and book exhibitions, the publication of Brezhnev’s writings and several factory, sovkhoz and other meetings.35

An angry Chernyayev wondered in his diary whether no one in the Politburo realized that for ‘ninety-five per cent’ of the population, moves such as awarding Brezhnev the rank of marshal had the opposite effect to that which was intended.36 Given the endless celebrations, there probably wasn’t anyone in the Soviet Union who hadn’t made fun of it, he assumed.37 He noted that when sixty years of the Red Army were celebrated in 1978 and television showed Brezhnev being awarded the Order of Victory for days on end, not only taxi drivers, but also the CC chauffeurs had laughed.38 Chernyayev was frustrated with the degree of ignorance and nonchalance in the upper spheres of power, where no one seemed concerned about the effect on the population: ‘Can’t the KGB at least report that Homeric laughter is resounding throughout the land and complete indifference is setting in to all these theatrical dramas that replace real steering and reveal the absolute impotence of the leading figure?’39 The sometimes disastrous impact of this cult around his seventy-fifth birthday in combination with the appearance of the fourth volume of his ‘memoirs’ is also evident in the fact that even the Leningrad literary journal Aurora, a publication of the Soviet writers’ union, put out a thinly veiled diatribe against Brezhnev by Viktor Golyavkin, disguised as a ‘jubilee speech’ to a fictive writer in order to ridicule Brezhnev’s receipt of the Prize for Literature: One can barely imagine that this wonderful writer is living. It is unbelievable that he marches along the streets just like us. It seems as if he has died. After all, he has written so many books, anyone else who had written as many books would long be lying in the grave. But him – probably superhuman! He lives and doesn’t even think of dying, to universal amazement. But the majority believe he is long since dead. So much does one admire this talent. After all, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy have long been in that world like other famous writers too. His place is there – alongside them. He has certainly earned this honour! I see him before me – rosy-cheeked and fat, you can hardly believe he will die one day. And he himself probably doesn’t believe it either. But doubtless, he will die.40

Its publication resulted in the immediate replacement of the entire editorial team. That the general secretary’s entourage ignored the negative consequences of delegitimization and ridicule may also have been due to the fact that Brezhnev clearly enjoyed the cult. He developed a weakness for gifts, medals and decorations, if not indeed an addiction to them. As early as 1966 he is said to have worked on Podgorny until he relented and awarded him the medal he so coveted for his sixtieth birthday – ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’, the first of four such decorations – whereas the plan had actually been to give him a star as a ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’.41 Shelest thought a new ‘leaderism’ was already evident in 1971, and suspected Brezhnev would have liked to have been called ‘Leader’ on his sixty-fifth birthday like Stalin before him.42 Indeed, Brezhnev’s loyal supporter Kirilenko did try to introduce ‘vozhd” (leader) as a form of address for him, but was unable to.43 It is possible, however, that

342

Brezhnev

Brezhnev himself dismissed Kirilenko’s proposal given the aversion he had to Stalin. But apart from this title, Brezhnev loved medals and gifts, and according to his entourage, as his addiction to pills worsened he lost his capacity for self-criticism or reflection on what outsiders thought about all the honours and medals.44 It seems plausible that his addiction limited his judgement or that his physical frailty made him less resistant to flattery. His doctor, Chazov, reports that, lying in hospital, Brezhnev proudly showed his visitors excerpts from newspapers heaping praise on him.45 Another indication he believed in his own merits was his practice of presenting foreign heads of state and other dignitaries with portraits of himself in his marshal’s uniform or editions of his memoirs.46 This high opinion of his own achievements was certainly not just the result of his addiction; as the cult of personality grew, he found himself locked in a discourse of praise and self-praise that became a matter of course and no longer tolerated dissenting voices. When his ambassador, Falin, advised him not to wear his medals when visiting Federal Chancellor Schmidt in Hamburg in 1978, since it was not the normal practice in the Hanseatic city, Gromyko immediately intervened and placated Brezhnev, telling him he had no need to be embarrassed by the decorations he had earned honestly.47 But it was not only the Politburo but also Brezhnev’s family that ensured his comfort zone remained undisturbed. His son-in-law, Churbanov, considered his craving ever more decorations to be pathological; when Brezhnev was made a marshal, he carefully warned him of his excesses. Brezhnev took offence, saying he had not asked the party to bestow the honour upon him, and his daughter Galina told her husband he shouldn’t anger her father without good reason.48 If it was really the case that many people around Brezhnev saw the ridicule attracted by the ‘wall of icons’ on his chest but none of them seriously intervened, and hence clearly didn’t care a jot about the public response, was this then a cult of personality that primarily served to keep the general secretary in a good mood? ‘Dmitriy Ustinov and Konstantin Chernenko as the instigators, Gromyko, Andropov and Suslov going along with it, constantly pushed new gimcracks his way’, observed ambassador Falin.49 Brezhnev’s photographer, Musael’yan, confirms that Brezhnev used to have his cases containing around forty Soviet medals brought to him in the evenings and looked at them cherishingly.50 It appears he not only craved the Order of Victory because it attested to his having commanded a key military operation, but also because the points of the red star were made of red rubies, their gleaming wreath was made of diamonds, and the metal base was of platinum decorated with gold and silver. In his notebook, he recorded five days before the ceremony that he had taken a look at the medal.51 And so under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union produced a new kind of one-dimensional cult of personality. It only served to underpin assurance between the leader and his entourage, while the majority of the population began to laugh. The cult became a farce.

Addiction For a long time, Brezhnev seems to have managed to keep on top of his addiction. According to his doctors, he took not only the sleeping medication radedorm, but

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

343

also the sedatives ativan and seduxen and the highly addictive tranquillizer eunoctin.52 A vicious circle set in: the more tablets he took, the harder he found it to stay awake and active during the day, and the more tablets he then needed at night in order to be able to sleep at all. We might speculate that a second, psychological addiction also developed and that Brezhnev, as vain and concerned about his looks as he was, fought the shame he felt for letting himself go physically with more tablets that gently allowed him to forget. During the day he felt tired and beaten; at night he couldn’t sleep. He was constantly begging his wife Viktoriya, his bodyguards, his doctors and even the members of the Politburo for more sedatives.53 His doctor Nikolay Rodionov always had a small case of them with him; he referred to it as his ‘black box’ and dipped into it whenever Brezhnev demanded.54 Since Chazov had carelessly told Brezhnev his medications would work better with vodka, Brezhnev insisted on taking them with his favourite Zubrówka (flavoured in the bottle with a blade of bison grass), which his bodyguards had to supply. They tried to dilute it with water, and to replace the pill boxes Brezhnev placed everywhere with placebos.55 His staffers had a theory that one of the reasons Brezhnev loved the fast boat and car trips he undertook with Kissinger and Nixon was that he needed the adrenalin kick to regain full consciousness after taking his pills.56 Keeping him in sedatives soon became the task of the nurse Nina Aleksandrovna Korovyakova, who was assigned to him in 1973. The attractive young woman is said to have reminded him of his wartime love Tamara Levchenko. It is also said her services were not only of a medical nature.57 She was around him constantly and accompanied him to his dacha and on his travels, since she cleaned his teeth, gave him massages and worked with him as a physiotherapist.58 His doctor Mikhail Kosarev, who replaced Rodionov in 1975, was horrified that an individual nurse had so much power and free access to the sedatives. But this was clearly at the behest of Brezhnev, who protected Korovyakova and also helped her husband enjoy a rapid rise within the KGB. Brezhnev’s first absence due to abusing medication during his tour of the USA in 1973 was the first time Chazov turned to Andropov to let him know how serious the situation had become.59 But he was not able to have Korovyakova kept away from him. As much as Brezhnev protected her and as little as he paid attention to his doctors’ advice, the entire year of 1975 clearly represented such a nadir for him that he was finally painfully aware he was in the process of destroying himself. After collapsing in Vladivostok and Paris in late 1974, he had himself referred to the clinic in Barvikha, outside Moscow, in early 1975. But he broke off the therapy as soon as he felt better.60 The Politburo, which had granted him two weeks’ special leave in the late January,61 responded to his condition by deciding to ‘normalize’ his working hours to counter his ‘systematic work overload’ and preserve his ‘health in the interests of the party and the country’. He was relieved of as many duties as possible.62 The debacle of the Helsinki summit must have forced a rethink not only by Brezhnev, but also by those around him. When he had to be taken straight to hospital after his subsequent holiday in Crimea in the early October,63 the meeting with Giscard d’Estaing in Moscow shortly thereafter once again nearly resulted in a scandal and he embarrassed himself by ‘directing’ the ‘Internationale’ in Poland,64 Andropov

344

Brezhnev

gave in to Chazov’s demands that the Politburo be kept informed about his condition. They came up against Suslov, however, who insisted only a small circle should remain in the know. His reasons immediately became clear: Podgorny popped up at the clinic, demanding to be allowed to see Brezhnev. Thus it was clear to Andropov and Suslov that they had to get Brezhnev back in action as soon as possible to avoid a vacuum and a battle for power.65 At the same time, in 1975 Mikhail Kosarev became Brezhnev’s new doctor. The first thing he did was get rid of the pill boxes.66 He urged Chazov to keep the people treating Brezhnev to a minimum, and ensured that only he was authorized to administer medication to him.67 Together, Kosarev and Chazov managed to confront Brezhnev with his illness and make it clear that if he carried on like he was, he would not be able to handle the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in late February 1976. Clearly, Brezhnev finally grasped the explosiveness of the situation, perhaps also due to Podgorny’s pushiness, and agreed to work on himself. In the course of this strategy, his doctors were able to remove Nina Korovyakova.68 Their goal was not only to cut off their boss’s unmonitored use of tablets, but also to get him fit again with exercise. He stopped swashing the sleeping pills down with vodka.69 From this point on, for Brezhnev himself his weight was not just a matter of vanity, but also an indication of his health.70 He had told the Politburo that he had been preparing for the party congress at his dacha since 1 January 1976 and was not to be disturbed.71 In fact, he started swimming twice a day, resumed hunting and walking and was evidently on the road to recovery. He insisted launching the congress by not only issuing brief greetings, but also by giving the entire four-hour opening speech like he had always done. He got through it, but by the break was drenched in sweat from the effort of speaking for two hours.72 His presence was noted: the German embassy reported from Moscow that Brezhnev had demonstrated ‘remarkable physical stamina’ and would thus surely remain in office for some time.73 Tellingly, while 1975 was a low point and Brezhnev barely wrote anything in his notebook for twelve months, there wasn’t a single entry for the first two months of 1976 either until the end of the party congress in the late March. It seems convalescing took all of his strength, or he lived so withdrawn that he hardly spoke with anyone whose name he might have written down. But even the first entry for 1976, on 10 March, five days after the congress ended, is revealing: ‘[We] Have arrived in Barvikha’.74 He was quite clearly undergoing further rehab and did not return to dayto-day politics until 21 April, just six days before he was awarded the rank of marshal. His doctors had probably been able to make it clear to him he had to be fit and sound of mind if he wanted to get through the anniversary year and his seventieth birthday with dignity. His persistent insomnia may have been another motivation for trying more exercise and bodily control, since on 9 September he noted in Crimea: ‘The night was bad (sleeplessness).’75 It was during his holiday of 1976 that he first began to document his weight: 28 September 1976 – 85.5 kilograms.76 In the course of his recording it, his weight would yo-yo considerably for his height of 1.78 metres, between 82 and 90 kilos. Now his ambition and his vanity were once again evident: he weighed himself in the mornings after swimming in the hope he would weigh less then.77 He precisely noted his weight down to fifty grams; if he had gained that amount, he wrote: ‘didn’t swim’.78

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

345

After the first entries of autumn 1976, he did not monitor his weight regularly until April 1977.79 He was clearly preparing for the announcement of the new constitution, the long-awaited removal of Podgorny, his own election as President in the May and his visit to France in the June. During the holiday in Crimea that followed, he expanded his weigh-ins to both before – 86 – and after – 85.75 – swimming.80 In the August, still in Crimea, he even regularly took three readings: before breakfast – 85.3 – after breakfast – 85.35 – and after swimming – 85.1.81 The autumn of 1977 saw him relapse: back in Moscow, he stopped monitoring his weight and presumably his pill intake too. It is speculation, but it is possible that after the removal of Kosygin in 1976 and Podgorny in 1977 and the endless jubilations in his honour he felt both tired and untouchable. He spent the second half of the December in hospital and thus missed the December Plenum for the first time.82 After returning to Barvikha for another fortnight in January 1978,83 in February 1978 he regained his self-discipline and recommenced his weigh-ins in order to make it through the Order of Victory ceremony – only to clearly lose control and give in to addiction afterwards. His aides postponed his visit to Bonn, planned for the February, to the May, claiming he had a cold.84 On 26 February he wrote in his notebook: ‘Around 14:10 […] I lay down to sleep, couldn’t sleep until seven o’clock in the evening […] spoke with Chazov. On 27 February and again on 13 March he noted: ‘Spoke with Chazov E.I. […] about sleeping pills’.85 The visit to Bonn in May was an ‘extraordinary strain’ which he only managed with great effort.86 If 1978 was something of a bad year in which Brezhnev repeatedly broke off recording his weight and relapsed into addiction for several weeks, from early 1979 onwards he hardly made any entries in his notebooks without documenting his weigh-ins.87 Nevertheless, 1979 was not a good year for him either. He disappeared from the scene for five weeks at the very beginning of the year, spent almost the whole of February in Sochi and postponed two international meetings: he put off Gierek until the March and Giscard d’Estaing until the April.88 It is likely he spent his time in Sochi at a rehab clinic. In the early April, before Giscard’s visit, the German embassy reported that the Kremlin doctors had had a number of international arterial sclerosis specialists and medical apparatus flown in from the West.89 After all, Brezhnev had to present himself to the world and the US president in Vienna in June 1979. Chazov believes that the addition to the Politburo of Chernenko in 1978 and Tikhonov in 1979 caused Brezhnev to feel secure and no longer see any need for selfdiscipline. While he kept monitoring his weight and took regular morning swims, he did not see any need to limit his use of sedatives.90 Brezhnev’s grandson Andrey, on the other hand, blames the doctors, who failed to get him off sleeping pills which no longer helped him anyway.91 Kosarev confirms this insofar as he says Brezhnev would no longer have been able to live without the tablets; they only managed to significantly reduce the dosage.92 Illness and its repression The problem was that no one in the Politburo was interested in Brezhnev’s addiction, at least not after the removal of Podgorny and Kosygin, although in the last years of

346

Brezhnev

his rule Chazov provided its members with six or seven updates on the state of his health.93 Just as the comrades in the Politburo ignored the people laughing at the many medals, they did not want to recognize that their boss had serious health problems. This was due to many factors. Firstly, the scenario of power did not permit them to discipline the general secretary in any way, shape or form, other than by taking away his tablets. The ‘script’ allocated Brezhnev the role of the carer and everyone else the role of the cared-for; any departure from this constellation would have dislocated the power structure. When Brezhnev asked them what they themselves did about insomnia and requested tablets from them in order to circumvent the supervision of his doctors, they gave him what he asked for.94 In the midst of the Afghanistan crisis, Brezhnev wrote in his notebook on 29 November 1979, ‘received from Chernenko’, and the day Suslov died, 25 January 1982, he noted, ‘received from Yu[ri] V[ladimirovich Andropov] – yellow ones’.95 That is not to say that the members of the Politburo realized they were assisting an addict with their ‘supplies’, since the conversations about insomnia seemed harmless enough and the severity of his suffering was not always understood. Once, when Brezhnev complained to Chernenko that he couldn’t sleep, Chernenko just responded by saying ‘Good, good’, until Brezhnev blew his top and demanded to know what was good about it – whereupon Chernenko gave the unintentionally funny reply, ‘Not good, not good’.96 Chernenko and Tikhonov regularly kept Brezhnev in supplies despite the warning they received from Andropov, who only provided him with placebos.97 The very fact he gave him placebos instead of refusing outright shows the lengths to which they all went to keep up appearances. No one wanted to be the first to revoke the contract of collective rule. One also wonders to what extent Brezhnev’s doctors even spoke openly with him when one reads what he wrote in his notebook on 14 January 1978: ‘Was at the institute, brain arteries checked, they said everything is good, you are to be envied and congratulated, you’re strong and healthy.’98 Additionally, particularly for the Politburo a subject like pill addiction was taboo, especially when it concerned the general secretary – ergo it could not exist. Many of them will certainly have tried to play down the issue or suppress it – addiction was something for people at the very bottom of society, not for the most powerful man in the state. Ultimately, with the exception of Gorbachev, the entire Politburo was of Brezhnev’s generation; it contained hardly anyone who was not sick, infirm or senile. Since Brezhnev had some other physical ailments too, it was easy to act as if he were suffering from quite ‘normal’ illnesses or was in hospital having surgery, as the Foreign Office and he himself repeatedly told their partners abroad.99 The official diagnosis, reports Kevorkov, without revealing his sources, was ‘arteriosclerosis of the aorta with aneurysm in the stomach area, stenosing arteriosclerosis of the coronary vessels, ischaemia (bloodlessness) of the heart and cardiac arhythmia’.100 In March 1982, he also had a terrible accident that was kept out of the public domain:101 during his final journey through Central Asia, a metal balustrade in an aeroplane factory in Tashkent collapsed under the weight of curious factory workers. Brezhnev was buried underneath it. Although his bodyguards were able to throw themselves on top of him to protect him, he suffered concussion and broke his right collarbone, which subsequently refused to mend.102 His return to Moscow was thus not broadcast on

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

347

television as usual, but simply announced in the newspapers.103 Although he could hardly raise his right arm and was in pain throughout the May and November parades, his doctors decided not to operate due to his weak heart.104 He remained in hospital for an enitre month.105 His bodyguard Medvedev reports it was painful to listen to him, since he slurred half of his words and could barely be understood.106 And so the Soviet citizens and diplomats saw an infirm old man still desperately clinging onto the strings of power, and it didn’t occur to anyone he was suffering from addiction. Outside of the Politburo, Brezhnev’s health was the best-kept state secret, relates Arbatov, and even he, one of his closest aides, hadn’t dared ask the doctors.107 Geriatric frailty In contrast to this secrecy, Brezhnev was remarkably open about his health when he sought to gain the trust of his discussion partners. It seems as if he was probing how much one could casually talk about such a subject in the West in order to establish common ground. During his very first meeting with Willy Brandt in August 1970, he revealed he had just got out of hospital but was officially not allowed to speak about it.108 He used the information to excuse himself from attending the reception after signing the Moscow Treaties. In April 1979, he used his illness as his excuse for postponing Giscard’s visit by two months, and blamed a cold for the peculiar behaviour he had shown in Rambouillet in December 1974; then, he had only had problems with his jaw: It’s much worse now. I’m receiving radiation therapy. You know what I mean. Sometimes it gets too strenuous for me, then I’m forced to break off the treatment. The doctors are quite confident. Look, here, in my back, is where the trouble is! They think they might be able to heal me still or at least delay the illness. But at my age it doesn’t matter much.109

It is unclear what was supposed to be wrong with his back. The West German embassy reported that Brezhnev did indeed have considerable trouble with his jaw.110 His muffled voice, which to Jaruzelski sounded ‘as if from the grave’, was mainly due to his sedative abuse, which prevented precise articulation.111 His photographer claimed that his mumbling was in part caused by an injury he had sustained during the war, when the mine threw him out of the landing craft,112 while the West German Foreign Office presumed he had two operations on his jaw in the mid-1970s.113 However, one of the two West German dentists Brezhnev had flown in around twenty-five times between the autumn of 1974 and the summer of 1976 to treat him using methods then unknown in the Soviet Union later related how Brezhnev had had neither a war injury nor problems with his jaw; rather, he had required a very complicated dental procedure.114 Nevertheless, Brezhnev had dentures and only stopped smoking in the mid-1970s because his doctors told him his false teeth would fall out at some point if he didn’t.115 Just as he began to document his weight-loss programme in 1976 and around the time he stopped receiving treatment from his West German dentist, in the May of the

348

Brezhnev

same year he started recording the regular therapy he received from two doctors who cleaned his teeth and adjusted the West German implant.116 But the best imported prosthetics couldn’t stop his enunciation deteriorating due to his pill use, until, as at the May Plenum of 1982, he could barely be understood. In 1982, the West German Foreign Office reported on the state of Brezhnev’s health: ‘He is slowly losing his strength, but as is normal for a man of his age.’117 On the whole, the office was well informed: it reported that he had a weak heart that was, however, being kept under control with a pacemaker, medication and permanent supervision by a cardiac specialist, Chazov. But he was showing signs of stress or poor resistance to influenza and thus had to be taken to hospital whenever he had the slightest cold. His lungs weren’t functioning properly, he usually wore a hearing aid, he had arthritis in his legs and back and mild Parkinson’s symptoms. In all, he did not have much left in the tank. He would most likely die of a weak heart, but a stroke was also a possibility. Speculation about the state of Brezhnev’s health, the question as to how long he would hold on or whether he might be ousted, and if not, what he would die of, became commonplace after 1975. During the last two years of his life it became the main occupation of Western diplomats and ‘Kremlinologists’. Tellingly, it clearly didn’t occur to anyone that his decline was not due to his age – he was only in his early seventies – but due to addiction. In April 1979, diplomatic circles were already reporting that the Kremlin doctors had said, ‘Brezhnev’s life cannot be extended for much longer’.118 In the August of 1982, the West German General Consulate reported from Leningrad that Brezhnev’s visit to Tashkent had placed him under so much strain that the accompanying doctors had reckoned with his ‘immediate passing’, and Soviet television had thus been requested to prepare the necessary memorial schedules without delay – the programmes had been ready to air ever since.119 Collective leadership without a rudder Western diplomats expected Brezhnev’s resignation from 1975 onwards.120 He is said to have actually offered it twice.121 According to his photographer, Musael’yan, he first suggested it at a gathering congratulating him on his seventieth birthday in 1976 after Suslov had finished his speech upon awarding him another medal: He suddenly said he was tired and [wondered] whether it might not be time to relinquish the post of gensec. I couldn’t believe my ears. The response – deathly silence. Then four voices in chorus: ‘You’re our figurehead. How are we supposed to go on without you.You’ll get more rest and continue working with twice the energy’.122

He said Brezhnev replied, ‘Then make me the honorary chairman of the party like in the USA.’123 He remained in office. The second time he tested the water was in April 1979, in a private setting. After a long withdrawal and immediately before Giscard’s visit and the impending trip to Vienna, he confided in his head bodyguard, Ryabenko, telling him he wanted to retire.124 Chernenko then assembled the Politburo, who again persuaded him he couldn’t go now.125

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

349

It seems the members of the Politburo, like historians to this day, were unsure whether Brezhnev merely wanted to test his entourage, as Stalin had done: who will remain loyal to me, who is just waiting for me to leave? However, that would contradict everything we know about Brezhnev and his scenario of power.126 At least it was not a test in order to take bloody revenge if necessary; at worst, he would have been fishing for compliments. It remains uncertain how determined he was to relinquish all of his positions. It is possible he was terrified of the uncertainly that would follow. After all, there was no procedure for the regular retirement of a party leader; Lenin and Stalin had died in office, Khrushchev had been ousted. Power was also something familiar and ‘sweet’ to him, as his photographer observed.127 Presumably, his determination to retire or the realization he was no longer up to the responsibility was stronger after the awful spring and before the pending summit in 1979 than it had been on his seventieth birthday in 1976, when he had regained some sort of form. When Gromyko and Andropov visited him, he is said to have asked them once more whether it might not be better if he retired.128 It is speculation, but certainly possible, that his offer of 1976 was more of a theoretical flight of fancy and an idea he still had to get used to, while its repetition in 1979 sounds more like a desperate realization that he had had a bad time of it in recent years and things weren’t going to get any better. Later, his bodyguards, doctors and even his political enemies agreed he would have done right to have retired in 1976: then the world would have remembered him as a great man, a bringer of peace and a visionary for a new order of European security.129 But instead, the Politburo offered him a deal: he would only have to work a few hours a day, could leave for the weekend on Thursdays and could take five months off per year if he remained in office.130 They would take care of everything in the meantime and ensure the power structure didn’t change. This was the point at which stability turned into stagnation. The fear of the unforeseeable personal, structural and Union-wide consequences of a change of leadership was stronger than the realization that Brezhnev was just a shadow of his former self, and the system urgently required a breath of fresh air.131 The West German embassy rightly observed that Brezhnev was an ‘important unifying figure’ and would not be easy to replace.132 In other words, Brezhnev and his comrades had become stuck in a symbiotic relationship in which both parties thought they depended on each other. In order to have their own peace and quiet and secure their own power, his comrades convinced him he had to continue – and he felt flattered and understood it as an appeal to his party discipline: ‘If you are all of this opinion, then I will keep working a little longer’.133 Karen Brutents considers Brezhnev, as a product and beneficiary of the system, to have been its victim: There were not only the personal ambitions of Leonid Il’ich, who had settled in at the very top, but his entourage (or better, camarilla) also shamelessly exploited his deranged condition and forced the old man to suffer in high office instead of letting him live out his autumn days as a comfortable pensioner.134

Indeed, with his scenario of power, the collective speech-writing and the rituals of respect and reassurance, Brezhnev had created a structure that no one wanted to

350

Brezhnev

destroy, and which also worked without his active participation. Everyone knew his role, what he had to do, and the common production of consensus ensured no one tried to outdo anyone else as long Brezhnev remained in the background as the guarantor of this order. He now seldom chaired the Politburo, and on the few occasions he did, he kept it to under twenty minutes whenever possible; Suslov, Chernenko or Kirilenko took it in turns to replace him in running the Secretariat.135 When he did make an appearance, it was often a surprise and difficult for the other members of the Politburo, since he frequently didn’t understand what was going on. He read out his prepared notes and could no longer respond to the others’ contributions.136 He left it to Gromyko and the others to receive delegations, appearing for thirty minutes at the most. After 1976, his comrades decided that Brezhnev’s speeches at the CC plenums would be handed out and read during the break instead of being read out by him, or that another member of the Politburo would give the speech for him. How well the system worked was evident at the December Plenum of 1977, when Brezhnev was absent by ‘strict doctors’ orders’ and Suslov suggested they act as if he had been there: Brezhnev’s speech was handed out, read in silence, then discussed in the usual manner and praised in the next day’s newspapers.137 From April 1979 onwards, Brezhnev merely opened the plenums and handed the chair to Suslov; the meetings themselves were now put back from 10.00 am to 11.00 am and were adjourned for three hours in the afternoon until 5.30.138 Even the formerly four-hour parades on 1 May and 7 November were reduced by one-and-a-half hours to ease the strain on Brezhnev, who could no longer climb the steps to the mausoleum stage by himself.139 Whereas he used to be up until nine or ten in the evening, after the reduction to his workload in 1976 he put in no more than six hours: he left his dacha by car at 8.30 am, arrived at the Kremlin at 10.00, ate there at midday, then slept for one-and-a-half hours, had his hair done and then left his office around 6.00 pm.140 In March 1982, the West German embassy reported that he worked for only two to three hours a day and didn’t have the strength to do more;141 his doctor Chazov goes so far as to claim he didn’t do any work at all during his last six years.142 From the age of sixty-five onwards, he was certainly entitled not only to two or more months’ holiday in the summer, but also to a winter break of up to several weeks.143 What the Politburo considered an acceptable solution was a source of ridicule abroad. Egypt’s President Sadat complained one could no longer do politics with the Soviet leaders, since first they were on holiday for three months in Crimea and then took two months to recover from it; Honecker now referred to the general secretary only as the ‘general wreck’.144 Jaruzelski used to tell a joke that was doing the rounds throughout the Eastern Bloc: there has been another demonstration of strength during the parade on Red Square: the state and party leader climbed up to the stage on the mausoleum unassisted.145 Gerontocracy and succession If we ask why the other fifteen members of the Politburo did nothing, refused to accept Brezhnev’s offer to retire and failed to pension him off, we must bear in mind he

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

351

wasn’t the only one who was struggling; the majority of his comrades were just as old and infirm as he was. Tikhonov fell down the stairs on a visit to Poland, Gromyko fell over during ceremonies, during an all-Union congress a third party leader fell asleep on the toilet, forcing bodyguards to break the door down, and Kirilenko, long considered Brezhnev’s successor, developed acute dementia. He sometimes sought out Brezhnev to discuss something with him only to forget what he had wanted to say.146 Brezhnev’s notebooks also contain several entries recording his visits to comrades in hospital or conversations about their health with Chazov.147 From Brezhnev’s perspective, it may have seemed he was suffering from insomnia and addiction, but the others were really ill. At a Politburo meeting in January 1977, he noted with some concern that almost half the members were absent: Gromyko had had a heart attack, Andropov had been bedridden for two months, Mazurov had just recovered but had to take it steady, Podgorny was ill again, Chernenko had pneumonia after a bout of influenza, Kapitonov had just been taken to hospital and Solomentsev had already been off sick for some time.148 And so a frustrated Chernyayev wrote in his diary in 1980 that there was no suitable successor in sight: Kosygin had had a heart attack (and died at the end of the year); his deputy and successor Tikhonov was not up to it morally or mentally; Chernenko was Brezhnev’s puppet and would disappear when he went; the Leningrad party leader Grigoriy Romanov was no longer fit for work; Suslov was too old and Andropov was severely ill and, since he was a KGB man, out of the question.149 Andropov had diabetes, and so Brezhnev allowed Chazov to travel to the USA in April 1977 to see what could be done for the head of the secret service.150

Figure 37 From left to right: Suslov (with his back to the camera), Brezhnev, Andropov, Ustinov and Chernenko in the Politburo lounge on Army Day, 23 February 1975.

352

Brezhnev

While Andropov was a strategic ally for Brezhnev, Chernenko was a friend from his time in Moldavia. He looked after the former for tactical reasons, the latter out of loyalty. He is reported to have said of Chernenko, ‘Of my dogs, the most obedient and devoted is Kostya Chernenko.’151 As his office manager, Chernenko organized Brezhnev’s working life from 1950 onwards.152 From 1964 on, he took the minutes at meetings of the Politburo, and hence Brezhnev called him ‘scribe’ or ‘writer’.153 Chernenko also took the strain for him when his addiction forced him to withdraw. When Brezhnev hid away in his dacha in later 1975 and had the Communist Parties’ conference postponed, Chernenko shielded him from the world outside while making sure he didn’t lose contact with it either.154 He read aloud to him and translated for him, as the following note of 14 March 1977 on the visit of the first party secretary of Kalmykia demonstrates: ‘I asked him to tell Chernenko K.U. what concerned him, what he needs, since he has buried me in a pile of concerns, I found it hard to understand them.’155 The more Brezhnev withdrew from political life, the more responsibilities he delegated to Chernenko, whom he swiftly elected CC secretary in March 1976, before making him a candidate in October 1977 and a full member of the Politburo as early as November 1978.156 Nevertheless, as he grew older, Chernenko was only of limited help. Brezhnev’s bodyguard Medvedev relates that in the final years, Brezhnev’s secretary Galina Doroshina had to be called to ensure the ‘two old men’ hadn’t made a mess of everything again.157 Doroshina was universally admired for her integrity and competence in equal measure. From May 1976 onwards, Brezhnev regularly wrote in his notebook whenever he worked with her, occasionally for six hours at a time: she read papers to him and explained them, reported from the Politburo and explained its decisions or prepared him for state receptions with the relevant material.158 Together with his personal aide Anatoliy Blatov, she supported him with his daily work wherever she could. While Blatov had been his closest aide since 1972, in 1976 Doroshina was clearly brought in to compensate for Brezhnev’s inability to do intellectual and organizational work.159 Mikhail Suslov, who was four years older than Brezhnev and still considered a cool head and calculating theorist, and to whom Brezhnev looked for orientation, was also frail and could not be burdened from 1975 onwards.160 When he became very ill in January 1977, Brezhnev is said to have been beside himself and to have told Chazov he had to be restored to health – he wouldn’t know what to do without him and would have to resign.161 While Suslov lived another five years, he died a good half a year before Brezhnev, on 25 January 1982. How Brezhnev felt about his death is not known; in his notebook, he wrote simply: ‘stood at Mikhail Andreyevich’s coffin’.162 Suslov’s death raised the crucial question of who could succeed Brezhnev; there was eager anticipation as to whom he would choose to fill the vacant post. Perhaps he saw that Chernenko was losing it and increasingly had to be put right by Doroshina, perhaps he thought the architect of his foreign policy could rescue his legacy; whatever his motives, he had Yuri Andropov elected his number two at the May Plenum of 1982 – his last.163 Andropov was already showing severe symptoms of diabetes; he had to hide the weeping sores over his eyebrows with thick-rimmed spectacles.164 While his promotion made him an éminence grise and, as Kevorkov put it, ‘placed him on the

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

353

home straight’,165 the no less infirm Chernenko no longer left Brezhnev’s side and remained his connection with the outside world.166 According to Arbatov and Chernyayev, Brezhnev always kept two deputies who competed with each other: while before it had been Suslov and Kirilenko,167 the latter now suffering from dementia, he now favoured the seventy-one-year-old Chernenko and the sixty-eight-year-old Andropov. But Brezhnev’s aim would have been not so much to follow Stalin’s example and let the satraps fight each other as to maintain the balance of power within the collective and rely on the support of many. He cleverly evened up the power structure by making Chernenko’s man Vitaliy Fedorchuk Andropov’s successor as chairman of the KGB.168 Chazov considered it to be a tragedy that the two severely ill men spent the last months of their lives engaged in a power struggle that mainly involved spreading rumours about the poor state of the other’s health.169 Giscard d’Estaing recalled Gierek telling him in Warsaw in 1980 that Chernenko was the new crown prince.170 During his visit to Moscow the same year, Helmut Schmidt, like all Western heads of state, looked for Brezhnev’s potential successor and found Andropov and Chernenko instead of young cadres.171 Valentin Falin reports that he was there in 1981 when Brezhnev told Chernenko, ‘Kostya, prepare to take over my business.’172 Falin nevertheless did not discount the possibility that Brezhnev might have said the same thing to Andropov, whom he placed in pole position as second secretary. Brezhnev’s photographer Musael’yan is the sole voice claiming that due to the sickness besetting Andropov and Chernenko, in the end Brezhnev planned to make Shcherbitskiy, the sixty-four-year old head of the Ukrainian party, his successor, which he intended to announce at the CC plenum of 15 November 1982.173

Family and death Many members of Brezhnev’s entourage have said that during the last years of his life he was not happy with his family, avoiding them, escaping to the Zavidovo hunting lodge whenever possible and even preferring to spend his birthdays with his Politburo comrades at the Kremlin than with his ‘misguided’ children.174 His family would thus appear to be one of the reasons he didn’t retire. Even if his wife told him, ‘Lënya, it can’t go on like this’, whenever she watched the evening newscast, Vremya, which mercilessly showed the full extent of his decline,175 and even if he told his family several times that he was fed up of never having any peace and wanted to retire – his children must have urged him to remain in office. Perhaps they weren’t just trying to flatter the patriarch, but thought of the risk to their privileges and posts if he went.176 Perhaps Brezhnev too remembered how petty he had been in responding to Khrushchev’s wishes regarding his pension and realized he would no longer have any say about where he and his wife would live and how much money they would have to get by on. Their apartment in Moscow, the dacha in Zarech’ye, the Zavidovo hunting lodge, their furniture and ultimately all the gifts of state he received were the property of the USSR. Like all CC secretaries, Brezhnev’s monthly salary was by no means lavish, amounting to 800 roubles, with supplements of 500 roubles in 1974 and a further 200

354

Brezhnev

roubles in 1978.177 He also received donations for his military titles.178 It is speculation, but certainly possible, that he secured the second supplement in 1978 with an eye on his pension. In the four-part Russian television series Brezhnev (2006), the director has him tell his wife he doesn’t know what they’ll live off if he retires; after all, he doesn’t have a private house they could withdraw to like the US presidents. In March 1977, Brezhnev learnt from Georgiy Pavlov, administrator of the CC and something of a confidant, that it would cost 28,880 roubles to build a dacha.179 From 1978 onwards, he kept a note of payments into his savings account in his pocket diary.180 Considerable sums had been coming in since 1979 in the form of royalties for his memoirs – he is said to have made a total of 180,000 roubles on them – and for gramophone records of both the memoirs and his speeches.181 But as much as he saved during his old age, he was not permitted to spend his autumn years as a pensioner within his own four walls. The question is whether he really wanted a private life in the bosom of his family. While on the one hand he went to great lengths to have his children, their spouses and his grandchildren promoted to lucrative posts, on the other hand he complained that they only visited him when they wanted something from him.182 Very shortly after his daughter Galina was wed, he made his son-in-law Yuriy Churbanov a general, deputy minister of the interior and even a CC candidate in 1976. He also had his son Yuriy appointed deputy minister of overseas trade, and a CC candidate in 1981.183 All three drank too much. His main and constant worry, however, remained Galina with her debauchery, her craving for diamonds and her shady acquaintances, more than a few of whom were eventually arrested for smuggling, embezzlement and speculation.184 In 1977, Brezhnev asked Chazov to send her to a rehab clinic; from 1978 onwards, he regularly consulted his doctor Kosarev about his son’s alcoholism.185 He loved his grandchildren as long as they were still small: Galina’s daughter Viktoriya, known as Vitusya, who had more or less grown up with him and his wife, and Yuriy’s sons Leonid and Andrey. But in 1977, aged twenty-five, Vitusya also got into difficulties, with the result that Brezhnev felt compelled to intervene to shield her from the ‘wrong’ sort of men.186 His wife, Viktoriya, with whom he celebrated their golden wedding anniversary on 26 March 1978, had geriatric diabetes and spent a lot of time at a sanatorium in Karlsbad in the CSSR.187 Hence in order to have some company on his birthdays and other festive occasions, Brezhnev invited his closest comrades to his dacha: Ustinov, Gromyko, Andropov, Chernenko, Tikhonov, Kulakov and Kirilenko.188 He also liked to go to ice hockey and football matches with them, something he kept up to the end of his life.189 He also went to the circus once a year.190 He enjoyed spending time in the company of his bodyguards and hunters, his pilot Bugayev and other members of his domestic staff. He clearly enjoyed their simple, informal interaction, that he could be a ‘human’ with them instead of always having to play the general secretary and caring patriarch. He liked playing dominoes with them in Crimea, where he won the odd game partnering Chernenko against Ryabenko and Kosarev.191 During his last years, it was his bodyguards Ryabenko, Medvedev, Vladimir Sobachenkov and Gennadiy Fedotov who organized his day-to-day life, put his clothes out for him in the mornings, drove him to work, ate with him at the Kremlin,

Craving Glory and Physical Decline

355

took him home again, took his coat, put away his briefcase, sat at the dinner table with him and his wife and watched the news with him.192 In his private cinema room, they watched spy thrillers together or Brezhnev’s beloved war films.193 It seems they had become his surrogate family and a source of calm to him. They joined him hunting, which he pursued to the very end. His favourite thing was taking Medvedev and a hunter with him to Zavidovo, where they would spend the whole day.194 They went there twenty-four hours before his death. Since September 1982, his doctors had expected him to die at any time, such was the state of his heart and his entire body after all the pills.195 In the late September, he undertook his last journey to Baku in order to give the Soviet republic a medal, and didn’t even notice he had misread his script and had said ‘Afghanistan’ instead of ‘Azerbaijan’.196 On 7 November, a Sunday, Brezhnev participated in the parade in Red Square as usual, then went to spend the holiday on Monday, 8 November, hunting in Zavidovo. He spent the Tuesday, 9 November, in his office in the Kremlin, without anything of note happening.197 The only unusual occurrence was that when he awoke from his midday sleep in the early evening, Medvedev finally chased away the barber Tolya, since he had once again turned up in a completely drunken state.198 And so the bodyguard did Brezhnev’s hair himself, left the Kremlin with him at 7.30 pm and lit a cigarette on the drive home so that Brezhnev could inhale the smoke – it would be the last time he did so.199 Brezhnev’s only complaint was that he couldn’t eat much, and he went to sleep before the news. When, on the morning of 10 November 1982, a Wednesday, his bodyguards Medvedev and Sobachenkov went to wake him at 9.00, they found him lying motionless in his bed. Chazov was summoned but could only establish that his attempts to reanimate him were futile; Brezhnev had already been dead for several hours.200 Since the texts for the obituary and the public announcement had to be carefully formulated and approved by the Politburo, the people were not officially told until 11 November, at 11.00 am. The newspapers did not report his death until 12 November.201 But when the radio and television stations played nothing but funeral music, most people already realized Brezhnev had died.202 His death too was accompanied by macabre jokes: ‘What were Brezhnev’s last words? – Yura [Andropov], don’t touch the cardiac machine!’203 Brezhnev was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on 15 November, the day he is said to have intended to announce Shcherbitskiy as his successor.

Epilogue

Brezhnev’s family were right to fear the consequences of the patriarch’s retirement. Nevertheless, Viktoriya Petrovna retained her privileges as long as Andropov (1982– 1984) and Chernenko (1984–1985) were in power. It was Gorbachev who ensured she had to move out of the dacha in Zarech’ye and had her pension reduced from 700 to 300 roubles. She received frequent visits from CC apparatus staff checking she had really handed over all two hundred of her husband’s medals and items of value. His savings books with his royalties were confiscated, but later restituted. She no longer had a chauffeur-driven car, but was thankful to continue receiving treatment at the Kremlin hospital for her diabetes, which blinded her in the late 1980s. She died in Moscow in 1995. In 1991 she told interviewer Vladimir Karpov that if she could choose to relive her life, she would choose the one she had lived.1 Brezhnev’s daughter Galina is said to have completely lost control after the death of her father and succumbed to alcohol. She had long since left her husband, who was sentenced to twelve years in prison for corruption in 1987;2 in 1975 she had begun a new affair with the singer Boris Buryatse, seventeen years her junior. In 1982, Buryatse was sentenced to five years in prison for jewellery theft. Under Gorbachev, Galina also found herself in court, but the prosecution was unable to prove illegal enrichment, and the gifts her father had given her were returned to her. After she had spent all she had on drink, her daughter Viktoriya had her declared mentally incompetent and committed to a psychiatric clinic, where she died completely alone in 1998 at the age of sixty-nine.3 Galina’s ex-husband Churbanov regained a foothold after his early release from prison in 1993. He became vice-president of a cement company and the Spartak ice hockey club, and campaigned for and offered support to prisoners. He died after longterm illness in 2013. Brezhnev’s son, Yuriy, lost his post as deputy trade minister immediately after his father’s death, but was able to return to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1986. Like his brother-in-law, he died in 2013. Analysis of why Brezhnev’s children made themselves known largely for their drinking and scandals would fill another book. It was clearly a disastrous combination of an absent father, too kind a mother and the omnipotence they derived from the former: no one dared get in their way or deny them their wishes. There were also a number of ‘false friends’ who tried to get close to them in order to secure positions and apartments. Brezhnev’s memory was also subject to fluctuations: it was cultivated under Andropov and Chernenko before being demolished during the perestroika years; 356

Epilogue

357

since Putin’s accession to power, it has gradually been restored, but also instrumentalized. The decision of 13 November 1982 to name cities or quarters and streets, factories, schools and icebreakers after Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev was undone during the glasnost era.4 The commemorative plaque on his Moscow apartment block, 26 Kutuzovskiy prospekt, was taken down and found its way into the Berlin Wall Museum, which demanded an outlandish sum of money in exchange for its return. And so Brezhnev’s photographer, Musael’yan, his KGB adjutant Oleg Storonov and others arranged for the production of a duplicate, which they had put up on his 107th birthday in 2013.5 The bust in the city of his birth became the subject of some controversy when a Ukrainian decree of 2015 stipulated communist symbolism of any kind was to be removed from the public sphere. The city refused, however; the bust remains on display in today’s Zaporizhzhia.6 As always in the Soviet Union, the succession issue came down to who was in charge of the funeral committee. The moment he was informed by Brezhnev’s bodyguards, Chazov put Andropov in the picture, and hence they both arrived at Brezhnev’s apartment around the same time.7 Andropov thus had a decisive advantage over Chernenko, who didn’t receive the news until later. Since it was not part of the political culture for candidates to campaign, Andropov was now the ‘obvious’ number one when it came to making all the necessary arrangements. In a certain respect, this too was a success of Brezhnev’s politics of consensus: the open power struggle everyone had so feared did not materialize; on the contrary, everyone stuck to the unwritten rules and their given roles. On 12 November, the CC plenum elected Andropov as the new general secretary. Andropov immediately dismissed Minister of the Interior Shchëlokov, whom he despised, and replaced the head of the KGB; he launched an anti-corruption campaign, which Brezhnev had always resisted, since it would have affected too many of his clients. But the sixty-eight-year-old did not have much time left: his chronic kidney pain forced him to undergo regular dialysis after just a hundred days in office. He could have lived a few more years with the help of cutting-edge technology, but in the Soviet Union no one had enough experience with dialysis. In September 1983, he was no longer able to leave hospital; he died on 9 February 1984 at the age of sixty-nine. Andropov had built up his successor: Mikhail Gorbachev. He suffered the same fate as Chernenko had fifteen months earlier: whereas then it was Chernenko who was displaced, this time Chernenko himself pushed out Andropov’s protégé. In his inaugural speech on 13 February 1984, Chernenko warned of the dangers of too much enthusiasm for reform, pressure to perform and disciplinary measures and promised a ‘return’ to the ‘stability in the cadres’ that had existed under Brezhnev. A few months later, he was no longer able to read the scripts written for his public appearances fluently. In order to demonstrate to the world that Konstantin Chernenko was in rude health, a remarkably realistic-looking polling station was set up next to his hospital ward; terminally ill, on 24 February 1985 he was dragged from his bed and dressed so that he could vote for himself as deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. He died fourteen days later. In the West, the talk was of ‘Marxism-Senilism’; the Soviet population joked about a ‘five-year plan of state funerals’. When Gorbachev was elected general secretary on

358

Brezhnev

11 March 1985, he was the first man in the post who was neither from Brezhnev’s generation nor an engineer. Furthermore, while the Terror and the war had had an impact on him as a child, he had not had to fight against Fascists or unveil ‘enemies’.8 And above all, he was the first general secretary to experience collective rule’s politics of consensus not as a blessing after Stalin’s Terror and Khrushchev’s restructuring, but as a curse and an intolerable situation. Instead of consensus, he wanted diversity of opinion, instead of the nodding of heads he wanted competing ideas, and instead of clientelism he wanted the best people for the job. While Andropov and Chernenko had adopted Brezhnev’s ‘trust and care’ scenario of power with only a few minimal variations on the theme, it was Gorbachev who chose ‘restructuring and transparency’ as the new guiding principle, thereby fundamentally reinterpreting Lenin’s legacy. The success and tragedy of Brezhnev’s rule was that his motto ‘Everyone should live and work in peace’ managed to satisfy a traumatized society but brought about political – but not societal – inertia. In other words, the fear resulting from a thirtyyear reign of terror was so strong that the political response to it led to paralysis within the Central Committee and the Politburo. Brezhnev was not able to establish a political culture in which a change of leadership would have represented healthy routine instead of an existential threat. Not only was the trauma caused by Stalin’s Terror and Khrushchev’s practice of humiliation too great, but the fundamental functioning of Soviet rule as a series of patron–client relationships prevented reforms and innovations from being seen ‘objectively’, in terms of their benefit, instead of in terms of clan parochialism. But in an age of denunciation and dismantling, these personal networks seemed to be the only guarantee of at least a modicum of security; they were, then, a consequence of the frenzy of purges and transfers. The ‘Dnepropetrovsk mafia’ were thus also a direct after-effect of the Stalinist Terror, having emerged as a ‘survival network’. Personal ties determined their thinking, their perception of others and their assessment of political concepts. This became most evident in the ‘Kosygin reforms’, which Brezhnev desired in principle, but ultimately sabotaged and discredited because they strengthened his rival and his claims to glory. The economic stagnation was thus a direct consequence of this way of doing politics: cadre stability on the one hand, and the primacy of ideology on the other. The tragedy was that Brezhnev recognized, albeit perhaps not as keenly as Kosygin, that the economy was flagging and a second industrial revolution was imperative. But as much as he enjoyed cautioning and admonishing the finance ministers, he was unable to break free of the corset of clientelist policies and central economic planning and replace his moralistic appeals with profound structural reforms. Whereas Khrushchev had tapped into the gold reserves in 1962 as an emergency measure, Brezhnev made it a permanent feature of his economic policy. The extensive purchases of meat, grain, clothing and other consumer goods were essentially an implicit admission that his grand design to strengthen light industry so the people could finally experience satisfaction and plenty did not come to fruition. At the same time, it says a lot about him that he did not waver from this course and continued foreign spending for the benefit of the people. The Soviet Union could only afford such expenditure by exporting its own raw materials, especially gas and oil, to the West. And so the Union supplied energy to the capitalist market economies, which

Epilogue

359

in turn fed and clothed the Soviet people so that they could indeed ‘live and work in peace and quiet’. Brezhnev’s great achievement was that he did actually reconcile large swathes of the population with the Soviet Union, brought a little prosperity, guaranteed social welfare and declared the dream of having one’s own prefabricated apartment, a dacha and a car a legitimate goal. He transposed his mother’s petty bourgeois wish for him to lead a life of material fulfilment onto society as a whole. In this perspective, he made the Soviet Union more human and placed the individual with his basic needs at the centre of politics. He not only continued Khrushchev’s social programmes, but also went so far as to declare raising the standard of living the party’s general line. It is of course speculation, since we cannot ‘see inside’ Brezhnev, but after everything he had seen during collectivization, the war and the post-war years in Ukraine, Moldavia and Kazakhstan, it seems he had a genuine inner need to alleviate the misery and offer the Soviet citizens a dignified life. He switched from a revolutionary mode to a social one. The undeniable consequence of this reorientation was that, for many people, the Soviet Union became an unquestioned reality, a permanent situation no one believed would ever change.9 The tragedy was that from 1975 onwards, the Soviet people saw on television just how infirm and senile their party leader and head of state had become. Ultimately, however, this was also one of his successes: Brezhnev the man might have been sick, but the political system did not appear weak or unstable because of it. As Chernyayev asserts, most people didn’t realize how incapable of running the country the Politburo was in the ten years before Gorbachev. The Soviet people laughed about Brezhnev, but Brezhnev said: as long as they’re laughing, they like me. Brezhnev’s greatest tragedy was surely that he was not up to the pressure and stress to which he was exposed, particularly when it came to foreign policy. His insomnia and restlessness were a legacy of the Stalin era, when resting and inactivity were punished as crimes against the state. This burden added to the strain most statesmen and stateswomen probably have to endure when it comes to questions such as whether to expand or cut off relations, negotiate or invade, choose war or peace. It must have been hard dealing with Dubček, a protégé he was fond of, whom he valued and whom he eventually removed with force. It must also have been testing pushing through his Western course despite all the reservations of the Politburo. We can only imagine what a strain it was keeping all the military men in check; perhaps this will become clear once the relevant archives are opened. Even in the year of his greatest successes, 1973, he found no peace and resorted to tranquillizers and sleeping pills. It must have broken him when his three contemporaries Pompidou, Brandt and Nixon died or resigned in 1974. The trust he had spent five years building up seemed to have been for nothing. He had presented himself as a Western statesman, played the charmer and the anti-ideologist – and ended up all on his own. This was a tragedy not just for Brezhnev personally, but for the whole world: no one had any idea the most powerful man in the Soviet Union was addicted to tranquillizers. Hence his withdrawal due to physical ailments was interpreted as a political change of course and an intentional volte face. While his condition led to stagnation on the domestic front, in the sphere of foreign politics it effected a swift

360

Brezhnev

decline in détente and a new low point in the Cold War. Nevertheless, all the Western politicians who sent their condolences and like US Vice-President George Bush travelled to Moscow for the funeral stressed his efforts to promote peace; they emphasized that his experience during the Second World War had made him an unswerving fighter for peaceful coexistence.10 In this respect, the assessment of his contemporaries is quite correct: if he had actually retired in 1976, he would probably have gone down in history as a peacemaker and great European. Instead, however, he was remembered as the man who invaded Prague and Afghanistan. Brezhnev is said to have told his aide Aleksandrov-Agentov that the best job he had was that of oblast secretary.11 Mlechin used this against Brezhnev: he should have remained a small provincial secretary; the post of general secretary was a bridge too far for him.12 However, Brezhnev’s statement rather demonstrates that he saw himself as a doer and felt comfortable dealing with the people directly. He said that as an oblast secretary, one could achieve more and see the results, go into the factories and into the fields, speak with the people and feel their mood; in the Kremlin, one only learnt what was going on from papers.13 Firstly, this indicates once again that Brezhnev did not strive for a career in politics. He started out as an amateur thespian and engineer, and did not need much more to be satisfied. Throw in hunting and a fast car, and he was perfectly happy. Secondly, his statement shows that he was a man without airs and graces, that he not only liked to look after people’s needs, but also enjoyed speaking with them too, making them laugh and, if he was received with music, inviting the women to dance. It was this quality of the ‘normal’, non-intellectual everyman that caused some of his rivals to underestimate him. His strength and his ‘weapons’ were listening, patience, a long-term outlook and certainly his acting ability. He used the latter to entertain his entourage with Yesenin’s poetry, hold speeches with pathos and passion or slip into the role of the Western politician. One of the people he dismissed remarked both bitterly and in recognition that Brezhnev was a ‘great actor’ who was able to hide his face behind the theatrical mask.14 But it wasn’t just his acting ability that set him apart from the members of the Politburo. He was a bon vivant who had no time for the prudish sexual morality of the party. As much as he acted as an ‘equal among equals’ on the political stage, in informal settings he used his weakness for women and fast cars and his skilled marksmanship to present himself as a ‘real man’, unlike his comrades, and thereby demonstrate his superiority over them. In this respect, it is not surprising he felt more at home with Brandt, Pompidou and Nixon, that he was in like-minded company. The ‘big four’ enjoyed life, while the ‘others’ – so it seemed at least – were dry ideologues. And so the question is also who could have succeeded Brezhnev in 1976 or 1979. In 1976, he will have worried it could have been the recently recovered premier, Kosygin, or Podgorny, who had yet to be deposed as president. In 1979 he had outmanoeuvred them, but the only one who was not as old and as ill as him appeared to be Gorbachev, who was then not even a full member of the Politburo. Whether he would have been able to garner support for Shcherbitskiy, head of the party in Ukraine and twelve years his junior, is a moot point. Given the alternatives, it cannot be said with any certainty that an earlier change of leader would have really meant a fresh start or could have rescued the détente with the West.

Epilogue

361

Since the 100th anniversary of Brezhnev’s birth in 2006, at the latest, there has been a reassessment of his eighteen-year rule, from the black of the Gorbachev era to the white of the Putin era. Today, many Russians recall the Brezhnev years as a carefree ‘golden age’ of plenty. But this is clearly projection. As the West German Foreign Office predicted back in 1973: if Brezhnev couldn’t meet the expectations he had raised of a higher standard of living, he would face ‘concrete danger’.15 And indeed the former head of the party in Moldavia, whom Brezhnev summoned to Moscow as deputy chairman of the council of ministers in 1980, writes that he frequently reported to him how dangerous and tense a situation prevailed in the country, since the people could not buy enough meat, dairy products, sugar and cooking oil. There was repeated unrest as frustrated customers faced with empty shelves smashed up what stock there was or workers performed sit-ins.16 Chernyayev too relates that in 1978 in Rostov-onDon, once the meat had been distributed to the crèches, kindergartens and restaurants, only 1.5 kilograms per inhabitant per year remained for the shops – some regions were better supplied, but nowhere was there more than seven kilograms per head.17 He asserts that when the May Plenum of 1982 agreed a norm establishing how many calories each Soviet citizen was entitled to, this only meant that no more could be bought, not even pearl barley.18 There were also many jokes about the shortages of the Brezhnev era: the manager of the restaurant for foreigners says you can get everything at his place if you just order in advance. So a tourist orders giraffe with potatoes. The next day the tourists see a giraffe chained to the restaurant. The manager explains, see, we’ve got the giraffe, now we’ve just got to find some potatoes …19 The second fact that has become a myth in today’s Russia is that Brezhnev turned the Soviet Union into an undisputed superpower. Hence in the eyes of the nostalgics, he deserves a seat of honour beside Lenin and Stalin, on the side of the ‘winners’, while Khrushchev and Gorbachev are declared ‘losers’ who weakened the Soviet Union or brought about its decline. This glorification does Brezhnev no justice, since he spent his entire life fighting for coexistence, détente with the West and disarmament; Putin’s antiAmerican, isolationist rhetoric would probably have him turning in his grave. Invading another country was no source of pride and greatness to him, but a last resort that weighed heavily on his conscience. On the contrary, Brezhnev perceived his greatness to lie in his intention to provide the Soviet people with a better, peaceful life and to this end buying in foodstuffs but also clothing and electrical goods on an unprecedented scale. He was proud not of the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, but of introducing the five-day week, establishing pensions for all women over fifty-five and all men over sixty, and raising wages.20 The big question as to whether Brezhnev did more for the stability of the Soviet Union or its collapse can be answered very differently depending on one’s perspective, and ultimately only hypothetically. What is relatively undisputed is that all his domestic and foreign policy achievements up to 1975 helped to stabilize, consolidate and normalize the Soviet Union. In essence, the state that would later crumble only emerged under his rule. There are very different assessments, however, concerning the degree to which the paralysis could be felt during his final years. His aide Brutents says, ‘In the early 1980s, it seemed as if the entire country was grinding to a halt, as if nothing happened any more, only jubilees and end points. It actually seemed like an

362

Brezhnev

imitation of real societal and political life, a substitute for it.’21 Nevertheless, everything continued to function, and if Gorbachev hadn’t put an end to it all, the situation would perhaps have been perpetuated for a lot longer. The only act that undisputedly led to the delegitimization of the party’s rule and thus contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union was the invasion of Afghanistan. With it, Brezhnev broke his most important promise, that of securing a life of peace for the people, instead sending Soviet citizens into a bloody war that no one wanted and that they could not win. That is also something to consider for those who like to portray him as the superpower warlord: the Soviet–Afghan War was his biggest mistake with the gravest consequences, even if it remains uncertain to what extent it was his decision and not that of the troika. While Brezhnev loved the military, it was more for nostalgic reasons. He was a man of peace and negotiations, not of war and deterrence. Egon Bahr thus wrote, in allusion to the later German–Soviet/Russian reconciliation Helmut Kohl achieved with Mikhail Gorbachev and especially Boris Yeltsin, ‘The idea of having a sauna with Brezhnev would have been absurd. No chancellor would have survived it. But without what he started in 1970, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin would have become head of the Kremlin.’22 And even the extremely critical Chernyayev thought: Without ‘Czechoslovakia 68’, with which he went along with a trembling heart (as we know today), presumably only because he was yet to feel completely secure in his absolute leadership, and without ‘Afghanistan 79’, into which he was forced by the troika in the Politburo, who exploited his physical and mental helplessness (he hardly knew what was going on around him then), today I think he would have entirely deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.23

Notes Introduction 1

2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16

Jens Schneider: Dicker Max war gestern. Michael Müller will zeigen, dass Berlin mehr ist als Zentrum für Künstler. Mit dem Image des bescheidenen Arbeiters kommt der Regierende Bürgermeister an, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 August 2015. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Jerry Hough: The Brezhnev Era. The Man and the System, in: Problems of Communism 25 (1976) 2, 1–17, here p. 8. Leonid Mlechin: Brezhnev. Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudey, vol. 1325, Moscow 2008, p. 109; Wladimir S. Semjonow: Von Stalin bis Gorbatschow. Ein halbes Jahrhundert in diplomatischer Mission 1939–1991, Berlin 1995, p. 341. Vladimir Medvedev: Chelovek za spinoy. Vospominaniya nachal’nika lichnoy okhrany Brezhneva i Gorbacheva, Moscow 1994, pp. 48, 50; Wjatscheslaw Keworkow: Moskau, der KGB und die Bonner Ostpolitik, Berlin 1995, p. 210. Marc Bloch: The Historian’s Craft, translated from the French by Peter Putnam, with a Preface by Peter Burke, Manchester 2004, p. 23. John Dornberg: Breschnew. Profil des Herrschers im Kreml, Munich 1973; idem: Brezhnev: The Masks of Power, New York 1974. Paul J. Murphy: Brezhnev. Soviet Politician, Jefferson, N.C., 1981, p. 5; Theodore H. Friedgut: Paul J. Murphy. Brezhnev, Soviet Politician (book review), in: Canadian Slavonic Papers 25 (1983) 2, 315–317. D.A. Volkogonov: 7 vozhdey. 4 vozhd’: Leonid Brezhnev, vol. 2, Moscow 1995; Rudol’f Germanovich Pikhoya: Sovetskiy Soyuz. Istoriya vlasti 1945–1991, Moscow 1998. Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov: Sila i bessiliye Brezhneva. Politicheskiye etyudy, 2nd, updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 1980 [1979]. Roy Medvedev: Lichnost’ i epokha. Politicheskiy portret L.I. Brezhneva, Moscow 1991, p. 5. H. Gordon Skilling/Franklyn Griffith (eds): Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, Princeton 1971; Thomas H. Rigby: The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilizing Oligarchy?, in: Soviet Studies 22 (1970) 2, 176–191; idem: How Strong is the Leader?, in: Problems of Communism 11 (1962) 5, 1–8; idem: Political Elites in the USSR. Central Leaders and Local Cadres from Lenin to Gorbachev, Aldershot 1990; John P. Willerton: Patronage Networks and Coalition Building in the Brezhnev Era, in: Alexander Dallin (ed.): The Khrushchev and Brezhnev Years, London 1992, pp. 189–218; idem: Patronage and Politics in the USSR, Cambridge 1992. Sergey Semanov: Brezhnev: pravitel’ zolotogo veka, Moscow 2006; idem: Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, Moscow 2007. Aleksandr Khinshteyn: Pochemu Brezhnev ne mog stat’ Putinym. Skazka o poteryannom vremeni, Moscow 2011, p. 8.

363

364

Notes

17 Ian D. Thatcher: Brezhnev as Leader, in: Edwin Bacon/Mark Sandle (eds): Brezhnev Reconsidered, Houndmills, Basingstoke 2002, pp. 22–37, here p. 32; Edwin Bacon: Reconsidering Brezhnev, in: idem/Sandle, Brezhnev Reconsidered, pp. 1–21, here p. 13; William Tompson: The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Harlow 2003, p. 17; Donald J. Raleigh: Russia’s Favorite. Reevaluating the Rule of Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev, 1964–1982. Guest editor’s introduction, in: Russian Studies in History 52 (2014) 4, 3–11. 18 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 104. 19 Brezhnev, an online exhibition of the Russian Federal Archive Authority and the Rossiyskiy Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Noveyshey Istorii (henceforth: RGANI) as part of the exhibition cycle ‘Leaders of the Soviet Epoch’; http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/, accessed 24.4.2017. 20 Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, Munich 2000, Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit dem Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU, L.I. Breschnew, in Moskau, pp. 1449 f. 21 Karen N. Brutents: Tridtsat’ let na Staroy ploshchadi, Moscow 1998, p. 496. 22 Mark Dubovskiy (ed.): Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, 1917–1992, Smolensk 1993, p. 199. 23 See also Nikolaus Katzer: Dans la matrice discursive du socialisme tardif. Les ‘Mémoires’ de Leonid Il’ič Brežnev, in: Cahiers du Monde Russe 54 (2013) 1–2, 73–101. 24 Georgiy Arbatov: Iz nedavnego proshlogo, in: Yu.V. Aksyutin (ed.): L.I. Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, Moscow 1991, pp. 61–92, here p. 91. 25 Vladislav Vladimirov: Tandem. O L. Brezhneve i K. Chernenko, in: Kodry, 1990, 4, 150–193, here p. 157; Aleksandr Murzin: Kak pisalis’ memuary. Ispoved’ suflera, http:// leonidbrezhnev.ucoz.ru/publ/stati_zametki_intervju/kak_pisalis_memuary/2-1-0-25, accessed 28.9.2016. 26 Petr Abrasimov: Vspominaya proshedshiye gody. Chetvert’ veka poslom Sovetskogo Soyuza, Moscow 1992, p. 270; Evgeniy Chazov: Zdorov’ye i vlast’. Vospominaniya ‘kremlevskogo vracha’, Moscow 1992, pp. 154 f. 27 Vladimir Medvedev: Chelovek za spinoy, 2nd edition, Moscow 2010, p. 94. 28 Cit. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 155. 29 Murzin, Kak pisalis’ memuary. 30 Ibid.; Georgiy Yakovlev: Kak sozdavalis’ memuary Brezhneva, in: Aksyutin (ed.): Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 285–293, here p. 290; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 593. 31 Georgiy Arbatov: Chelovek Sistemy. Nablyudeniya i razmyshleniya ochevidtsa eyë raspada, Moscow 2002, p. 365. 32 Vladimirov, Tandem, p. 154. 33 Aleksandr Bovin: XX vek kak zhizn’. Vospominaniya, Moscow 2003, p. 233. 34 Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, p. 153. 35 Leonid Brezhnev: The Virgin Lands, in: idem: Trilogy. Little Land, Rebirth, The Virgin Lands, Moscow 1980, p. 314. 36 Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstana (henceforth: APRK), f. 708, op. 27, d. 284: dokladnyye zapiski, spravki, informatsii i zapiski sel’khozotdela na imya sekretarey TsK KP Kazakhstana, 3.1.–13.6.1954, l. 137 f.: L.I. Brezhnevu – informatsiya o proisshedshem neschastnom sluchaye v zernosovkhoze ‘Dal’niy’ Yesil’skogo rayona, Akmolinskoy oblasti. 37 Yakovlev, Kak sozdavalis’ memuary Brezhneva, p. 290. In an interview in 1991, however, Murzin admitted he had retained his original manuscript, including all related documents, and kept it with him to this day. See Murzin, Kak pisalis’ memuary. 38 Federal’noye arkhivnoye agenstvo et al. (ed.): Leonid Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, 3 vols, vol. 1: Leonid Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, 1964–1982 gg., Moscow 2016, p. 825.

Notes 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

365

Ibid., pp. 1115 f. Ibid., pp. 915, 919. Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 593, 596. Yakovlev, Kak sozdavalis’ memuary Brezhneva, p. 288. L.I. Brezhnev: ‘Vo imya dela partii, dela naroda.’ Vrucheniye Leninskoy premii General’nomu sekretaryu TsK KPSS Predsedatelyu Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR L.I. Brezhnevu, 31 marta 1980 g., Moscow 1980, pp. 12 f. Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 11; Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 15, 436. Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 955. Ibid., p. 41. Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 2: Zapisi sekretarey Priyemnoy L.I. Brezhneva, 1965–1982 gg., Moscow 2016. Vladimir Gurgenovich Musael’yan, interview with the author, 16 March 2016; see also: Vladimir Musael’yan: Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, in : Karavan kollektsiya istoriy, 7, July 2015, 134–163, here p. 144.

Chapter 1: Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Memoirs, Oxford 1982, p. 1. Cit. Vladislav Lyashchevskiy/Lyubov’ Romanchuk: Nash Il’ich. 5 neizvestnykh faktov iz zhizni Leonida Brezhneva, in: Dnepr vecherniy, 19 December 2009, no. 190, 12; and in conversation with the author, 18 June 2014. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 15. See Reginald E. Zelnik: A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia. The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov, Stanford 1986; Mark D. Steinberg: Proletarian Imagination. Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925, Ithaca 2002. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, p. 36. Nataliya Bulanova: Kam’yans’ki etyudi v stili retro, 2nd, updated edition, Dnepropetrovsk 2011, p. 103. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 112. Cf. ibid.; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 40. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 41. Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 117. Ibid., pp. 118 f. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 2. 8; Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 124; O sem’ye Brezhnevykh, in: Muzey Istorii mista Kam’yans’kogo (henceforth: MIK), KP–18391/D–8114, no page numbers. Lyashchevskiy/Romanchuk, Nash Il’ich, p. 12. Brezhnev’s niece claims, however, that her father Yakov wasn’t actually born until 1913, but his mother forged his birth certificate so that he could gain employment as an apprentice at the factory earlier: Lyubov’ Brezhneva: Plemyannitsa genseka, Moscow 1999, p. 371. Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 124; Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 11; O sem’ye Brezhnevykh. Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1164. Brezhnev’s niece claims her grandfather died in 1933, after an accident at work: Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 375. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 6; Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 124.

366 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Notes Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 124; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 50. O sem’ye Brezhnevykh. Brezhnev, Memoirs, pp. 11–12; Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 125. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 8. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 6. Ibid., p. 5. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 42. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 18. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 8. Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 369. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 43; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 20. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 15. Iosif Zakharovich Shtokalo: Shkol’nyye gody Leonida Il’icha Brezhneva (vospominaniya uchitelya), in: MIK, typed manuscript, 1980, pp. 6, 10, 20. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 9; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 46; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 20. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 45. O sem’ye Brezhnevykh; Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 125. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 12. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 18. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 18. Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 170. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 47; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 15; Felix Schnell: Räume des Schreckens. Gewalträume und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine, 1905–1933, Hamburg 2012, p. 167. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 47; M.A. Morozov: Shchodennik gromadyans’koyi viyni, in: Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, pp. 170–190, here p. 176. Morozov, Shchodennik, p. 176. Cf. also Schnell, Räume des Schreckens, pp. 183, 257 ff. Morozov, Shchodennik, p. 180; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 48. Morozov, Shchodennik, p. 180. Ibid. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 47; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 16. Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, pp. 188–190. Ibid., p. 187; cf. also Schnell, Räume des Schreckens, p. 178. Schnell, Räume des Schreckens, p. 309. Morozov, Shchodennik, p. 181; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 48. Cf. also Schnell, Räume des Schreckens, pp. 197 ff. Morozov, Shchodennik, p. 182. Cf. also Schnell, Räume des Schreckens, p. 200. At least according to Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 16. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 18. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 48; Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 16. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 49; Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 194. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 16. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 49; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 18. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 50; Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 126. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 20.

Notes 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96

367

Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 19. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 21. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 50; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 19. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 19. O sem’ye Brezhnevykh; see also the official chronicle of the factory, which still exists and feeds the city to this day. According to the chronicle, the plant was unoperational from 1918 to 1925: http://www.dmkd.dp.ua/node/481, accessed 23.10.2014; cf. also Murphy, Brezhnev, pp. 14, 16. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 50; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 20; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 21. Derzhavniy Arkhiv Dnipropetrovskoyi Oblasti (henceforth: DADO), filial Partiynyy Arkhiv, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341: Brezhnev, Leonid Il’ich, l. 2; Tsentr dokumentatsii obshchestvennykh organizatsiy Sverdlovskoy oblasti (henceforth: TsDOOSO), f. 4, op. 17, d. 256: Uchetnaya kartochka Brezhneva L. I. (kopiya), l. 1ob. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 4: Avtobiografiya Brezhneva L. I. Bulanova, Kam’yans’ki etyudi, p. 126. A. Fursenko (ed.): Prezidium TsK KPSS 1954‒1964 gg., 3 vols, vol. 1: Chernovyye protokol’nyye zapisi zasedaniy, stenogrammy, Moscow 2004, p. 810. T.N. Kaul’: Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva i daleye, Moscow 1991, pp. 78 f. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 21. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 21. Ibid. Georgiy Arbatov: Zatyanuvsheyesya vyzdorovleniye (1953–1985). Svidetel’stvo sovremennika, Moscow 1991, p. 356. Anatoliy Chernyayev: Sovmestnyy iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epokh, 1972–1991 gody, Moscow 2010, p. 192. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 253; Arbatov, Zatyanuvsheyesya vyzdorovleniye, p. 356. Galina Vishnevskaya: Galina. Istoriya zhizni, supplemented edition, Moscow 2006, p. 304. Denis Babichenko: Neizvestnyy Brezhnev, in: Itogi, 30 October 2001, p. 46; Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 24. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 53 (trans. J. Heath from the German by S. Schattenberg). Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 24–25. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. Avtorkhanov, Sila i bessiliye, p. 68. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 21. Nikolay Zakhorov: Krestnyy otets razvitogo zastoya, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 12 November 1997, 2. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 55. Avtorkhanov, Sila i bessiliye, p. 68; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 25; Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev: A Short Biography, ed. by Institute for Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee, Oxford et al. 1977, p. 6; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 55. Avtorkhanov, Sila i bessiliye, p. 68. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. See also Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 29; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 55. TsDOOSO, f. 434: Bisertskiy rayonnyy komitet VKP(b), op. 1, d. 20: Protokoly zasedaniy partiynogo aktiva plenumov i byuro raykoma VKP(b) 5.1.1929–25.12.1929 g., l. 149. On such conspiracy theories about the ‘Jewish ladies of the Kremlin’, see Nikolay Mitrokhin: Die ‘Russische Partei’. Die Bewegung der russischen Nationalisten in der UdSSR 1953–1985, Stuttgart 2014, p. 60.

368 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113

114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124 125 126 127

Notes Vladimir Vasil’yevich Karpov: Vecherniye besedy s Viktoriyey Brezhnevoy, in: idem: Rasstrelyannyye marshaly, Moscow 1999, pp. 399–477, here p. 407. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 408; L.N. Vasil’eva: Kremlevskiye zheny. Fakty, vospominaniya, slukhi, legendy i vzglyad avtora, Moscow 2008, p. 399; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 52. V.E. Semichastnyy: Bespokoynoye serdtse, Moscow 2002, p. 397. Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 905. Vasil’eva, Kremlevskiye zheny, pp. 399 f.; Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 52 f. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 410. Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 54. Gosudarstvennyy arkhiv Sverdlovskoy oblasti (henceforth: GASO), f. R-160: Ispolnitel’nyy komitet Sverdlovskogo okruzhnogo Soveta rabochikh, krest’yanskikh i krasnoarmeyskikh deputatov. Zemel’noye upravleniye1924–1930, op. 1-l, d. 103: Brezhnev L.I., l. 1–5. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 408. Ibid., p. 410. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 17, d. 256, l. 1ob. See also Brezhnev, Memoirs, pp. 25, 29; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 53; Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 408. V. Danilov et al. (eds): Tragediya sovetskoy derevni. Kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivaniye. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939, 5 vols, vol. 1, Moscow 1999, document no. 24, p. 114; document no. 38, p. 147. Ibid., document no. 62, p. 200; no. 64, pp. 201 f. Ibid., document no. 58, pp. 186 ff. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 96: Dokumenty o sostoyanii zemleustroystva v rayonakh okruga, 1.10.1927–1.1.1929 gg., l. 13–13ob. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 26. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 124: Dokumenty (tsirkulyary, dokladnyye zapiski, svedeniya) o chislennosti zaregistrirovannykh zemel’nykh obshchestv v rayonakh okruga 15.11.1928– 11.3.1929 gg., l. 4. TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1724: Protokoly zasedaniya plenuma byuro Mikhaylovskogo Raykoma VKP(b) vyslannaya v Sverdlovskiy orkuzhkom dlya svedeniya, 12.1.1929– 7.12.1929 g., l. 25. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 183: Dokumenty i perepiska ob otvode zemel’ […] Bisertskogo rayona 23.1.–26.10.1929 g., l. 24. TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1, d. 20, l. 69, 110. Ibid., l. 70, 77ob., 78. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 183, l. 3. Ibid., l. 7. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 183: Dokumenty i perepiska ob otvode zemel’ […] Bisertskogo rayona 23.1.–26.10.1929 g., l. 12. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 27. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200: Postanovleniya plenumov TsK, PB o naznacheniyakh L. Brezhneva na dolzhnosti i osvobozhdenii ot nikh, 7.2.1939–3.3.1981 gg., l. 3; cf. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 55; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 28. Danilov, Tragediya sovetskoy derevni, vol. 1, dokument no. 223, p. 678. TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1 d. 20, l. 148. cf. also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 55. Danilov, Tragediya sovetskoy derevni, vol. 1, documents nos. 224–227, pp. 679–684. Ibid.; TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1, d. 20, l. 152. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 164: Protokoly proizvodstvenno-tekhnicheskikh soveshchanii pri OkrZU i otdele zemleustroystva OkrZU za noyabr’ 1929–may 1930 g., l. 16.

Notes

369

128 TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1, d. 20, l. 156. 129 Lynne Viola: The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements, Oxford 2007, p. 15. 130 TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1, d. 20, l. 169. 131 Ibid., l. 172. 132 Trans. in Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 28; original in: TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1, d. 20, l. 174; cf. too Mlečin, Brezhnev, p. 56. 133 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1879: Stenogramma zasedaniya 5-go Plenuma Sverdlovskogo Okruzhkoma VKP(b) s rezolyutsiyami, 16.–19.2.1930 g., no page number, at the end of the stitched-in brochure, p. 6. 134 Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 27. 135 Wyradhe: Livejournal, 5 February 2014, http://wyradhe.livejournal.com/340176.html, accessed 16.3.2015. 136 Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 372. 137 Vadim Pechenev: Vzlet i padeniye Gorbacheva glazami ochevidtsa. (Iz teoretikomemuarnykh razmyshleniy: 1975–1991 gg.), Moscow 1996, p. 49. 138 GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 165: Prikazy, no.39‒90, 1‒60 OkrZU po osnovnoy deyatel’nosti i lichnomu sostavu za iyul’ 1929 – iyul’ 1930 gg., l. 66. 139 TsDOOSO, f. 434, op. 1, d. 20, l. 167. 140 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1885: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro Sverdlovskogo okruzhkoma 5.1.–24.7.1930 g., l. 40ob.; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200, l. 3; cf. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 56. 141 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1879, l. 13. 142 GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 188: Dokumenty i perepiska ob otvode zemel’, vnutrikhozyaystvennom zemleustroitel’stve i zemlepol’zovanii Mikhaylovskogo rayona, 25.10.1929–29.6.1930 gg. 143 GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 178: Dokumenty ob otvode zemel’ i po lichnomu sostavu, oktyabr‒iyun’ 1930 g. 144 GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 164, l. 15: Protokoly proizvodstvenno-tekhnicheskikh soveshchaniy pri OkrZU i otdele zemleustroystva OkrZU, 13.05.1930 g. 145 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1892: Rukovodyashchiye ukazaniya TsK i pis’ma OGPU po Uralu 16.1.–13.7.1930 g., l. 6: Osobaya papka, postanovleniye byuro Uralobkoma VKP(b) o likvidatsii kulatskikh khozyaystv v svyazi s massovoy kollektivizatsiyey; cf. also Viola, The Unknown Gulag, p. 22. 146 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1879, l. 8–13. 147 J. V. Stalin: Dizzy with Success. Concerning Questions of the Collective-Farm Movement, in: Pravda, no. 6, 2 March 1930, trans. in idem: Works, vol. 12. Moscow: Foreign Publishing House 1955, pp. 197–205, reproduced at https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm, no page number. 148 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1879, l. 18. 149 GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 164, l. 3. 150 GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 165, l. 15, 16, 29, 30. 151 Ibid., l. 33. 152 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1882: Stenogramma vystupleniy na soveshchanii okruzhnogo part. aktiva 25.3.1930 g., l. 1–3. 153 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1882, l. 74. 154 Ibid., l. 37. 155 Ibid., l. 3. 156 GASO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 164, l. 15. 157 Ibid.

370

Notes

158 The relevant order stated he was granted twenty days in 1929 and a month in 1930; whether or not he broke off his holiday, which was meant to include his annual holiday for 1929, remains unclear. GASO, f. R-160, op. 1, d. 165, l. 6ob. 159 DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 24 f. See also Zakhorov, Krestnyy otets, p. 2. 160 O sem’ye Brezhnevykh. 161 Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 411. 162 Cf. Viola, The Unknown Gulag, p. 22; Schnell, Räume des Schreckens, p. 430. 163 TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 1891, l. 45 ff. Danilov, Tragediya sovetskoy derevni, vol. 2, document no. 56, p. 168. 164 Cf. Wyradhe, Livejournal. 165 Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 29. 166 Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 411. 167 See David L. Hoffmann: Peasant Metropolis. Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941, Ithaca 1994, p. 35. 168 DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 56. 169 Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 29. 170 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 171 Interestingly, Brezhnev’s official English biography, edited by the Academy of Sciences, correctly dates his return to Kamenskoye to 1930: Leonid I. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, with a Foreword by Leonid I. Brezhnev, Written under the Auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, New York 1978, p. 25. 172 DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. 173 O sem’e Brezhnevykh. 174 DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 27. 175 P.T. Tron’ko et al. (ed.): Istoriya mist i sil Ukrayins’koyi RSR v 26i tomakh, vol. 7: Dnipropetrovs’ka oblast’, ed. by A.Y. Pashchenko et al., Kiev 1969, p. 236; Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 26. 176 Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 30. 177 Ivan Pavlovich Bardin: Izbrannyye trudy v 2kh tomakh, vol. 1, Moscow 1963, p. 83. 178 Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 31. 179 Ibid., p. 30.; DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. 180 DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. 181 Susanne Schattenberg: Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren, Munich 2002, pp. 154–157. 182 Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, pp. 28 f.; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 37. 183 Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 28; A. Kuznetsov: I Brezhnev takoy molodoy …, in: Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 50, 13–19 December 2006, no. 50, p. 4. 184 Gosudarstvennyy Archiv Rossiyskoy Federatsii (henceforth: GARF), f. R-7523, op. 83, d. 19: Materialy o prebyvanii predsedatelya prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR tov. Brezhneva L.I. v Afganistane (11–17 okt. 1963 g.), l. 28. 185 A.A. Kartsenko: Vospominaniya o L.I. Brezhneve, in: MIK, KP-18395/D-8118, no page number. The identical statement in the works newspaper is presumably based on the same source: K 100-letiyu L.I. Brezhneva. Odnakashniki – odnopolchane, in: Znamya Dzerzhinki. Gazeta trudovogo kollektiva OAO ‘Dneprovskiy metkombinat’, no. 50, 16. December 2006. 186 Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 29. 187 Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 7, p. 235; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 38 f.; Kuznetsov, I Brezhnev takoy molodoy, p. 4. 188 Danilov, Tragediya sovetskoy derevni, vol. 3, document 166, p. 469.

Notes 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206

207 208 209

210 211 212 213 214

215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224

371

Ibid., document 207, p. 541. Ibid., document 220, pp. 563 f. Ibid., document 257, p. 634. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 39. Danilov, Tragediya sovetskoy derevni, vol. 3, dokument 118, p. 318. Ibid., document 273, p. 653. Ibid., document 269, p. 647. Schattenberg, Stalins Ingenieure, pp. 175–178. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. S.A. Mol’ner: Vospominaniya o L.I. Brezhneve, in: MIK, KD-18394/D-8117, no page number. Kuznetsov, I Brezhnev takoy molodoy, p. 4. A. Slonevskiy: Rasskazy o Brezhneve, in: Znamya Dzerzhinki, no. 51, 20. December 2012, p. 12. Cf. also Kuznetsov, I Brezhnev takoy molodoy, p. 4. Cit. Aleksandr Kuznetsov: Kak Brezhnev ‘gayki zakruchival’, in: Tribuna, no. 228, 19 December 2001, 8. DADO, f. R-5853, op. 1, d. 23 ‘a’, Protokol Gos. kvalifikatsionnoy komissii po zashchite diplomnogo proyekta L.I. Brezhneva v 1935 g., l. 11 f. I. Kondrat’eva: Brezhnev dalekiy i blizkiy, in: Znamya Dzerzhinki, no. 20, 15 May 2014, 11. Znamya Dzerzhinki, 2 February 1935, reprinted in Pravda, 27 May 1976, cf. also Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 15. Remarkably, this information is missing from his personnel file. However, Mlechin confirms what everyone else describes: Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 58; see also Brezhnev, Pages from his Life, pp. 30 f. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 31. Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 7, p. 235; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 42. His recruitment in 1928 was put back four years to 1932 and then further postponed until 1935, presumably due to his studies. See also GASO, f. R-160, op. 1-l, d. 103, l. 16; cf. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 58. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2. K 100-letiyu L.I. Brezhneva. Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 7, p. 233. Schattenberg, Stalins Ingenieure, p. 351. DADO, f. R-5575: Narodnyy Komissariat Tyazheloy Promyshlennosti SSSR, upravleniye kadrov i uchebnykh zavedeniy, Kamenskiy vecherniy metallurgicheskiy tekhnikum, 1934–1973, op. 1, d. 3: Prikazy direktora po tekhnikumu [avtograf Brezhneva], l. 63. Ibid., l. 66ob. Ibid., l. 68ob. Ibid., l. 74–74ob. Ibid., l. 8. Ibid., l. 18. Ibid., l. 13. Ibid., l. 21. Stanislav Pshenichnyy: Pervaya vysota Leonida Brezhneva, in: Dneprovskaya pravda, 4 November 2006, no. 43, http://dneprovka.dp.ua/t1472/, accessed 24.3.2015. Slonevskiy, Rasskazy o Brezhneve, p. 12. Vospominaniya o L.I. Brezhneve, 31.12.1976, in: MIK, KD-18393/D-8116, no page number.

372

Notes

Chapter 2: ‘How the Steel was Tempered’, or a Career Amidst Terror and War 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24

Protsess antisovetskogo trotskistskogo tsentra. Dopros podsudimogo Pyatakova, in: Pravda, 24 January 1937, 4. Katrin Boeckh: Stalinismus in der Ukraine. Die Rekonstruktion des sowjetischen Systems nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Wiesbaden 2007, p. 60. Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, p. 60; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 46–48; Simon Sebag Montefiore: Stalin. Am Hof des Roten Zaren, Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 310. A. Slonevskiy: Pod znamenem Lenina-Stalina, in: Ekspeditsiya XXI, no. 2 (128), 2013. Manayenkov Iosif Petrovich (1896–1938). Zvezda i smert’ Iosifa Manayenkova, in: http:// lib.dndz.gov.ua/?pid=421, accessed 16.3.2015. DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 681: Stenogramma plenuma, protokoly zasedaniy byuro Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma KPU, 9.1.–28.11.1937 g. (Protokol 11.1.1937 g., l. 61.) DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 681 (Protokol 5.2.1937 g.). Ibid., Protokol 8.3.1937 g., l. 122 f. Ibid., Protokol 13.5.1937 g., l. 196; see also Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 37. Pshenichnyy, Pervaya vysota Leonida Brezhneva. Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 190. DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 341, l. 5. IV mis’ka partiyna konferentsiya zakinchila svoyu rabotu, in: Dzerzhinets’. Organ MK KP(b)U, mis’kradi ta MRPS, 11 May 1937, 1; Plenum mis’koy radi, in: idem, 5 August 1937, 1; Mikhail Timoshchenko: Brezhnev iz Brezhnevo, http://gazeta.dp.ua/read/ brezhnev_iz_brezhnevo, accessed 13.4.2016. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 27. Shinel’ka: Sekretari Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma VKP(b), 2 December 2013, http:// forum3.sobitie.com.ua/index.php?/topic/23214-секретари-днепродзержинскогогоркомавкпб/ accessed 16.3.2015; Slonevskiy, Rasskazy o Brezhneve, p. 13. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 116: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma KPU, 5.1.–14.2.1938, (Protokol 9.2.1938 g., l. 156); Oleksandr Slonevs’kiy: Yak na zavodі Dzerzhins’kogo Brezhnev z vorogami narodu borovsya, in: Ekspeditsiya XXI, no. 12 (90) 2009, 6 f., here p. 6. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 116, Protokol 9.2.1938 g., l. 157; d. 117: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro Dneprodzerzhinsogo gorkoma 21.2.–23.3.1938, (Protokol 8.3.1938 g.), l. 8. DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 684: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma KPU, 14.11.–28.12.1937 g. (Protokol 14.1.1937 g., l. 22; Protokol 23.11.1937 g., l. 36.) Slonevs’kiy, Yak na zavodі Dzerzhins’kogo Brezhnev, p. 7. Brezhnev iz Brezhnevo, in: Novosti Dneprodzerzhinska, 17 June 2009, http://gorod.dp.ua/ dz/news.php?page=2&id=17839, accessed 16.3.2015; Slonevs’kiy, Yak na zavodi Dzerzhins’kogo Brezhnev, p. 6; Slonevsk’iy: Sudebnyye protsessy i prestupnost’ v Kamenskom-Dneprodzerzhinske: ocherki i dokumenty, Dnepropetrovsk 2010, p. 87, http://lib.dndz.gov.ua/uploads/Judicial_processes_and_crime_%28Last%29.pdf, accessed 17.3.2015. DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 681, Protokol 28.11.1937, l. 1. DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 681: Stenogramma Plenuma gorodskogo partiynogo komiteta, 28.11.1937 g., l. 2. Ibid., l. 29. Ibid., l. 30.

Notes 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45 46 47 48 49

373

Ibid. Ibid., l. 31. Ibid. Ibid., l. 40. Ibid., l. 38 ff. Ibid., l. 40. Ibid., l. 48. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 116: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma KPU, 5.1–14.2.1938, (Protokol 25.1.1938, l. 75–78); d. 115: Protokoly V gorodskoy partiynoy konferentsii, plenumov Dneprodzerzhinskgo gorkoma KPU, 3.2–17.9.1938 g., Protokol No. 1 Plenuma Dneprodzerzhinskogo Gorkoma 4.3.1938 g., l. 19 f.; Protokol No. 2 Plenuma Dneprodzerzhinskogo Gorkoma 20.4.1938 g., l. 25; Protokol No. 3 Plenuma Dneprodzerzhinskogo Gorkoma 14.5.1938 g., l. 27; Protokol No. 4 Plenuma Dneprodzerzhinskogo Gorkoma 23.5.1938 g., l. 28 f.; Protokol No. 5 Plenuma Dneprodzerzhinskogo Gorkoma 17.9.1938 g., l. 36. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 115, Protokol No. 1 Plenuma Dneprodzeržinskogo Gorkoma 4.3.1938 g., l. 19 f.; d. 116, Protokol 25.1.1938, l. 75. DADO, f. 19, op. 2, d. 684, Protokol 9.12.1937 g.; Protokol 28.12.1937 g.; op. 3, d. 118: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma 28.3–9.5.1938 g. (Protokol 1.4.1938 g., l. 37; Protokol 17.4.1938 g., l. 90 ff. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 117, Protokol 9.3.1938 g., l. 107. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 118, Protokol 17.4.1938 g., l. 98. Ibid., l. 127; Protokol 4.5.1938 g. Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 37. Slonevskiy, Rasskazy o Brezhneve, p. 12. DADO, d. 19, op. 3, d. 119, Protokol 16.5.1938, l. 1 f.; Maksim Kavun: Leonid Brezhnev: Kar’yera i zhizn’ genseka, in: Nedvizhimost’ v dvizhenii, no. 14 (120), 19 April 2006, p. 10 f.; cf. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 28 f. Dornberg: Masks of Power, p. 69. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; cf. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 60; Kavun, Leonid Brezhnev, pp. 10 f. DADO, f. 19, op. 3, d. 227, Byuro dnepropetrovskogo obkoma KPU, protokol, stenogramma V. oblastnoy partiynoy konferentsii, 27.2.–2.3.1939; d. 239: Stenogramma VII. plenuma obkoma KPU, 7.5.1939 g.; d. 240: Stenogramma VIII. plenuma obkoma 9–10.6.1939 g.; d. 255: Protokoly 1–4 zasedaniy byuro obkoma KPU 2–7.3.1939 g.; d. 257: Protokoly No. 5–11 zasedaniy byuro obkoma KPU, 8–15.3.1939 g.; d. 366: Protokol i stenogramma sobraniya oblastnogo partiynogo aktiva v itogakh Martovskogo Plenuma TsK VKP, 16–17.4.1940 g. Plenum dneprovskogo Obkoma KP(b)U, 9 i 10 yanvarya, vystupil L.I. Brezhnev s dokladom ‘O postanovlenii partiynoy propagandy v svyazi s vypuskom “Kratkogo kursa istorii VKP(b)” ’, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 11 January 1940, no page number. VKP(b) = the Communist Party’s title until 1953: All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviki). ‘Plenum dneprovskogo Obkoma KP(b)U, 9 i 10 yanvarya, vystupil L.I. Brezhnev’. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 19; cf. Murphy, Brezhnev, pp. 52–54; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 72. Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 60. Plenum Dnepropetrovskogo Obkoma KP(b)U 27–28 sentyabrya 1940 g., in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 29 September 1940. Mlechin, Murphy and Dornberg believe Brezhnev had already taken on the role of secretary for armament in September 1940; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 61;

374

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

Notes Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 29; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 68. Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ and the regional historians Andrey and Tat’yana Portnov(a) also give the year 1940: Brezhnev, Memoirs, p. 40; Andrey Portnov/Tat’yana Portnova: ‘Stolitsa zastoya? Brezhnevskiy mif Dnepropetrovska’, in: Neprikosnovennyy zapas, no. 5 (97), 2014, 71–87, here p. 75. In fact, the new oblast committee secretaries’ posts were not introduced until the Eighteenth Party Conference of the CPSU, held in Moscow from 15 to 20 February 1941: S.S. Chizhnyakov/ O.V. Khlevnyuk: XVIII partkonferentsiya. Vremya, problemy, resheniya, Moscow 1990. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200, l. 7; cf. Kavun, Leonid Brezhnev, pp. 10 f.; Iona Andronov: Dorogami voyny, in: Novoye vremya, no. 9, 1972, 18–24, here pp. 20 f.. Interestingly, Brezhnev did not receive a mention as the new armament secretary when the newspaper Dneprovskaya Pravda announced the new appointments, although it did introduce the new third secretary. It can only be assumed that the armament sector was a matter of secrecy: Plenum Dneprovskogo Obkoma KP(b)U, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 24 April 1941. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 34. K.S. Grushevoy: Togda, v sorok pervom …, Moscow 1974, p. 6. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 73. Brezhnev, Memoirs, pp. 40–41. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 20; Vasil’yeva, Kremlevskiye zheny, p. 400. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 400. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 100; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 387. Cit. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 24. Aleksandr Kolesnichenko: Kak popast’ v istoriyu i anekdot. Leonid Il’ich byl odnim iz samych ‘riskovykh’ sovetskikh vozhdey. [Rasskaz Aleksandra Ryabenko], in: Argumenty i fakty, 2010, no. 21, 28 f., here p. 28. Slonevskiy, Rasskazy o Brezhneve, p. 12. Cf. Dmitriy Tabachnik: Zapyataya v biografii Genseka, in: Aksyutin, Materialy k biografii, pp. 38–58, here p. 39. Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, p. 152. Ibid., p. 154. Georgiy Konstantinovich Zhukov: Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya [1969], vol. 3, Moscow 1984, p. 24. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 45. D.I. Ortenberg: Sorok tretiy. Rasskaz-khronika, Moscow 1991, http://militera.lib.ru/ memo/russian/ortenberg_di3/04.html, accessed 17.4.2015. DADO, d. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 4. Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 19. Yuriy Churbanov: Moy test’ Leonid Brezhnev, Moscow 2007, p. 99. Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 13. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 27–29. Ibid., pp. 34–40. Ibid., pp. 42 f.; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 74. Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 54. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 45; Kavun, Leonid Brezhnev, pp. 10 f.; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 65; Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 42; Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 21; Andronov, Dorogami voyny, p. 20. Tsentral’nyy Archiv Minoborony Rossii (henceforth: TsAMO), f. 228, op. 718, d. 6, l. 57, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/prikaz-shtabu-yuzhnogo-fronta-po-lichnomusostavu-003-ot-23-iyulya-1941-goda-o-naznachenii-brez, accessed 8.2.2017.

Notes 79 80 81 82 83

375

Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 34. Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, pp. 87 ff.; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 66. Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 87. Ibid., p. 92. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 67; Dornberg, Masks of Power, pp. 74 f.; Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, pp. 100, 119. 84 Generaloberst Halder: Kriegstagebuch, vol. III: Der Rußlandfeldzug bis zum Marsch auf Stalingrad (22.6.1941–24.9.1942), ed. by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Stuttgart 1964, pp. 188–197; Andronov, Dorogami voyny, p. 22. 85 Cit. Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 129; further: pp. 112, 119 f., 127; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 68. 86 Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, pp. 130–132; Halder, Kriegstagebuch, p. 197. 87 Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 164. 88 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 34; Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 194. 89 TsAMO, f. 33, op. 682524, d. 12, l. 168 f.; TsAMO, Kartoteka ucheta nagrazhdennykh, dok. 1/21, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/uchetnye-kartochki-nagrazhdennogona-leonida-ilicha-brezhneva, accessed 8.2.2017; see also Medvedev Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 35; Grushevoy, Togda, v sorok pervom, p. 200. 90 Richard Overy: Russlands Krieg, 1941–1945, Hamburg 2003, p. 245. 91 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 35. 92 Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 63. 93 Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 70. 94 TsAMO, f. 224, op. 783, d. 64, l. 186 f.; f. 276, op. 832, d. 19, l. 40; d. 64, l. 70. 95 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 52. 96 P.G. Grigorenko: V podpol’ye mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys …, New York 1981, ch. 23, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/grigorenko/23.html, accessed 27.4.2015. 97 TsAMO, f. 33, op. 686044, d. 1781, l. 182 f.; op. 682525, d. 70, l. 132 f. 98 Cit. Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 21. 99 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 50. 100 Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 69. 101 TsAMO, f. 33, op. 682524, d. 12, l. 168ob., http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ nagradnoi-list-na-zamestitelya-nachalnika-politupravleniya-yuzhnogo-frontabrigadnogo-komissara, accessed 8.2.2017; cf. also A.A. Grechko: Gody voyny. Part 1: Surovyye ispytaniya, Moscow 1976, ch. 2, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/grechko_ aa2/04.html, accessed 27.4.2015. 102 TsAMO, f. 33, op. 11484, d. 88, l. 290, 294. 103 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 61. 104 TsAMO, f. 32, op. 11296, d. 221, l. 8; however, in his tabular CV from 1949, Brezhnev stated he had received the new position in the June: DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1166; Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 62 f. 105 Kartoteka ucheta nagrazhdennykh, dok. 1/21, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ uchetnye-kartochki-nagrazhdennogo-na-leonida-ilicha-brezhneva, accessed 8.2.2017. 106 TsAMO, f. 33, op. 11484, d. 158, l. 410, 465 f.; d. 205, l. 589, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/ brezhnev/docs/prikaz-narodnogo-komissara-oborony-02297-o-naznacheniipolkovnika-li-brezhneva-nachalnikom-poli, accessed 8.2.2017; see also Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 35–38. 107 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, pp. 21–22. 108 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 74. 109 Ortenberg, Sorok tretiy, ch. 4: Aprel’, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/ortenberg_di3/04. html, accessed 27.4.2015; K.S. Moskalenko: Na Yugo-Zapadnom napravlenii, Moscow 1969.

376 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

141 142

143

Notes Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 22. Ortenberg, Sorok tretiy: Aprel’; Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 80. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 43. Roy Medvedev: Vo vtorom eshelone, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 11–30, here p. 16; Ortenberg, Sorok tretiy: Aprel’. TsAMO, f. 33, op. 686044, d. 1781, l. 182. A.A. Grechko: Bitva za Kavkaz, Moscow 1967, ch. 6: Proryv goluboy linii, http://militera. lib.ru/memo/russian/grechko_aa_1/06.html, accessed 29.4.2015. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 15; Medvedev, Vo vtorom eshelone, p. 17. Grechko, Bitva za Kavkaz, ch. 4: ‘Perelom’, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/grechko_ aa_1/04.html, accessed 29.4.2015. RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 278, l. 22; http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/li-brezhnevv-gospitale-posle-raneniya-1943-g.html, accessed 8.2.2017. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, pp. 34 f.; Medvedev, Vo vtorom eshelone, p. 17. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, pp. 44, 81. Ibid., p. 90. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 47 f. Ibid., p. 39. Medvedev, Vo vtorom eshelone, p. 19. Cf. Christoph Mick: Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt: Lemberg 1914–1947, Wiesbaden 2010, p. 544. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1197, l. 21, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ attestatsionnyi-list-li-brezhneva-na-prisvoenie-ocherednogo-voinskogo-zvaniya-6sentyabrya-1944, accessed 12.2.2017. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 98. Cit. A.A. Grechko, Cherez Karpaty, Moscow 1970, p. 202 [Arkhiv MO SSSR, f. 371, op. 6386, d. 31, l. 363 f.]. TsAMO, f. 42426, op. 136, d. 81, l. 54 f. Vasyl Markus: L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique à l’Ukraine soviétique, 1944–1945, Leuven 1956, p. 24. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 80. TsAMO, f. 32, op. 11289, d. 661, l. 5 f. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 99. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 80. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 24, 26, 30. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 14 f., 31. Ibid., pp. 15, 22. Ibid., pp. 21 f. TsAMO, f. 371, op. 6368, d. 16, l. 120, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ ukazanie-nachalnika-politotdela-18-i-armii-li-brezhneva-nachalnikam-politotdelovsoedinenii-i-z, accessed 13.3.2017. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 16 ff. Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, p. 126; Markus, L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique, p. 30; Vincent Shandor: Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century. A Political and Legal History, Cambridge, Mass., 1997, p. 263; František Nemec/Vladimir Moudry: The Soviet Seizure of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Toronto 1955, p. 83. Nemec/Moudry, The Soviet Seizure, pp. 102–104; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 84; cf. also Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, pp. 122 f.

Notes 144 145 146 147

148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157

158 159 160

161 162 163 164 165

166 167 168 169 170

171 172 173 174

377

Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, 1944–1964, pp. 8–15. Markus, L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique, p. 24. Nemec/Moudry, The Soviet Seizure, pp. 89, 108. Markus, L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique, p. 42; Nemec/Moudry, The Soviet Seizure, p. 108; Istoriya mist i sil Ukrayins’koyi RSR, vol. 6: Zarkapat’ska oblast’, ed. by. V.I. Belousov et al., Kiev 1969, pp. 56 f., 95, 390; Shandor, Carpatho-Ukraine, p. 266; Andrey Pushkash: Tsivilizatsiya i varvarstvo. Zarkapat’ye 1918–1945, Moscow 2006, p. 424. Markus, L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique, pp. 46–50. Belousov, Zarkapat’ska oblast’, pp. 58 f. David R. Marples: Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s, London 1982, p. 62; Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, p. 125. Nemec/Moudry, The Soviet Seizure, pp. 114, 116, 119, 160. Ibid., p. 345. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 99. Belousov, Zarkapat’ska oblast’, p. 59. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 26 f. Ibid. TsAMO, f. 371, op. 6386, d. 54, l. 10 f., http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ ukazaniya-nachalnika-politotdela-18-i-armii-li-brezhneva-nachalnikam-politotdelovsoedinenii-o-, accessed 13.2.2017. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 83. Ibid., p. 87; Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 100. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1197, l. 23, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ attestatsionnyi-list-general-maiora-li-brezhneva-s-zaklyucheniem-starshikhnachalnikov-i-okonch, accessed 13.2.2017. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, between pages 95 and 96. Luba Brezhneva: The World I Left Behind. Pieces of a Past, New York 1995, p. 67; Brezhnev, Trilogy: Little Land, p. 86; ibid., The Virgin Lands, p. 238. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 420. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 77. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 2; B.G. Komskiy et al. (eds): Krasnoznamennyy Prikarpatskiy. Istoriya Krasnoznamennogo Prikarpatskogo voyennogo okruga, 2nd edition, Moscow 1982, pp. 63 f.; Rossiyskiy Gosudarstevnnyy Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoy Istorii (henceforth: RGASPI), f. 17, op. 116, d. 229, l. 78, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/ docs/postanovlenie-sekretariata-tsk-vkpb-o-naznachenii-li-brezhneva-nachalnikompolitupravleniya-pri, accessed 13.2.2017. Komskiy, Krasnoznamennyy Prikarpatskiy, p. 63; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 83. Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, p. 125. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, pp. 420 f. V.I. Fes’kov/K.A. Kalashnikov/V.I. Golikov: Sovetskaya armiya v gody kholodnoy voyny (1945–1991), Tomsk 2004, p. 20. TsAMO, f. 32, op. 11289, d. 520, Politdonos nachal’nika PU PrikVO L. Brezhneva, 12.12.1945 g., l. 182 f.; cf. also Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, p. 127; Borys Lewytzkyj: Die Sowjetukraine 1944–1963, Cologne 1964, p. 31. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 87. Brezhnev, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/perechen-dokumentov-ieksponatov?page=4, accessed 13.2.2017. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 87. TsAMO, f. 141, op. 244822, d. 13, l. 238 ff.; f. 32, op. 11289, d. 720, l. 131 ff., 182 f.

378 175 176 177 178

179 180 181 182 183 184

185

186

187 188 189 190 191 192

193 194 195

196

Notes TsAMO, f. 141, op. 765372c, d. 1, l. 31 f. Ibid., l. 33 ff. Ibid. Boeckh, Stalinismus in der Ukraine, pp. 128, 144, 161, 174, 241. Unfortunately, in her extensive, extremely detailed work, Boeckh doesn’t mention anything about the role of the military administration. Nor does she mention Brezhnev; Markus, L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique, pp. 56, 60 f. TsAMO, f. 141, op. 765372c, d. 1, l. 244; Komskiy, Krasnoznamenskiy prikarpatskiy, pp. 65–68. TsAMO, f. 141, op. 765372c, d. 1, l. 246 f.; Komskiy, Krasnoznamesnskiy prikarpatskiy, pp. 69 f. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 87. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 421. A.A. Grechko: Gody voyny, ch. 2: Udar na Barvenkovo, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/ russian/grechko_aa2/04.html, accessed 29.4.2015. RGANI, f. 5, op. 75, d. 207: Informatsiya otdela ob otklikakh radioslushateley na radioperedachu ‘Po stranitsam vospominaniy L.I. Brezhneva “Malaya zemlya” ’, l. 6. Viktor Golikov: ‘Ya veryu i nadeyus’ …’ Posledneye interv’yu, transcribed by Konstantin Podyma, 3 May 2012, http://www.novodar.ru/index.php/novohistory-punkt/5683-vgpi05-2012?format=pdf, accessed 15.7.2015. Nash dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, in: Moy Dneprodzerzhinsk, no. 52, 16. November 2011; Roy Medvedev: Fars s primes’yu tragedii, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 122–145, here p. 140. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 46. Grechko, Cherez karpaty, pp. 73, 177. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 46. Lewytzkyj, Die Sowjetukraine, p. 74. Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 98; Mikhail Dokuchaev: Moskva. Kreml’. Okhrana, Moscow 1995, p. 181. See Svetlana Alexijewitsch: Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht, Berlin 2004; Anna Krylova: Soviet Women in Combat. A History of Violence on the Eastern Front, Cambridge 2010. Brezhneva, The World I Left Behind, p. 81. According to granddaughter Viktoriya as cited by Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 80. Anna Velikzhanina: Preyemnikom Brezhneva dolzhen byl stat’ Shcherbitskiy [interview with V.G. Musael’yan], in: Komsomol’skaya Pravda v Ukraine, 4 July 2014; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 81. Cit. Pechenev, Vzlet i padeniye Gorbacheva, p. 61.

Chapter 3: In Stalin’s Shadow, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship I 1 2 3 4

Brezhnev, A Short Biography, p. 36. See also Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 214. Vladimirov, Tandem, p. 158; Kavun, Leonid Brezhnev, pp. 10–12. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1484, l. 55, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ postanovlenie-politbyuro-tsk-vkpb-o-snyatii-li-brezhneva-s-dolzhnosti-nachalnika-

Notes

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

379

politupravleni, accessed 13.2.2017; DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 342, l. 2; see also Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 51; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 78; Aleksandr Gavrilyuk: ‘Teper’ muzhik skazhet …’ Iz zhizni nomenklatury, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 261–274, here p. 262. Oleg Khlevnyuk: Regional’naya vlast’ v SSSR v 1953 – kontse 1950kh godov. Ustoychivost’ i konflikty, in: Otechestvennaya istoriya (2007) 3, pp. 31–49; Yoram Gorlizki: Too Much Trust. Regional Party Leaders and Local Political Networks under Brezhnev, in: Slavic Review 69 (2010) 3, 676–700. Lewytzkyj, Die Sowjetukraine, p. 61. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 94. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 95; Marshall MacDuffie: Der rote Teppich. Fünfzehntausend Kilometer durch Sowjetrußland, Munich 1955, p. 156. Istoriya mist i sil Ukrayins’koyi RSR, vol. 11: Zaporiz’ka oblast’, ed. by V.I. Petrikin et al., Kiev 1970, p. 96. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 96; Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 108. MacDuffie, Der rote Teppich, p. 156. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 96. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 15. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 95; Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 114; Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 11, p. 99. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 110. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 421. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 111. Derzhavniy arkhiv Zaporiz’koyi oblasti, (henceforth: DAZO), f. 157, op. 1, d. 1473: Protokol No. 9, zasedaniya plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorkoma KPU, 24.12.1946 g., l. 2. Ibid. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 129. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1473, l. 10. DAZO, d. 157, op. 1, d. 1481: Stenogramma VIII plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorkoma KPU, 12.09.1946 g., l. 38. Ibid., l. 46. Ibid., l. 66. Ibid., l. 67. Brezhnev: Trilogy: Rebirth, pp. 107 f. MacDuffie, Der rote Teppich, p. 165. Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 11, p. 51. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1473: Protokol No. 9 zasedaniya plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorodskogo komiteta KPU, 24.12.1946 g.; d. 1633: Protokol No. 12 zasedaniya plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorodskogo komiteta KPU, 13.6.1947 g.; d. 1636: Stenogramma zasedaniya 13. Plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorodskogo komiteta KPU, 14.8.1947 g.; Gennadiy Moyseyenko: Epokha pobediteley. Dokumental’no-istorikheskaya povest’, 2nd, expanded edition, Moscow 2012, p. 224, http://kniga.seluk. ru/k-tehnicheskie/1226382-1-1-moiseenko-epoha-pobediteley-dokumentalnoistoricheskaya-povest-vtoroe-izdanie-dopolnennoe-pererabotannoe-kn.php, accessed 24.4.2017. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 137, Protokol No. 253 zasedaniya byuro Zaporozhskogo obkoma KPU 17.9.1946 g.; d. 137: Protokol No. 254 zasedaniya byuro Zaporozhskogo obkoma KPU 20–22.9.1946 g. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 148: Stenogramma VIII. Plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorkoma, 12.9.1946 g., l. 38; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 97.

380 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Notes DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 148, l. 38; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 97. Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 11, p. 51; Dneproges snova v stroyu, in: Izvestiya, 5 March 1947, 1. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 118. Marples, Stalinism in Ukraine, p. 83; Lewytzkyj, Die Sowjetukraine, p. 48. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 83. Chruschtschow erinnert sich, ed. by Strobe Talbott, Reinbek 1971, p. 238; William Taubman: Khrushchev. The Man and his Era, New York 2003, p. 201. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 252: ‘Pis’ma obkoma KP(b)U v TsK VKP(b), TsK KP(b)U, Sovminy SSSR i USSR, obkomy partii po voprosam org.-part. raboty, s. kh., obespecheniya naseleniya prodovol’stviyem, vosstanovleniya shkol, tekhnikumov, ob”ektov kul’tury i dr., 2.2.1946–27.12.1946 g., l. 30. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 378: Protokol No. 293 zasedaniya byuro Zaporozhskogo obkoma KPU, 25.2.1947 g. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 237: Stenogramma soveshchaniya sekretarey gorkomov i raykomov KPU po voprosam osenne-polevykh rabot, 16.9.1946 g., l. 1. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 13: Stenogramma XII Plenuma Zaporozhskogo obkoma KPU, 15.11.1946 g., l. 79 f. Ibid., l. 81. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 237, l. 73 f. Ibid., l. 6. Order of 28 July 1947 ‘On Reinforcing the Troops’ Discipline’, popularly known as ‘No Backward Step’, forbidding all units to retreat without Stalin’s express approval and introducing strict punishment for those that did. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 237, l. 75. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 358: Stenogramma XIV Plenuma zaporozhskogo obkoma KPU, 22–23.3.1947 g., l. 90. Ibid., l. 53. Ibid. Ibid., l. 9. See also DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 13, l. 79. Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 203. Ibid.; Chruschtschow erinnert sich, p. 247; Lazar’ Kaganovich: Pamyatnyye zapiski rabochego, kommunista-bol’shevika, profsoyuznogo, partiynogo i sovetskogosudarstvennogo rabotnika, Moscow 1996, p. 489. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1630: Stenogramma Xgo Plenuma Zarporozhskogo gorkoma KPU ot 6.3.1947 g., l. 69. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 150; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 98. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 150. Vazhnoye obyazatel’sto vosstanoviteley zavoda ‘Zaporožstal’, in: Pravda, 16 March 1947, 1. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 151. Cit. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 151. Partiyno-politicheskaya rabota sredi stroiteley, in: Pravda, 11 April 1947, 1. Cf. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 101. Kaganovich, Pamyatnyye zapiski, p. 490. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1631: Originaly zasedaniya Plenuma Zaporozhskogo Gorkoma KP(b)U, 28 aprelya 1947 g., no page numbers, annex to file, p. 1. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid., p. 2. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 153. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1631, p. 6.

Notes 67 68 69 70 71 72

381

Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 153. DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1631, p. 7. Ibid., p. 5. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 149. Ibid., pp. 48 f. Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 11, p. 99; Peredovoy otryad ‘Zaporozhstroya’, in: Pravda, 10 October 1947, 1. 73 Kaganovich, Pamyatnyye zapiski, p. 490; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 102; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 79. 74 Istoriya mist i sil, vol. 11, p. 100; Pravda, 3 December 1947, 1. 75 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 230: Iyunskiy Plenum TsK KPSS, shestoye utrenneye zasedaniye, 26.6.1957 g., l. 16–18. 76 DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1638: Stenogramma zasedaniya XIVgo Plenuma gorkoma KPU, 23.10.1947 g. 77 See e.g. DAZO, f. 102, op. 2, d. 366: Stenogramma XVIII Plenuma Zaporozhskogo obkoma KPU, 29.–30.10.1947 g. 78 DAZO, f. 157, op. 1, d. 1633: Protokol No. 12 zasedaniya Plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorkoma KPU, 13.6.1947 g.; d. 1636: Originaly protokola No. 13 zasedaniya Plenuma Zaporozhskogo gorkoma KPU, 14.8.1947 g. 79 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 146. 80 DADO, d. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 4 f. 81 Cit. Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 182. 82 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 181. 83 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 55. 84 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 5, Stenogramma 1 go Plenuma Dnepropetrovskogo obkoma, 13.1.1949 g., l. 20. This plenum was opened by Shchëlokov. 85 DADO, f. 19. op. 6, d. 341, l. 3; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 83. 86 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 181; DADO, f. 19, op. 5, d. 203: Protokol i stenogramma XVIII Plenuma Dnepropetrovskogo obkoma, 21.11.1947 g., l. 2; f. 18, op. 3, d. 324: Stenogramma XVII Plenuma Dnepropetrovskogo gorkoma 9.12.1947 g., l. 195. 87 Chruschtschow erinnert sich, p. 248. 88 Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 99; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 104. 89 DADO, f. 19, op. 5, d. 203, l. 4. 90 Ibid., l. 2. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid., l. 108 f. 93 DADO, f. 18, op. 3, d. 324, l. 175 f. 94 Ibid., l. 176. 95 I.I. Sobolev: Minuvshikh dney dela …, Dneprodzerzhinsk 1981, p. 15, manuscript in: MIK. 96 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 5: Protokoly i stenogrammy XIX i I Plenumov Dnepropetrovskogo obkoma KPU, 24.2–1.3.1948 g, l. 51. 97 Sobolev, Minuvshikh dney dela, pp. 30 f. 98 DADO, f. 19, op. 5, d. 266: Stenogramma oblastnogo soveshchaniya agronomov i zaveduyushchikh rayonotdelami s.kh. ob itogakh 1947 s. kh. goda […], 29–30.12.1947 g., l. 114. 99 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 5, l. 53. 100 Ibid., l. 36–38. 101 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 2: Stenogramma VII Dnepropetrovskoy oblastnoy partiynoy konferentsii, 27.–28.2.1948 g., tom 2, l. 126 f.

382

Notes

102 Ibid., l. 152. 103 Ibid., l. 182. 104 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 2: Stenogramma VIII Dnepropetrovskoy oblastnoy partiynoy konferentsii 12–13.1.1949 g., tom 2, l. 138. 105 Ibid., l. 183. 106 Cf. also Murphy, Brezhnev, pp. 104 f. 107 DADO, f. 18, op. 3, d. 535: Stenogramma IX Dnepropetrovskoy partiynoy konferentsii, 7–8.2.1948 g., l. 229. 108 DADO, f. 18, op. 3, d. 540: Stenogramma X Dnepropetrovskoy gorodskoy partiynoy konferentsii, 28–29.12.1948 g. , l. 238. 109 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 223. 110 DADO, f. 19, op. 5, d. 266, l. 131. 111 Ibid., l. 68. 112 Ibid., l. 80 ff. 113 Ibid., l. 118, 121. 114 Ibid., p. 67. 115 Ibid., l. 131. 116 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 103: Dokladnyye zapiski, informatsionnyye soobshcheniya obkoma KP(b)U, oblispolkoma v TsK VKP, TsK KPU, SovMin USSR […], 10.2.–30.12.1948 g., l. 49 ‘Sekretno tov. Khrushchevu’, 6.7.1948 g. 117 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 146: Dogovor na sotsialisticheskoye sorevnovaniye mezhdu Dnepropetrovskoy i Zaporozhskoy oblastyami i svedeniya o ego vypolnenii […] 29.1.1949–4.1.1950 gg., l. 1–17. 118 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 103, l. 60: O khode vypolneniya Ukaza Prezidiuma VerTsKhovnogo Soveta USSR ot 21.03.1948 – dokladnaya zapiska, 15.04.1948 g. 119 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 56. 120 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 1: Stenogramma VII Dnepropetrovskoy oblastnoy konferentsii, tom 1, 27–28.2.1948 g., l. 62. 121 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 1: Stenogramma VIII Dnepropetrovskoy oblastnoy partiynoy konferentsii 11–12.1.1949 g., tom 1, l. 24. 122 DADO, f. 19, op. 5, d. 266, l. 132. 123 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 105: Doklad sekretarya obkoma L.I. Brezhneva na sobranii Dnepropetrovskogo gorodskogo partiynogo aktiva po vypolneniyu resheniy TsK KP(b) U i obkoma partii o stroitel’stve avtozavoda v g. Dnepropetrovske, 18.5.1949 g., l. 20. 124 Sobolev, Minuvshikh dney dela, p. 65. 125 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 199. 126 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 1, l. 30. 127 DADO, f. 18, op. 3, d. 535: Stenogramma IX. Dnepropetrovskoy partiynoy konferentsii, 7–8.2.1948 g., l. 57. 128 DADO, f. 18, op. 3, d. 324, l. 270 f. 129 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 103, l. 39–44 Informatsionnyye soobshcheniya o politicheskikh nastroyeniyakh trudyashchikhsya Dnepropetrovskoy oblasti. 130 DADO, f. 19, op. 7, d. 1., l. 23. 131 DADO, f. 19, op. 10, d. 13: Protokol No. 101, 102, 1–3, 5 zasedaniy byuro obkoma 4.1.–2.2.1949 g., l. 45. 132 Brezhnev, Trilogy: Rebirth, p. 207. 133 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 371. 134 Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 215. 135 Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 100.

Notes 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143

144 145 146 147 148

149 150 151 152 153

154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

166

383

Velikzhanina, Preyemnikom Brezhneva. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 84; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 106. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 55. DADO, f. 19, op. 6, d. 341, l. 3. Il’ich ne lyubil zhenshchin bez chulok, in: Torgovyy dom [Dnepropetrovsk], 22 April 1999, no. 6, no page number. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 103. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1168. Arhiva Organizaţiilor Social-Politice a Republicii Moldova (henceforth: AOSPRM), f. 51, op. 9, d. 94: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya V plenuma TsK KP Moldavii, 4.–6.7.1950 g.; I.I. Bodyul: Dorogoy zhizni. Vremya, sobytiya, razdum’ya, Chišinău 2002, p. 49; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 84; Gavrilyuk, Teper’ muzhik skazhet, p. 262; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 60. Vladimirov, Tandem, p. 158. Ibid. Kavun, Leonid Brezhnev, pp. 10 f. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 106. Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 86 f.; idem: Brezhnev. Razocharovaniye Rossii, Moscow 2012, p. 30; B.G. Bomeshko: Golod i zasukha v Moldavii v 1946–1947 gg., Chišinău 1990, p. 36; Predumyshlennyy golodomor 1946–47, http://rys-arhipelag.ucoz.ru/publ/ predumyshlennyj_golodomor_1946_1947_gg/31-1-0-2083, accessed 18.6.2015. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, pp. 42 f. V.I. Tsaranov: Problemy istorii Moldavii. Issledovaniya po istorii sovetskogo obshchestva, Kishinev 2007, pp. 204, 209; Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 46. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 47. Tsaranov, Problemy istorii Moldavii, p. 226. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 13: Politdoneseniya, dokladnyye zapiski i spravki voinskikh organizatsiy, 4.1.1950–21.12.1950 g.; op. 10, d. 149: Perepiska s voinskimi organizatsiyami, 5.1.1951–19.12.1951 g.; Arhiva Naţională a Republicii Moldova (henceforth: ANRM), f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 4: Akty i dokladnyye zapiski po proverkam Ministerstva Goskontrolya Moldavskoy SSR 1951–1956 gg., l. 20; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 112. Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 111. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 94, l. 235 f. Ibid., l. 236. L.I. Brezhnev: Moldavskaya vesna. Glavy iz knigi ‘Vospominaniya’, in: Novyy mir 59 (1982) 1, 3–67, here p. 4; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 61; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 84. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 94, l. 7, 12. Ibid., l. 8, 190. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 17: Stenogramma VII Plenuma TsK KP Moldavii (original – pravlennaya), 26.–28.1.1951 g., l. 183 f. ANRM, f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 4, l. 22–41. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 94, l. 23, 199 f., 205, 214, 242. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101: Stenogramma VI Plenuma TsK KP Moldavii, 5–6.10.1950 g., l. 419, 442. Ibid., l. 442. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148: Stenogramma soveshchaniya sekretarey raykomov KP Moldavii i predsedateley ispolkomov rayonnykh sovetov deputatov trudyashchikhsya MSSR, 2–3.8.1950 g., l. 3 f. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 145: Stenogramma soveshchaniya sekretarey raykomov i predsedateley rayispolkomov v TsK KP Moldavii, 7.6.1950 g.

384 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204

Notes AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 452. Ibid., l. 7. Ibid., l. 11. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 33. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 21: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya VIII Plenuma TsK KP Moldavii, 24.3.1951 g., l. 2–15. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 61: Protokoly zasedaniya byuro TsK KPM, No. 61 f., 8–10.1.1952 g., l. 289. ANRM, f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 319: Protokoly zasedaniy SovMin i zasedaniy Byuro SovMin Moldavii, No. 29–49, 24.5–16.8.1950 g., l. 179. Ibid., l. 213. ANRM, f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 320: Protokoly zasedaniy SovMin i zasedaniy Byuro SovMin Moldavii, No. 50–63, 23.8–18.10.1950 g., l. 36. Ibid. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 135. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 37. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 21: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya VIII Plenuma TsK KP Moldavii, 24.3.1951 g., l. 8. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 415. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 59: Protokoly zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Moldavii No. 131–134, 9.3–28.3.1951 g. (Protokol No. 133 ot 23.3.1951 g.), l. 26. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 417. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 39. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 412. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 24: Stenogramma i protokol I Plenuma TsK KP Moldavii (tret’ego sozyva) 2.4.1951 g., l. 8. Ibid., l. 9. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 106. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 52. Ibid., pp. 52 f. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 144: Stenogramma soveshchaniy pri TsK KPM za 1950 god, originaly − nepravlennyye, 1. ekz, 7.4.–9.11.1950 g., l. 59; Brezhnev, Moldavskaya vesna, p. 5. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 13 f. Ibid., l. 44. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 130: Protokoly zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Moldavii, 18–29.8.1950 g., l. 317. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 40: Stenogramma soveshchaniy pri TsK KP Moldavii v period pervogo polugodiya 1951 g., l. 16. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 41: Stenogramma soveshchaniy pri TsK KPM vo vtoroy polugodii 1951, 15.7–25.12.1951, l. 90. Ibid., l. 91. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 131: Protokoly zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Moldavii, No. 96–98, 19–26.9.1950 g., l. 152–156. Ibid., l. 239. Ibid., l. 243. Ibid., l. 246. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 144, l. 59. Ibid., l. 60. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 5; d. 2, l. 81. Ibid., l. 12.

Notes 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240

241 242 243 244 245

385

Ibid., l. 16. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 131, l. 10. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 6. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 20. Ibid., l. 24–28. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 37. Ibid., l. 17. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 40, l. 312–326. ANRM, f. R-1936, op. 2, d. 4, l. 1–3. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, pp. 57 f. Ibid., p. 57. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 39. Ibid., l. 5. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 148, l. 22. Ibid., l. 23. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 1: Stenogramma i protokol III s”ezda KP Moldavii, 30.3– 1.4.1951 g., l. 16. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 130: Postanovleniya i rasporyazheniya SovMin SSSR, 29.7.1950–31.3.1951 g., l. 4, 32, 135; Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 53. Tsaranov, Problemy istorii Moldavii, p. 226. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 42; see also d. 130, l. 147. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 1, l. 35. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 44. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 2: Perepiska s TsK VKP(b) i Sovetom Ministrov SSSR, 11.7– 28.12.1950 g., l. 42 f. Ibid., l. 240. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 11: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya V Plenuma TsK KPM, 25–26.1.1952 g., 2. ekz, l. 5–7. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 54. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, pp. 55 f. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 2, l. 82. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 38. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 130, l. 99. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 38. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 2, l. 204–209. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 130, l. 323. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 2, l. 204–209. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 24, l. 1; d. 127: Perepiska s TsK VKP(b) i SovMin SSSR, 4.1–28.4.1951 g., l. 30. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 64: Protokoly zasedaniya byuro TsK KPM No. 69–73, 12.2– 26.2.1952 g., l. 306. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 328: Spravki rabotnikov TsK KP Moldavii ob ukreplenii i organizatsionno-khozyaystvennom sostoyanii kolkhozov v respublike, 13.1–23.11.1951 g., l. 6–8. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 2, l. 241. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 127, l. 161. Tsaranov, Problemy istorii Moldavii, p. 225. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 136: Spravki i dokladnyye zapiski Ministerstva Yustitsii i Verkhovnogo Suda MSSR, 13.2.–27.11.1951 g., l. 56–58. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 136, l. 121, 155–158.

386

Notes

246 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 136, l. 60. 247 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 63: Protokoly zasedaniya byuro TsK KPM No. 66–68, 1–8.2.1952 g., originaly, l. 20–30. 248 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 2: Stenogramma i protokol IV s”ezda KP Moldavii, 18– 21.9.1952 g., l. 499. 249 Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 3. 250 Ibid., pp. 51, 57, 59; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 65. 251 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 16: Stenogramma i protokol VIII Plenuma TsK KP Moldavii, 28–29.8.1952 g., l. 273. 252 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 24, l. 3. 253 ANRM, f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 392: Protokoly zasedaniy SovMin i byuro SovMin MSSR No. 1–24, 3.1–21.3.1951 g. 254 ANRM, f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 393: Protokoly zasedaniy SovMin i byuro SovMin MSSR No. 25–50, 24.3–30.5.1951 g.; also in the files d. 394, d. 472, d. 473, d. 474, d. 475. 255 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 1, l. 266; d. 17, l. 424; d. 40, l. 66; d. 60, l. 168. 256 ANRM, f. R-2848, op. 11, d. 392 (Protokol zasedaniya SovMin MSSR, 19.1.1951), l. 87. 257 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 91. 258 Vladimirov, Tandem, p. 161. 259 Nikita Zverev: Chernenko poznakomilsya s Brezhnevym v Kishineve, in: Komsomol’skaya Pravda Moldavii, 12 March 2005, 11. 260 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 11, l. 3; d. 63, l. 57–60. 261 Ibid. 262 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 2, l. 245 f. 263 Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 56. 264 Ibid. 265 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 127; d. 128: Perepiska s TsK VKP(b) i SovMin SSSR, 4.5– 27.8.1951 g., etc. 266 ANRM, R-2848, op. 11, d. 319, l. 192. 267 Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 52. 268 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 131: Postanovleniya i rasporyazheniya SovMin SSSR, 30.12.1951–26.2.1952 gg., l. 139. 269 Ibid., l. 142, 199, 231 f. 270 Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 57. 271 Sotsialisticheskoye sorevnovaniye v kolkhoznoy derevne, in: Pravda, 26 January 1952, no page number. 272 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 11, l. 287–290. 273 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 45: Stenogramma soveshchaniya sekretarey raykomov i gorkomov KPM i rukovoditeley resp. org., 27.1.1952 g., l. 2. 274 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 9, d. 101, l. 413. 275 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 40, l. 9. 276 Brezhnev, Moldavskaya vesna, p. 15. 277 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1235: Postanovleniya Politbyuro TsK ob otpuskakh L. Brezhneva i materialy k nim, l. 1–2. Viktor Dönninghaus claims Brezhnev had a heart attack in 1951; see Viktor Dönninghaus/Andrey Savin: ‘Lichnaya tragediya Brezhneva’, at lenta.ru, 26. April 2015, https://lenta.ru/articles/2015/04/26/brezhnev/ accessed 21.5.2017. 278 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 11. 279 Ibid.; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1235, l. 4 f. 280 AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 12: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya VI Plenuma TsK KPM, 3–4.6.1952 g.; d. 14: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya VII Plenuma TsK KPM, 26.7.1952 g.; cf. Mlechin, Razocharovaniye, p. 31.

Notes 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310

311 312 313 314

315

387

AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 16, l. 26, 272. Ibid., l. 272. Ibid., l. 273. Ibid., l. 283 ff. Plenum TsK KP Moldavii, in: Pravda, 7 September 1952. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 18: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya IX. Plenuma TsK KPM, 13.9.1952 g., l. 13 f. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 2: Stenogramma i protokol IV s”ezda KPM 18.–21.9.1952 g., l. 491. Ibid., l. 491. Ibid., l. 499, 502; d. 19: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya I Plenuma TsK KPM, 21.9.1952 g., l. 3. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 2, l. 4. L. Brezhnev, sekretar’ TsK KP(b) Moldavii: Kritika i samokritika – ispytannyy metod vospitaniya kadrov, in: Bol’shevik, no. 17, September 1952, 50–58. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 114. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 67. Mlechin, Razocharovaniye, p. 31. XIX s”ezd VKP(b) – KPSS (5–14.10.1952 g.). Dokumenty i materialy, p. 83, http://publ. lib.ru/ARCHIVES/K/KPSS/_KPSS.html#020, accessed 11.05.2020. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 600; see also Mlechin, Razocharovaniye, p. 32; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 68. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 11, d. 20: Stenogramma i protokol zasedaniya II Plenuma TsK KPM, 25.10.1952 g., l. 3. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, p. 58. Ibid. AOSPRM, f. 51, op. 10, d. 1, l. 67. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, pp. 111 f.; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 116; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 66. Brezhnev, Moldavskaya vesna, p. 14. Ibid., p. 14. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 428. Ibid., p. 425. Ibid., p. 423. Ibid., pp. 432–435. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 396; Valentina Oberemko in conversation with Mila Moskalëva: Krivolapaya sud’ba. Pochemu druz’ya otvernulis’ ot Galiny Brezhnevoy, in: Argumenty i fakty, no. 17, 28 April 2010, http://www.aif.ru/society/people/17712, accessed 6.7.2015. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 427. Ibid., p. 429. Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 120. Oleg Khlevnyuk et al. (eds): Politbyuro TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov SSSR, 1945–54 gg., Moscow 2002, pp. 88–91; RGASPI, f. 3, op. 8, d. 17, l. 2–4, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/ brezhnev/docs/protokol-1-zasedaniya-prezidiuma-tsk-kpss-o-raspredeleniiobyazannostei-mezhdu-sekretaryami-tsk, accessed 13.2.2017; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 95. Khlevnyuk, Politbyuro i Sovet Ministrov, pp. 93–96.

388

Notes

316 Ibid., p. 92; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 96. 317 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 96. 318 RGANI, f. 3, op. 8, d. 16, l. 22, 27 f., http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/protokol13-zasedaniya-byuro-prezidiuma-tsk-kpss-o-prezidiume-tsentralnogo-komiteta-kpss-isekr; RGANI, f. 5, op. 108, d. 4, l. 109, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ spravka-otdela-administrativnykh-organov-tsk-kpss-ob-utverzhdenii-general-maiora-librezhneva-z, both accessed 13.2.2017; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 97. 319 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1234: Kopii arkhivnykh dokumentov o rabote L. Brezhneva v okruzhnom zemel’nom upravlenii, l. 44 f. 320 The letter bears the note: Comrade Khrushchev has dealt with it personally. Ibid., l. 44. 321 Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 253. 322 V. Naumov/Yu. Sigachev (eds): Lavrentiy Beriya. 1953. Stenogramma Iyul’skogo Plenuma TsK KPSS i drugiye dokumenty, Moscow 1999, p. 83. 323 Krasnaya Zvezda, 22, 23 and 24 August 1953; 9 and 14 September 1953. 324 Viktor Grishin: Genseki SSSR. Politicheskiye portrety pyati gensekov, Moscow 2013, p. 24. 325 GARF, f. R-5446, op. 1, d. 585, l. 37, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/ postanovlenie-soveta-ministrov-sssr-2064-o-prisvoenii-voinskogo-zvaniya-generalleitenanta-t-br, accessed 13.2.2017; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 98.

Chapter 4: Under Khrushchev, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship II 1

Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 261; Martin McCauley: Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture. The Virgin Land Programme 1953–1964, London 1976, pp. 47–50; Michaela Pohl: From White Grave to Tselinograd to Astana. The Virgin Lands Opening, Khrushchev’s Forgotten First Reform, in: Denis Kozlov/Eleanor Gilburd (eds): The Thaw. Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s, Toronto 2013, pp. 269–307. 2 McCauley, Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture, p. 74; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 137. 3 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 236. 4 P.K. Ponomarenko, in: Daniyar Ashimbayev/Vitaliy Khlyupin: Kazakhstan: Istoriya vlasti, opyt rekonstruktsii, Alma-Ata 2008, p. 472. 5 APRK, f. 708, op. 27: TsK KP Kazakhstana, d. 2: Stenogramma zasedaniy VII s”yezda KP Kaz 18.2.1954 g., l. 411; d. 35: Protokol i stenogramma zasedaniya I Plenuma TsK KP Kaz 19.2.1954 g., l. 4. 6 The party was renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) at the September Plenum of 1953. 7 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 29: Stenogramma zasedaniy IX Plenuma KP Kaz 5–6.2.1954 g., l. 32. 8 Ibid., l. 44. 9 Ibid., l. 236. 10 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 2: Stenogramma zasedaniya VII s”yezda KP Kaz 18.2.1954, l. 18 ff. 11 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 35: Protokol i stenogramma zasedaniya I plenuma TsK KP Kaz 19.2.1954 g., l. 4. 12 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 49: Materialy k protokolu No. 39 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz 12.4.1955 g.; d. 79: Materialy k protokolu No. 49 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz 18.7.1955, l. 26; d. 284: Dokladnyye zapiski, spravki, informatsii i predlozheniya otdela partiynykh organov TsK KP Kaz na imya chlenov byuro i sekretarey TsK, 5.1.–30.8.1955 g., l. 76.

Notes

389

13 The brain tumour was presumably a consequence of the first atom bomb test in Kazakhstan in 1949; Shayakhmetov had been in the immediate vicinity. The claim he wasn’t ill at all but was visiting the theatre was clearly an intrigue on the part of his deputy Tasarenko. Cf. V.A. Liventsov in: Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 479. 14 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, pp. 239, 241; R.K. Shepel’ [the former director of the APRK]: Brezhnev. Dva goda v Kazakhstane, http://www.nomad.su/?a=15-201301180012, accessed 29.10.2014. 15 Vladimirov, Tandem, p. 156. 16 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 122: Materialy k protokolu No. 20 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 21.8.1954 g. ‘O krupnykh nedostatkakh v nauchno-ateisticheskoy propagande i merakh eyë uluchsheniya’, l. 6. 17 Robert Kindler: Stalins Nomaden. Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan, Hamburg 2014, p. 232. 18 Ibid., p. 342. 19 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 155: Protokoly zasedaniy byuro TsK KP Kaz (No. 24, 6.10.1954 g.), l. 55. 20 Spain, Portugal, France, Benelux, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Great Britain. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 68: Materialy k protokolu No. 2 byuro TsK KP Kaz, 23.3.1954 g., l. 24. 21 E.P. Zimovina: Dinamika chislennosti i sostava naseleniya Kazakhstana vo vtoroy polovine XX veka, in: Demoskop Weekly, no. 103–104, 3–16 March 2003, http://www. demoscope.ru/weekly/2003/0103/analit03.php, accessed 17.7.2015. 22 P.K. Ponomarenko [Memoirs], in: G.A. Kumanev (ed.): Ryadom so Stalinym, Smolensk 2001, pp. 108–170, here p. 114. 23 Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 133; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 74 f.; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 138; Mlechin, Razocharovaniye, p. 35. 24 Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 138. 25 See also Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 133. 26 Ponomarenko in: Kumanev, Ryadom so Stalinym, pp. 117 f.; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 81; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 133. 27 Dinmukhamed Kunayev in: Kazachstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 479; idem: Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva (V aspekte istorii Kazakhstana), Alma-Ata 1994, p. 99; Ponomarenko in: Kumanev, Ryadom so Stalinym, pp. 113, 117 f. 28 Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbačeva, p. 97; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 73. 29 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 29, l. 237. 30 Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 139. 31 Ponomarenko in: Kumanev, Ryadom so Stalinym, p. 116. 32 Ibid., p. 117. 33 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 78. 34 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 29, l. 236; d. 35, l. 5 f. 35 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 65: Materialy k protokolu No. 1 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz ot 16.3.1954 g., l. 20–22. 36 Ibid., l. 26–30. 37 Ibid., l. 32. 38 Ibid., l. 34. 39 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 266: Spravki zapiski i perepiska s TsK KPSS i ego otdelami, 2.3–31.5.1954 g., l. 51. 40 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 156: Protokoly No. 26–29, November–Dezember 1954, (No. 26, 11.11.1954 g., l. 5). 41 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 266, l. 23, 61.

390

Notes

42 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 122: Materialy k protokolu No. 20 zasedaniya TsK KP Kaz 21.8.1954 g, l. 37; d. 153: Protokoly No. 11–17, June–July 1954 (Protokol No. 13 zasedaniya byuro KP Kaz 19.7.1954 g., l. 86. 43 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 65, l. 26–30. 44 Ibid., l. 32. 45 V. Litvinov: Istinnyy kazakhstanets. O pervotselinnike, geroye sotsialisticheskogo truda, veterane V.A. Liventsove, in: Megapolis [Kazakhstan], 22 July 2004, p. 11. 46 Liventsova Celina. Vospominaniya pervotselinnika V. A. Liventsova o tselinnoy epopeye (Zapisal Vladimir Litvinov), in: Novoye pokoleniye, 4 April 2003, p. 7. 47 Litvinov, Istinnyy kazakhstanets, p. 11. 48 Sh. Chokin in: Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 479. 49 L.G. Zhukov in: Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 480; idem: Nezabyvayemoye, Pavlodar 2002, p. 124. 50 Today’s West Kazakhstan. 51 Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 104. 52 Iz vospominaniya V.A. Liventsova: Moye vremya, Aktobe 1999, cit.: Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 482. 53 Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 99 f. 54 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 80. 55 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 8: Stenogramma V Plenuma TsK KP Kaz, 2–6.8.1955 g., 2 kniga, l. 351; d. 365: Stenogramma soveshchaniya v TsK KP Kaz po sel’skomu khozyaystvu, 27–28.5.1955 g., l. 252; Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 374. 56 Zhukov, Nezabyvayemoye, p. 127. 57 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 374 58 Ibid., pp. 376, 378. 59 Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, p. 116; Brezhnev, A Short Biography, p. 52. 60 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 2, l. 21; Shepel’ writes of 6.4 million hectares: Brezhnev. Dva goda v Kazakhstane. 61 Shepel’, Brezhnev. Dva goda v Kazakhstane. 62 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 393: Stenogramma soveshchaniya u sekretarya TsK KP Kaz. Brezhneva po voprosu o sozdanii nadlezhashchikh usloviy vnov’ organizvannym sovkhozam, 30.11.1954 g., l. 2. 63 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, pp. 256, 263. 64 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 65, l. 82. 65 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 122, l. 40; d. 153, l. 48. 66 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285: Spravki i zapiski s.kh. otdela na imya sekretarey TsK KP Kaz, 5.8–30.12.1954 g., l. 118. 67 Banya – a Russian sauna. 68 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 73: Materialy k protokolu No. 47 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 14.6.1955 g., l. 38. 69 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 392: Stenogramma besedy sekretarya TsK KP Kazakhstana t. Brezhneva L.I. s tovarishchami, poselayemymi v kolkhozy dlya provedeniya obsledovaniy, 5.10.1954 g., l. 7. 70 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 266, l. 47. 71 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 1; d. 98: Materialy k protokolu No. 13 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 16.7.1954, l. 7; op. 28, d. 85: Materialy k protokolu No. 51 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 8.8.1955 g., l. 1. 72 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 393, l. 6.

Notes 73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

391

APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 28: Stenogramma II Plenuma TsK KP Kaz, 3–12.6.1954 g., 2 kniga, l. 345; op. 28, d. 17: Stenogramma respublikanskogo partiynogo aktiva, 11– 13.3.1955 g., l. 131. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 392, l. 1. Ibid., l. 4. Ibid., l. 5. Ibid., l. 9. Ibid., l. 7. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 186. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 269: Spravki, dokladnyye zapiski i perepiska s TsK KPSS i ego otdelami, 4.1–31.3.1955 g., l. 122; f. 811: Institut istorii partii, op. 24, d. 290: Kopii dokumental’nykh materialov k monografii ‘Kompartiya Kazakhstana v bor’be za osvoyeniye tselinnykh i zalezhnykh zemel”, 1954–1958 gg., l. 67. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 68 f. Ibid., l. 69. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 393, l. 9. APRK, f. 811, op. 24, d. 290, l. 142. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 69. APRK, f. 811, op. 24, d. 290, l. 142. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 71–73. APRK, f. 811, op. 24, d. 290, l. 73–75. Ibid., l. 78–84. Tselina Liventsova, p. 7; APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 393, l. 2; Litvinov, Istinnyy kazakhstanets, p. 11. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 393, l. 1. Ibid.; Litvinov, Istinnyy kazakhstanets, p. 11; Tselina Liventsova, p. 7. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 284, l. 176. Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 252. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 393, l. 9. Ibid., l. 2. Ibid. APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 155, l. 73 f. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 365: Stenogramma soveshchaniya v TsK KP Kaz po s. kh., 27–28.5.1955 g., l. 5. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 270: Spravki, dokladnyye zapiski i perepiska s TsK KPSS i ego otdelami, 2.4–29.6.1955 g., l. 153. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 269, l. 120–131; op. 27, d. 284, l. 134. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 270, l. 34. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 365, l. 252. Ibid., l. 253. Ibid. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 95: Materialy k protokolu No. 54 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 30.8.1955 g., l. 2. Ibid. APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 85: Materialy k protokolu No. 51 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 8.5.1955 g., l. 44. Ibid., l. 48. Ibid., l. 56 f.

392

Notes

111 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 108; op. 28, d. 386: Stenogramma soveshchaniya u sekretarya TsK KP Kaz t. Brezhneva L.I. po voprosu: ‘O sostoyanii ukhoda za posevami kukuruzy’, 11.6.1955 g., l. 6. 112 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 270, l. 188. 113 Tselina Liventsova, p. 7. 114 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 28, l. 349, 355. 115 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 116: Materialy k protokolu No. 18 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 12.8.1954 g., l. 1. 116 Ibid., l. 3; Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, pp. 266−270. 117 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 154: Protokoly No. 18–22, August–September 1954, l. 7. 118 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 284, l. 67. 119 Tselina Liventsova, p. 7. 120 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 188. 121 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 17: Stenogramma respublikanskogo partiynogo aktiva, 11– 12.3.1955 g., l. 130. 122 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 154, l. 6. 123 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 17, l. 131 ff. 124 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 73, l. 37. 125 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 365, l. 255, 258. 126 Ibid., l. 258. 127 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 386, l. 1–2. 128 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 92: Materialy k protokolu No. 10 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 29.5.1954 g., l. 2. 129 Ibid., l. 54. 130 Ibid., l. 65. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid., l. 68 f. 133 Ibid., l. 78. 134 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 95: Materialy k protokolu No. 10 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 29.5.1954 g., l. 9. 135 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 284, l. 79, 82, 94, 99. 136 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 284, l. 79. 137 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 285, l. 189. 138 Ibid., l. 213–233. 139 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 269, l. 178. 140 Ibid., l. 179–187. 141 Ibid., l. 188. 142 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 365, l. 6. 143 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 353. 144 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 365, l. 259. 145 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 353. 146 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 8, l. 317. 147 Ibid., l. 4. 148 Ibid., l. 318. 149 Ibid., l. 319. 150 Ibid., l. 323. 151 Ibid., l. 345. 152 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 85, l. 6. 153 Ibid., l. 20. 154 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 73, l. 29; Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 101.

Notes

393

155 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 73, l. 9; d. 116, l. 1; Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 101. 156 Ponomarenko in: Kumanev, Ryadom so Stalinym, p. 118; Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 479. 157 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 103; Golikov, Ya veryu i nadeyus’; Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 125. 158 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 77; Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, pp. 267−268; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 102. 159 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 28, l. 349; op. 28, d. 17, l. 130; d. 79, l. 1; d. 331: Spravki i perepiska s Ministerstvom Sel’skogo Khozyaystva Kaz. SSR, l. 1. See also Shepel’, Brezhnev. Dva goda v Kazakhstane. 160 Zhukov, Nezabyvayemoye, p. 124. 161 Brezhnev: Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 255. 162 Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, p. 479; Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 270. 163 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 130: Protokoly No. 38–42 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, April 1955, l. 12. 164 Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 92 f. 165 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 259. 166 Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 100; Zhukov, Nezabyvayemoye, p. 127. 167 U.K. Imanbayeva: Akh, Samara, Alma-Ata 2010, pp. 131 ff.; Konstantin Kozlov: Otdykhay, strana!, in: Liter. 17 April 2008, 10. 168 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 130, l. 13. 169 Ibid., l. 67. 170 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 2: Protokol zasedaniya IV Plenuma TsK KP Kaz, 18.4.1955 g., l. 2. 171 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 8, 1 kniga, l. 4, 8 f. 172 Litvinov, Istinnyy kazakhstanets, p. 11; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 139. 173 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 8, 1 kniga, l. 12, 18. 174 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 269, l. 138, 140. 175 APRK, f. 708. op. 28, d. 88: Materialy k protokolu No. 52 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 15.8.1955 g., l. 1. 176 Ibid., l. 2. 177 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 266, l. 44. 178 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 284, l. 139. 179 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 269, l. 186. 180 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 375. 181 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 125, l. 4; d. 13, l. 150; d. 271, l. 124; op. 29, d. 31: Otchetnyy doklad o rabote TsK KP Kaz na VIII s”ezde KP Kazakhstana – dokladchik – Brezhnev L.I., zasedaniye vtoroye, 24.1.1956 g., l. 108. 182 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 168: Materialy k protokolu No. 1 zasedaniya Sekretariata TsK KP Kaz, 18.3.1954 g., l. 8; op. 28, d. 269, l. 68; op. 29, d. 31, l. 108. 183 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 110: Materialy k protokolu No. 59 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 28.9.1955 g., l. 27. 184 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 331, l. 206–208. 185 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 119: Materialy k protokolu No. 62 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz, 19.10.1955 g., l. 38; Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 103. 186 APRK, f. 708, op. 28, d. 119, l. 2–9. 187 APRK, f. 708, op. 29, d. 1: Stenogramma VI Plenuma TsK KP Kaz, 22–29.1.1956 g., p. 3. 188 APRK, f. 708, op. 29, d. 290: Spravki otdelov TsK KPK i Gosplana KazSSR o realizatsii kriticheskikh zamechaniy i predlozheniy delegatov VIII s”ezda KP Kaz, 10.2–30.6.1956 g., l. 66 f. 189 APRK, f. 708, op. 29, d. 290, l. 74.

394

Notes

190 APRK, f. 708, op. 29, d. 66: Materialy k protokolu No. 1 zasedaniya byuro TsK KP Kaz 1.2.1956 g., l. 26. 191 APRK, f. 708, op. 29, d. 290, l. 74. 192 XX s”ezd Kommunisticheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, 14–25.2.1956 g., stenograficheskiy otchet, vol. 2, Moscow 1956, p. 403, 498; RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 185: Protokol No. 1, Fevral’skiy Plenum 27.2.1956 g., l. 5 f. 193 Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 104. 194 Gavrilyuk, ‘Teper’ muzhik skazhet’, p. 262. 195 Brezhnev, Trilogy: The Virgin Lands, p. 379; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 104; Bigel’dy Gabdullin: Velikoye kochev’ye. Istoricheskoye esse o tekh, kto stroil gosudarstvo Kazakhstan, in: Central Asia Monitor, no. 6, 10–16 February 2012, 7. 196 Litvinov, Istinnyy kazakhstanets, p. 11. 197 Ponomarenko in: Kumanev, Ryadom so Stalinym, p. 116. 198 Imanbayeva, Akh, Samara, p. 129 f. 199 APRK, f. 708, op. 27, d. 65, l. 93. 200 Gabdullin, Velikoye kochev’ye, p. 7; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 104. 201 XX s”ezd Kommunisticheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, vol. 1, pp. 213–220. 202 XX s”ezd Kommunisticheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, vol. 2, p. 401. 203 Roy Medvedev: Vom XX. zum XXII. Parteitag der KPdSU. Ein kurzer historischer Überblick, in: Reinhard Crusius/Manfred Wilke (eds): Entstalinisierung. Der XX. Parteitag der KPdSU und seine Folgen, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 23–49, here pp. 26 f. 204 V.P. Naumov: Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede N.S. Chruschtschows auf dem 20. Parteitag der KPdSU, in: Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte (1997) 1, pp. 137–177; Susanne Schattenberg: ‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’? How the Secret Speech was Translated into Everyday Life, in: Polly Jones (ed.): Dilemmas of Destalinization. Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London 2006, pp. 64–79. 205 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 68. 206 According to Dornberg, he was also made responsible for foreign communist parties and brother parties, which the archives have not confirmed, however: Dornberg, Masks of Power, pp. 149. 207 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 2, Postanovleniya 1954–1958, Moscow 2006, pp. 212, 215, 358, 337. 208 Ibid., pp. 225, 282, 420. 209 RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 139: Zapiska Brezhneva L.I., l. 28 ff. 210 RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 214: Proyekty postanovleniy Sovmina SSSR i TsK KPSS, zapiski i pis’ma sekretarya TsK KPSS L.I. Brezhneva, l. 7. 211 Ibid., l. 118 ff. 212 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 120. 213 Ibid., p. 934. 214 Ibid., p. 138. 215 Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 289. 216 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 148. 217 Ibid., p. 173. 218 Ibid., p. 174. 219 Ibid., p. 176 f. 220 Ibid., p. 178. 221 Ibid., p. 183; Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 2, p. 475. 222 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 193.

Notes

395

223 Ibid., p. 195. See too the list of names in Brezhnev’s notes: Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 77. 224 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 79–89. 225 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 201. 226 Ibid., pp. 191, 201. 227 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, pp. 205 f. 228 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 157. 229 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, pp. 222, 238, 261.; RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 210: Zapiski sekretarey TsK KPSS L.I. Brezhneva […], l. 3. Cf. also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 107; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 154. 230 RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 207: Zapiski i predlozheniya ministerstv, vedomstv i nauchnykh uchrezhdeniy o perestroyke urpavleniya promyshlennost’yu i stroitel’stvom otdelov TsK KPSS, l. 20. 231 Pikhoya, Sovetskiy soyuz, p. 172. 232 N.A. Mukhitdinov: Reka vremeni. Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Vospominaniya, Moscow 1995, p. 270; Pikhoya, Sovetskiy soyuz, p. 173. 233 Sergey Khrushchev: Nikita Khrushchev – Reformator. Trilogiya ob ottse, Moscow 2010, p. 438. 234 Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 441. 235 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 97. 236 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 230: Iyunskiy Plenum, shestoye utrenneye zasedaniye, 26.6.1957 g., l. 15; l. 32; Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 442. 237 In the published drafts and minutes, the meeting on 15 June was followed by one on 8 July 1958. Cf. Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, pp. 258 f.; see too Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni, p. 265. 238 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 98. 239 Pikhoya, Sovetskiy soyuz, p. 173. 240 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 230, l. 12 f. 241 Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 442. 242 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 99 ff. 243 Cit. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 452. Mukhitdinov, who was present at the meeting, uses roughly the same words in citing Brezhnev’s speech and Kaganovich’s riposte, Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni, p. 266. 244 Ibid.; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 86; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 108; Pikhoya, Sovetskiy soyuz, p. 174; RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 230, l. 15; l. 32. 245 Cit. Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni, p. 271. 246 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 42, l. 14, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/proekt-pismal-brezhneva-v-prezidium-tsk-kpss-o-serdechnom-zabolevanii-i-o-svoem-otnosheniik-g, accessed 14.2.2017; Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni, p. 274. 247 Vystupleniye L. I. Brezhneva na zasedanii Prezidiuma TsK KPSS [ne pozdneye 14 oktyabrya 1964 g.], in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964. Stenogrammy Plenuma TsK KPSS i drugiye dokumenty, ed. by A.N. Artizov et al., Moscow 2007, p. 228; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 11. 248 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 230, l. 13–15. 249 Ibid., l. 16–18. 250 Ibid., l. 26 f. 251 Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni, pp. 275 f. 252 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, e.g. pp. 393, 427. 253 Ibid., p. 277, footnote 14: pp. 1020 f. See also the transcript of Khrushchev’s speech in Brezhnev’s notebooks: Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 103–107; see also Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 362 f.

396

Notes

254 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 43, l. 18–24, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/docs/tezisyvystupleniya-li-brezhneva-na-plenume-tsk-kpss-s-kritikoi-deyatelnosti-byvshegoministra-, accessed 14.2.2017. 255 Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni, p. 287. 256 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 266: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya plenuma, 28–29.10.1957 g., l. 86. 257 Ibid., l. 83, 89. 258 Ibid., l. 90. 259 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 300. 260 Ibid., pp. 311, 390 ff. 261 Ibid., p. 291; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 83. 262 Cf. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 88. 263 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200, l. 46; f. 3, op. 12, d. 356, l. 15; http://liders.rusarchives.ru/ brezhnev/docs/postanovlenie-prezidiuma-tsk-kpss-o-brezhneve-li-29-marta-1958-g, accessed 14.2.2017. 264 See also Susanne Schattenberg: Frieden im Weltall: Mir + Shuttle = ISS, in: Katharina Kucher/Gregor Thum/Sören Urbansky (eds): Stille Revolutionen. Die Neuformierung der Welt seit 1989, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 33–43. 265 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 374. 266 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200, l. 47 f.; Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 305; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 110; Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 373. 267 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, pp. 285, 304. 268 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 113 ff. 269 Sergei I. Zhuk: Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985, Baltimore 2010, pp. 18 f.; Murphy, Brezhnev, pp. 160–162. 270 L.I. Brezhnev: Kosmicheskiy Oktyabr’, in: Novyy mir 59 (1983) 1, 26–45, here pp. 27–30. 271 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 189. 272 Ibid., pp. 136, 167. 273 See also Susanne Schattenberg: Les frontières du dicible. Du dialogue au silence. Les relations d’Andrej Saharov avec Hruščev et Brežnev, in: Cahiers du Monde Russe 54 (2013) 3–4, pp. 441–466. 274 Andrey Sakharov: Vospominaniya. Polnoye izdaniye v odnom tome, Moscow 2011, pp. 217 f. 275 Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 218. 276 B.E. Tschertok: Raketen und Menschen. Der Sieg Koroljows, Klitzschen 2000, p. 318. 277 Ibid. 278 Ibid., p. 322. 279 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 86. 280 Brezhnev, Kosmicheskiy Oktyabr’, pp. 35–37. 281 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 233. 282 Brezhnev, Kosmicheskiy Oktyabr’, p. 45. 283 Ibid., p. 32. 284 Postanovleniye Prezidiuma TsK KPSS ‘O sozdanii iskusstvennogo sputnika zemli’, 8.8.1955 g, in: Sovetskiy Kosmos. Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii, spetsial’noye izdaniye k 50-letiyu poleta Yuriya Gagarina, Moscow 2011, p. 25; see also Sergej Chruschtschow: Die Geburt einer Supermacht. Ein Buch über meinen Vater, Klitzschen 2003, p. 94.

Notes

397

285 See also Susanne Schattenberg: Die Angst vor Erniedrigung. Die U-2-Krise und das Ende der Entspannung, in: Bernd Greiner/Christian Th. Müller/Dierk Walter (eds): Angst im Kalten Krieg, Hamburg 2009, pp. 220–251. 286 Tschertok, Raketen und Menschen, p. 380. 287 Chruschtschow, Geburt einer Supermacht, pp. 364 f. 288 Tschertok, Raketen und Menschen, p. 382. 289 Ibid.; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 126. 290 Vladimir Kuznechevskiy: ‘Svyashchennaya korova’ voyenno-promyshlennogo kompleksa, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 252–261, here p. 253 f. 291 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200, l. 49. 292 Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 158; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 164. 293 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 441; vol. 3: Postanovleniya 1959–1964, Moscow 2008, p. 127. 294 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 120. 295 Cf. also Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 97. 296 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76: Materialy o poyezdke t. Brezhneva v Gvineyu, Ganu i Marokko (obzor pechati), l. 34: Izvestiya, 9 February 1961: ‘Schastlivogo puti’. 297 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 92. 298 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 79, d. 89: Lichnoye delo deputata Brezhneva L.I. 1962–1966. 299 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 92; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 127. 300 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 136: Stenogramma soveshchaniya sekretarey prezidentov Verkhovnykh Sovetov soyuznykh respublik, l. 169. 301 Ibid., l. 15 f. 302 Viktor Michaylovich Sukhodrev: Yazyk moy – drug moy. Ot Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva, 2nd edition, Moscow 2008, p. 273. 303 Kaul’, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 74. 304 B.L. Kolokolov: Professiya – diplomat. Memuary, Moscow 2006, p. 81. 305 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 37b: Al’bom s fotografiyami vrucheniya pravitel’stvennykh nagrad tov. Brezhnevym 28.5.1960–9.3.1962 gg., l. 30, 54–57. 306 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 37v: Al’bom s fotografiyami vrucheniya pravitel’stvennykh nagrad tov. Brezhnevym 1962–1964 gg., l. 8, l. 28; d. 37b, l. 43–45. 307 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 37b, l. 65. 308 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 3, p. 509. 309 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 37b, l. 66. 310 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 55: Rech’ Brezhneva pri vruchenii ordena Lenina Glavmosstroyu vo Dvortse sporta v Luzhnikakh, 11.5.1964 g., l. 2–4, 10; Vladimir Mayakovsky: Khrenov’s story about Kuznetsk-construction and the people of Kuznetsk [1929], in: idem: Mayakovsky Maximum Access. Selected Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Translated by Jenny Wade, Mill Valley, CA 2018, pp. 217–221, here p. 221, vv. 95–105. 311 Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 157. 312 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 107: Doklad L.I. Brezhneva na partiynom sobranii v apparate Prezidiuma Verkh. Soveta SSSR, 11.12.1961 g., l. 14. 313 Ibid., l. 23, 27. 314 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 55: […] Vystupleniye Brezhneva L.I. na zasedanii konstitutsionnoy komissii, 16.07.1964 g., l. 21; f. 5, op. 30, d. 443: Predlozheniya podkomissiy po podgotovke materialov novoy konstitutsii SSSR, l. 2 ff. 315 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 131, d. 52: Predlozheniya k glave ‘Mestnyye Sovety narodnykh deputatov’ proyekta Konstitutsii SSSR, 3.7.1962–2.2.1963 gg., l. 64. 316 Ibid., l. 89–94. 317 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 55, l. 23.

398

Notes

318 Ibid., l. 24. 319 Ibid., l. 21. 320 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 131, d. 55: Otdel po voprosam raboty Sovetov: Predlozheniya i zamechaniya k glave ‘Gosudarstvennoye upravleniye, deyatel’nost’ sovetov i obshchestvennyye organizatsii’, l. 1. 321 A.M. Aleksandrov-Agentov: Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva. Vospominaniya diplomata, sovetnika A.A. Gromyko, pomoshchnika L.I. Brezhneva, Yu.V. Andropova, K.U. Chernenko i M.S. Gorbacheva, Moscow 1994, p. 119; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 92; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, pp. 274 f.; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 391. 322 Politisches Archiv des Außenamts Berlin (henceforth: Politisches Archiv AA), fonds B 41 – Zwischenarchiv Sowjetunion 1973–1984 (henceforth: Zwischenarchiv), Best.-Nr. 112693: […] Besuch Breschnew I, 1973–1974, BRESHNEW [sic], Leonid Iljitsch, p. 3. 323 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 119. 324 David C. Engermann: The Second World’s Third World, in: Kritika 12 (2011) 1, 183–211, here p. 194; see also: Rossen Djagalov/Christine Evans: ‘Moskau, 1960: Wie man sich eine sowjetische Freundschaft mit der Dritten Welt vorstellte, in: Andreas Hilger (ed.): Die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Welt. UdSSR, Staatssozialismus und Antikolonialismus im Kalten Krieg, 1945–1991, Munich 2009, pp. 83–106. 325 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 102: Rechi Brezhneva L.I. v svyazi s prebyvaniyem v SSSR prezidenta respubliki Gana Kvame Nkruma (10–27.7.1961 g.) […], l. 3. 326 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 83, d. 20: Materialy o prebyvanii Predsedatelya Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta tov. Brezhneva v Irane (16–23.11.1963 g.), l. 20. 327 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 101: Rechi i vystupleniya L.I. Brezhneva v period prebyvaniya v Chekhoslovakii delegatsii KPSS na prazdnovanii sorokoletiya Kompartii Chekhoslovakii v maye 1961 g., l. 11. 328 RGANI, f. 10: Mezhdunarodnyye soveshchaniya, vstrechi, konferentsii predstaviteley kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partiy sotsialisticheskikh, kapitalisticheskikh, razvivayushchikhsya stran, op. 1, d. 112: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya soveshchaniya. 329 Ragna Boden: Die Grenzen der Weltmacht. Sowjetische Indonesienpolitik von Stalin bis Brežnev, Stuttgart 2006, p. 106; see also Murphy, Brezhnev, pp. 166 f. 330 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76: Materialy o poyezdke t. Brezhneva v Gvineyu, Ganu i Marokko (obzor sovetskoy pechati), l. 3, 5, 10. 331 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76, l. 9, l. 12; Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 168. 332 Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 168. 333 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76, l. 15. 334 Ibid., l. 17 f.; d. 77: Materialy o poyezdke L.I. Brezhneva v Gvineyu, Ganu i Marokko (obzor gvineyskoy, ganskyy i marokkonskoy pechati), l. 3, 10 f., 14 f. 335 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76, l. 21. 336 Ibid., l. 15. 337 Ibid., l. 20. 338 Ibid. 339 William Attwood: The Reds and the Blacks. A Personal Adventure, London 1967, p. 14. 340 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 102, l. 1. 341 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76, l. 30. 342 Murphy, Brezhnev, p. 170. 343 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 76, l. 32. 344 Sari Autio-Sarasmo: Khrushchev and the Challenge of Technological Progress, in: Jeremy Smith/Melanie Ilic (eds): Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Policy and Government in the Soviet Union 1953–1964, London 2011, pp. 133–149, here pp. 141 f.

Notes

399

345 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 80: Materialy o poyezdke tov. Brezhneva L.I. v Finlandiyu (obzory finskoy pechati), l. 33. 346 Ibid., l. 34. 347 Ibid., l. 40. 348 Ibid., l. 111. 349 Ibid., l. 114 f. 350 Ibid., l. 142. 351 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 88: Materilaly o poyezdke tov. Brezhneva v Sudan (obzory sudanskoy pechati), l. 16. 352 Ibid., l. 16. 353 Ibid., l. 30, 66. 354 Ibid., l. 70. 355 GARF, F. R-7523, op. 78, d. 91: Materialy o poyezdke t. Brezhneva v Indiyu (obzor sovetskoy pechati), l. 3. 356 Ibid., l. 6. 357 GARF, F. R-7523, op. 78, d. 92: Materialy o poyezdke L.I. Brezhneva v Indiyu (obzor indiyskoy pechati), l. 14, 17. 358 GARF, F. R-7523, op. 78, d. 101: Rechi i vystupleniya L.I. Brezhneva v period prebyvaniya v Chekhoslovakii delegatsii KPSS na prazdnovanii sorokoletiya kompartii Chechoslovakii, May 1961, l. 46 ff.; Boden, Die Grenzen der Weltmacht, pp. 186 f. 359 GARF, F. R-7523, op. 83, d. 17: Materialy o poyezdke predsedatelya Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR L.I. Brezhneva v Afganistan (otkliki afganskoy pechati), October 1963, l. 24. 360 Ibid., l. 34. 361 GARF, F. R-7523, op. 83, d. 19, l. 3, 28–32. 362 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 83, d. 20: Materialy o prebyvanii predsedatelya prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta tov. Brezhneva L.I. v Irane (16–23.11.1963 g.), l. 11 f. 363 Ibid., l. 21. 364 Ibid., l. 21 f. 365 Ibid., l. 38 f., 52 f. 366 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 83, d. 20, l. 55. 367 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 127: Materialy o prebyvanii tov. Brezhneva v Yugoslavii, l. 12 f. 368 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 83, d. 21: Materialy o prebyvanii v Chekhoslovakii tov. L.I. Brezhneva (10–15.12.1963 g.), l. 1–3. 369 Ibid., l. 18. 370 Cf. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 97. 371 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, pp. 556, 571, 619–623. 372 Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 474. 373 Ibid., pp. 445 f. 374 Ibid., p. 435. 375 Ibid. 376 Oberemko, Krivolapaya sud’ba. 377 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 355, 370. 378 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, pp. 719. 379 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1200, l. 57. 380 P.E. Shelest: … Da ne sudimy budete. Dnevnikovyye zapisi, vospominaniya chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS, Moscow 1995, p. 168. 381 Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 719.

400 382 383 384 385 386

387 388

389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419

Notes Ibid., pp. 820, 860. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 338. Dornberg, Masks of Power, pp. 164 f. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, pp. 397, 413. William J. Tompson: Industrial Management and Economic Reform under Khrushchev, in: William Taubman/Sergei Khrushchev/Abbott Gleason (eds): Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven, London 2000, pp. 138–159, here p. 142. Rigby, T.H.: Political Elites in the USSR. Central Leaders and Local Cadres from Lenin to Gorbachev, Aldershot 1990, p. 223. Hans-Henning Schröder: Lebendige Verbindung mit den Massen. Sowjetische Gesellschaftspolitik in der Ära Chruščev, in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34 (1986) 4, 523–560, here p. 558. Donald Filtzer: Die Chruschtschow-Ära. Entstalinisierung und die Grenzen der Reform in der UdSSR, 1953–1964, Mainz 1995, p. 42. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 341 f.; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, pp. 122–126. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 343 f. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 551: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum 1961, Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, l. 1. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 185: Fevral’skiy Plenum 1956, Protokol No. 1, l. 4. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 549: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum 1961, Protokol No. 1, l. 8 f. RGANI, d. 2, op. 1, d. 557: Martovskiy Plenum 1962, Materialy k protokolu, l. 97. Ponomarenko in: Kumanev, Ryadom so Stalinym, pp. 120 f. See all files under the title ‘repliki’, RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 44 (July 1953), d. 60 (September 1953), d. 88 (March 1954) etc., the last being d. 742 (July 1964). RGANI, f. 2, op. 1 1, d. 742: Repliki po vystupleniyam, vypisannyye iz stenografii zasedaniy Plenuma 10–15.2.1964 g, l. 4. Ibid., l. 7, l. 13. Ibid., l. 72. Ibid., l. 73. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 744: Iyul’skiy Plenum, 11.07.1964 g., Protokol No. 8, l. 4–7. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 747: Iyul’skiy Plenum 1964, Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, l. 1. Ibid., l. 2. Ibid. Ibid., l. 21. Ibid., l. 3. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 204. Fursenko, Prezidium TsK KPSS, vol. 1, p. 672. Bezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 3, p. 431. Cit. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 201. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 747, l. 13, 16. Ibid., l. 16. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 1035. Cit. RGASPI, f. 666: Petr Efimovich Shelest, op. 1, d. 26: Avtobiograficheskiye zametki 1964–1966, l. 14. Cit. ibid., l. 14. Kaul’, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 74; Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 1035. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 226. V.V. Grishin: Katastrofa. Ot Chrushcheva do Gorbacheva, Moscow 1996, p. 36.

Notes

401

420 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 354; Mlechin claims, however, that Brezhnev kept a list of everyone he had spoken to; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 29. 421 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 356. 422 Fedor Burlatsky: Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring. The Era of Khrushchev through the Eyes of his Adviser, New York 1988, p. 207; Fedor Burlatskiy: Brezhnev i krusheniye ottepeli, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 102–122, here p. 105. 423 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 193. 424 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 207; Burlatskiy, Brezhnev i krusheniye ottepeli, p. 105. 425 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 207. 426 Ibid. 427 See also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 154. 428 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 201; Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 351. 429 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 210. 430 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 375. 431 Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 1035. 432 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 185–191. 433 Ibid., p. 191. 434 Ibid., p. 194. 435 Ibid., p. 198–203. 436 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 351 f. 437 Ibid., p. 352. 438 Ibid. 439 RGASPI, f. 666, op. 1, d. 9: Rabochiye zapisi P.E. Shelesta, l. 21. 440 Ibid. 441 ‘Rabochaya protokol’naya zapis’ zasedaniya prezidiuma TsK KPSS, 25.–26.9.1964 g,’ in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 140–149. 442 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 214. 443 RGASPI, f. 666, op. 1, d. 9, l. 18; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 215. 444 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 211. 445 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 356 446 Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, p. 1033; Zapis’ besedy A.I. Mikoyana s V.I. Galyukovym, sdelannaya S.N. Khrushchevym, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 154–160; Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 354 f. 447 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 355; Anastas Mikoyan: Tak bylo. Razmyshleniya o minuvshem, Moscow 1999, pp. 614 f. 448 Mikoyan, Tak bylo, p. 615. 449 Iz rechi L.I. Brezhneva na torzhestvennom zasedanii v Berline, posvyashchennom 15-letiyu so dnya obrazovaniya GDR, 6.10.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 177 f.; Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 357. 450 In order to formally legitimize this meeting too, those present composed, as members of the Presidium, a resolution on its content, outlining that Brezhnev, Kosygin, Suslov and Podgorny should immediately contact Khrushchev by telephone and call him back to Moscow to deal with the unsolvable issues. However, the text was presumably only drafted on 12 October: Postanovleniye Prezidiuma TsK KPSS ‘O voznikshikh voprosakh po povodu predstoyashchego plenuma TsK KPSS i razrabotok perspektivnogo narodnokhozyaystvennogo plana na novyy period’, 12.10.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 181 f. 451 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 360. 452 Ibid.

402

Notes

453 Cit. Mikoyan, Tak bylo, p. 615. 454 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 362; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 225. 455 Cit. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 225.

Chapter 5: The Caring General Secretary, or Collective Leadership as Theatre 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 648; Edward Crankshaw: Khrushchev. A Career, New York 1966, pp. 279, 286. Doklad prezidiuma TsK KPSS na Oktyabr’skom Plenume TsK KPSS (Variant) [ne pozdneye 13.10.1964 g.], in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 185 ff., 196 ff. Ibid., pp. 182 f. Ibid., p. 183. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 231. Rabochaya protokol’naya zapis’ zasedaniya prezidiuma TsK KPSS 13–14.10.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 217. Doklad prezidiuma TsK KPSS, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 183. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 363. Proyekt vystupleniya L.I. Brezhneva na zasedanii prezidiuma TsK KPSS [13.10.1964 g], in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 227. Vystupleniye L.I. Brezhneva na zasedanii prezidiuma TsK KPSS [ne pozdneye 14.10.1964 g.], in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 228 f. Rabochaya protokol’naya zapis’ zasedaniya prezidiuma, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 226. Cit. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 369. Zayavleniye N.S. Khrushcheva v TsK KPSS ob osvobozhdenii ot zanimaemykh dolzhnostey, 14.10.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 230. Kak snimali Khrushcheva. Materialy Plenuma TsK KPSS, Oktyabr’ 1964 g., in: Istoricheskiy arkhiv (1993) 1, pp. 3–19, here p. 12. Ibid., p. 11. Nepravlennaya stenogramma Oktyabr’skogo (1964 g.) Plenuma TsK KPSS, 14.10.1964, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 236. Tellingly, the situation was falsified slightly in the minutes, which state that Brezhnev asked how they should proceed and that a voice from the plenum suggested not opening the floor for discussion. Protokol No. 9 zasedaniya Plenuma TsK KPSS ot 14.10.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 250. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 369; Nepravlennaya stenogramma Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 232–239. Postanovleniye prezidiuma TsK KPSS ‘O material’nom obespechenii t. Khrushcheva N.S.’, 22.10.1964 g. and 15.12.1964, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 303 f., 437; cf. also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 38. Memuary Nikity Sergeyevicha Khrushcheva: Vstrecha s Adenauerom, in: Voprosy istorii (1993) 9, pp. 73–103, 73–78, here p. 78. Nepravlennaya stenogramma Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 235; RGANI, f. 3, op. 22, d. 12: Prezidium TsK KPSS – rabota postanovleniya Plenumov i Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i materialy po voprosam organizatsii raboty prezidiuma, 13.10.1952–16.9.1965 g., l. 93.

Notes

403

21 However, the minutes also contain the entry ‘Polyanskiy’, crossed out and replaced with ‘Podgorny’. Nepravlennaya stenogramma Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 237 f. 22 Khrushchev was not officially deposed as chairman of the Council of Ministers by the Supreme Soviet until 9 December 1964. Stenogramma pervogo sovmestnogo zasedaniya Soveta soyuza i Soveta natsional’nostey pyatoy sessii Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR shestogo sozyva, 9.12.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 436. 23 Nepravlennaya stenogramma Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 238. 24 Ibid., p. 239. 25 Nepravlennaya stenogramma zasedaniya Plenuma TsK KPSS, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 363–368. 26 RGASPI, f. 84, op. 3, d. 55: Stenogramma zasedaniya Prezidiuma TsK KPSS – obsuzhdeniye voprosa ob osvobozhdenii Mikoyana ot obyazannostey predsedatelya prezidiuma Verkhognogo soveta, l. 1; RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 806: Protokol No. 13 Plenuma TsK KPSS, 6.12.1965 g., l. 14; d. 807: Materialy k protokolu, l. 20. 27 Mikoyan, Tak bylo, p. 627. 28 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 806, l. 19, 65. 29 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 785: Stenogramma pyatovo zasedaniya Plenuma TsK KPSS, 26.03.1965 g., l. 110; d. 787: Protokol No. 12 zasedaniya Plenuma TsK KPSS, 27.–29.9.1965 g., l. 17. 30 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 3: Stenogramma Aprel’skogo Plenuma, 8.4.1966 g., l. 11; d. 44: Tret’ye zasedaniye Dekabr’skogo Plenuma 1966 g., l. 102. 31 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 94: Stenogramma chetvertogo zasedaniya Aprel’skogo Plenuma 1968, l. 71 f. 32 Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 79. 33 Dokuchaev, Moskva. Kreml’. Ochrana, p. 172. 34 Richard S. Wortman: Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I, Princeton 1995, p. 4. 35 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, pp. 5–66, 113, 204, 254. 36 Benno Ennker: Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion, Cologne 1997, p. 89; Robert Service: Lenin. Eine Biographie, Munich 2000, p. 32; Frederick C. Corney: Telling October. Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ithaca 2004, p. 21. 37 Ethan Pollock: Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton 2006, p. 219. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya Noyabr’skogo Plenuma, 16.11.1981 g., l. 67. 38 Jörg Baberowski: Der Feind ist überall. Stalinismus im Kaukasus, Munich 2003; I.V. Stalin: Werke, vol. 13, Berlin 1955, p. 35. 39 V.I. Lenin: Krizis partii [19 January 1921], in: idem: Izbrannyye proizvedeniya v 2kh tomakh, vol. 2, Moscow 1935, pp. 450–457; cf. Manfred Hildermeier: Die Russische Revolution 1905–1921, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 293. 40 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 495. 41 Cf. also G.Ch. Shakhnazarov: S vozhdyami i bez nikh, Moscow 2001, p. 231. 42 RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1: XXIII s”ezd KPSS 1966 stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, otchetnyy doklad L.I. Brezhneva, 29.3.1966 g., l. 228; see also Tompson, The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, p. 22. 43 RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1, l. 231. 44 Ibid., l. 233, 249. 45 Ibid., l. 229. 46 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 5.

404

Notes

47 Skilling/Griffith, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics; Rigby, The Soviet Leadership; idem: How Strong is the Leader?; Willerton, Patronage Networks and Coalition Building; idem, Patronage and Politics in the USSR. 48 Barbara A. Misztal: Trust in Modern Societies. The Search for the Bases of Social Order, Cambridge 1996, p. 104. 49 Ibid., p. 106. 50 Nepravlennaya stenogramma zasedaniya Plenuma TsK KPSS, 16.11.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 362 f., and all subsequent plenums until 1982. 51 Ibid., p. 367, and all subsequent plenums until 1982. 52 Aleksandr Shelepin: Istoriya – uchitel’ surovyy, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Material k biografii, pp. 230–247, here p. 236. 53 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 109. 54 Nepravlennaya stenogramma zasedaniya Plenuma TsK KPSS, 16.11.1964 g., in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 365. 55 Ibid., p. 366. 56 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 549: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum 1961 g., Protokol No. 1, l. 8–9. 57 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 787: Sentyabr’skiy Plenum 1965 g., Protokol No. 12, l. 19; f. 2, op. 1, d. 809: Stenogramma vtorogo zasedaniya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma 1965 g., l. 66; f. 2, op. 1, d. 820: Stenogramma zasedaniya Martovskogo Plenuma 1966 g., l. 2; f. 2, op. 3, d. 21: Stenograficheskiy otchet Mayskogo Plenuma 1966 g., l. 308. 58 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 185: Fevral’skiy Plenum 1956 g., Protokol No. 1, l. 4. 59 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 773: Materialy k protokolu No. 11. Stenogramma zasedaniya komissii po vyrabotke proyekta postanovleniya Plenuma TsK ‘O neotlozhnykh merakh dal’neyshego razvitiya sel’skogo khozyaystva SSSR’, 25.3.1965 g., l. 23. 60 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 791: Materialy k protokolu No. 12, l. 113. 61 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 105: Stenogramma zasedaniya komissii po podgotovke proyekta postanovleniya Plenuma TsK po dokladu tov. Brehneva ‘Ob aktual’nykh problemakh mezhdunarodnogo polozheniya i o bor’be KPSS za splochennost’ mirovogo kommunisticheskogo dvizheniya’, l. 58. 62 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 25, d. 4: Ob otpuske L.I. Brezhneva, Politbyuro 22.6.1979 g., l. 1. 63 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 550: Stenogramma zasedaniya Fevral’skogo Plenuma 20.2.1981 g., l. 34. 64 Avtorkhanov, Sila i bessiliye, p. 99. 65 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 249. 66 Burlackiy, Brezhnev i krusheniye ottepeli, p. 113. 67 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 148. 68 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 222. 69 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 144. 70 Ibid., p. 147. 71 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, pp. 241, 247. 72 Ibid., p. 249. 73 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 258. 74 Ibid., p. 163. 75 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 790: Materialy k protokolu No. 12, l. 1. 76 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 820: Stenogramma zasedaniya, 26.3.1966 g., l. 2. 77 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 70: Stenograficheskiy otchet Iyunskogo Plenuma, 20–21.6.1967 g., l. 200. 78 Cf. e.g. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330 : Zapiski K. Chernenko, B. Ponomareva, K. Katusheva, A. Aleksandrova, K. Bogolyubova po voprosam organizatsii tekushchey raboty L. Brezhneva, 13.8.1971–6.7.1979 g., l. 32; d. 312: Zamechaniya tov. Andropova k vystupleniyu na Politbyuro, l. 149.

Notes 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

405

RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 488: Stenogramma vtorogo zasedaniya, 27.11.1978 g., l. 76 f. Mohammed Heikal: The Road to Ramadan, New York 1975, p. 94. Ibid. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112693, BRESHNEW, p. 5. Fedor Burlatskiy: Yuriy Andropov i aristokraty dukha, Moscow 2009, p. 188. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 258. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 201. Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh, p. 221. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 266. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 258. Anatoliy Chernyayev: Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, Moscow 1995, p. 258. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 754: Noyabr’skiy Plenum 1964 g., Protokol No. 10 zasedaniya 16.11.1964 g., l. 17. 92 Cf. Archie Brown: The Power of the General Secretary of the CPSU, in: idem (ed.): Political Leadership in the Soviet Union, Oxford 1989, pp. 135–157, here p. 149; Avtorkhanov, Sila i bessiliye, p. 11; Burlatskiy, Brezhnev i krusheniye ottepeli, pp. 102–122, 113; Alexander Jakowlew: Die Abgründe meines Jahrhunderts. Eine Autobiographie, Leipzig 2003, pp. 386. 93 Willerton, Patronage Networks and Coalition Building, p. 183; Michel Tatu: Power in the Kremlin. From Khrushchev’s Decline to Collective Leadership, London 1969, p. 455; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, pp. 253, 256. 94 Cf. also Hough, The Brezhnev Era, p. 6; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 490. 95 Cf. Brown, The Power of the General Secretary, p. 149. 96 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 216. 97 Jakowlew, Die Abgründe meines Jahrhunderts, p. 386. 98 M.S. Gorbachev: Zhizn’ i reformy, 2 vols, vol. 1, Moscow 1995, p. 181. 99 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 387. 100 Ibid., pp. 164, 192. 101 Ibid., pp. 169. 102 Medvedev, Fars s primes’yu tragedii, p. 139. 103 Arbatov, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, p. 85. 104 Mitrokhin, Russische Partei, p. 97 105 Cit. Burlatskiy, Brezhnev i krusheniye ottepeli, p. 115. 106 Nikolay Egorychev: U nas byli raznyye vzglyady.’ Iz interv’yu korrespondentu ‘Ogon’ka’ L. Pleshakovu, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 190–204, here p. 204. 107 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 216; Arbatov, Zatyanuvsheyesya vyzdorovleniye, p. 182; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 108. 108 RGANI, f. 3, op. 2, d. 12, l. 95: Vypiska iz protokola No. 206 zasedaniya Prezidiuma ot 15.7.1965 g. 109 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 122; see also Mitrokhin, Russische Partei, p. 94. 110 Shelepin, Istoriya – uchitel’ surovyy, p. 238. 111 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 806: Dekabr’skiy Plenum 1965 g., Protokol No. 13, l. 13. 112 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 393 f. 113 Ibid., p. 392; Shelepin, Istoriya – uchitel’ surovyy, p. 234; Arbatov, Zatyanuvsheyesya vyzdorovleniye, p. 172. 114 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 394. 115 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 279. 116 Cit. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 408.

406

Notes

117 Shelepin, Istoriya – uchitel’ surovyy, p. 239. 118 Ibid. 119 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 79: Sentyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma utrennego zasedaniya, 26.9.1967 g., l. 144. 120 Shelepin, Istoriya – uchitel’ surovyy, p. 241. 121 Cit. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 398. 122 Ibid. 123 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 353: Aprel’skiy Plenum, stenogramma utrennego zasedaniya, 16.4.1975 g., l. 86. 124 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 518. 125 Ibid., p. 519. 126 Petr Shelest: On umel vesti apparatnyye igry a stranu zabrosil, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 216–230, here p. 222. 127 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 170. 128 Anatoliy Prokhorov: Ne tol’ko patsient, in: N. Baybakov et al. (eds): Kosygin. Vyzov prem’era, Moscow 2012, pp. 229–238, here p. 236. Other versions of what caused the accident and his rescue are presented by: Abrasimov, Vospominaya proshedshiye gody, p. 268; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 518; N.K. Baybakov: Sobraniye sochineniy v 10 tomakh, vol. 4: Sorok let v pravitel’stve, Moscow 2011, p. 254. 129 Shelest, On umel vesti apparatnyye igry, p. 224. 130 Prokhorov, Ne tol’ko patsient, p. 237; Abrasimov, Vospominaya proshedshiye gody, p. 268. 131 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 653 f., 664, 675, entries of 31 July, 1, 15, 29, 30 August 1976. 132 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 518; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 684 f., entries of 13 and 14 September 1976. 133 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, reference code 112753: 1975–1976, Stellung Breschnews, Bonn, den 3. September 1976, Stellung Kossygins, no fol. number. 134 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 331: Stenogramma zasedaniya Iyul’skogo Plenuma, 24.07.1974 g., l. 25. 135 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 489: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya Noyabr’skogo Plenuma, 27.11.1978 g., l. 4. 136 Group B = light and consumer goods industry. 137 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 489: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya Noyabr’skogo Plenuma, 27.11.1978 g., l. 4. 138 Ibid., l. 3. 139 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 488: Stenogramma vtorogo zasedaniya Noyabr’skogo Plenuma, 27.11.1978 g., l. 77. 140 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 524. 141 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537: Stenogramma zasedaniya Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, 21.10.1980 g., l. 157–159. 142 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 534: Protokol No. 11 Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma 1980 g., l. 6; d. 535: Postanovleniya, l. 10. 143 Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 524 f. 144 Shelest, On umel vesti apparatnyye igry, p. 225. 145 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 429: Mayskiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 24.5.1977 g., l. 40–42 146 Ibid., l. 115. 147 Cit. Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 91; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 222. 148 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 415: Protokol No. 15 Mayskogo Plenuma, 24.5.1977 g., l. 1, 7, 10. 149 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 791, entry of 16 June 1977.

Notes

407

150 Niklas Luhmann: Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität, 4th edition, Stuttgart 2009, pp. 23, 27. 151 Ibid., p. 22. 152 See also Martin Hartmann: Die Praxis des Vertrauens, Berlin 2011, pp. 115 f. 153 Ibid. 154 Piotr Sztompka: Trust. A Sociological Theory, Cambridge 1999, p. 117. 155 Ibid., pp. 118. 156 See also Rigby, Political Elites, p. 229. 157 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 217; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 279; Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. 1, p. 180; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 179, 191. 158 Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh, p. 232. 159 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 980: Dnevnikovyye i rabochiye zapisi L. Brezhneva 1967 g., l. 7ob., 16, 21. 160 Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh, p. 232. 161 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 194. 162 Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 84. 163 Medvedev, Vo vtorom eshelone, p. 26; idem, Fars s primes’yu tragedii, p. 128. 164 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 199. 165 Zapis’ vystuplenia chlena prezidiuma i sekretarya TsK KPSS tov. M.A. Suslova na Plenume Tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS, in: Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 256. 166 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 120. 167 Ibid., p. 48; Dornberg, Masks of Power, p. 18; Dokuchaev, Moskva. Kreml’. Okhrana, p. 181. 168 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 129. 169 Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 113; Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 221. 170 Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, p. 261. 171 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 266. 172 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 253. 173 Ibid., pp. 157 f., 233; Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh, p. 228; Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, p. 262. 174 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 266. 175 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 86. 176 Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 107. 177 Ibid., pp. 132 f.; Thatcher, Brezhnev as Leader, p. 29. 178 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 26. 179 Ibid., pp. 28 f. 180 Ibid., pp. 24 f. 181 Aleksandr Bovin: Kurs na stabil’nost’ porodil zastoy, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 92–102, here p. 92; Yuriy Churbanov: Vse kak bylo, in: ibid., pp. 353–370, here p. 369. 182 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 82. 183 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 199. 184 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 750 f., entry of 10 January 1977; Aleksandr Danilovich Igmand: Ya odeval Brezhneva, ed. by Anastasiya Yushkova, Moscow 2008, p. 70; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 75. 185 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 755, entry of 21 January 1977; Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 87. 186 Igmand, Ya odeval, p. 70. 187 Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 82.

408

Notes

188 Churbanov, Moy test’, pp. 132 f.; Thatcher, Brezhnev as Leader, p. 29. 189 Igor’ Semenov: Tsarskiye okhoty vozhdey, in: Vse ob okhote v Kazakhstane, no. 2, February 2011, 26−27, here p. 27. 190 Ibid., 26. 191 Ibid. 192 GARF, f. R-7523, op. 78, d. 127, l. 12; f. R-7523, op. 83, d. 19, l. 3. 193 Semenov, Carskiye okhoty vozhdey, p. 27. 194 Shelepin, Istoriya – uchitel’ surovoy, p. 239. 195 Semenov, Carskiye okhoty vozhdey, p. 27; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 77. 196 Interview with Dr Wilhelm Osing, 30 December 2020. 197 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1017, Ambassadeur Seydoux, Moscou, 20 May 1972, pour le ministre et le sécretaire générale seulement. 198 Genadiy Voronov: ‘Oshibki s Brezhnevym my sebe ne proshchayem’. Iz besedy s Yu. Aksyutinym, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 181–190, here p. 188. 199 Nikolay Baybakov: Bez glubokogo analiza i vzveshennogo podkhoda, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 247–252, here p. 248. 200 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, pp. 157 f. 201 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 268. 202 Anatoliy Kovalev: Midovtsy i genseki [memuary], in: Novoye vremya, 1993, no. 37, 42–46, here p. 46; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 192; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i Dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 661 f., entries of 10 and 12 August 1976. 203 Churbanov, Vse kak bylo, p. 359; Baybakov, Bez glubokogo analiza, p. 248; Prokhorov, Ne tol’ko patsient, p. 235. 204 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 708, entry of 22 October 1976. 205 Ibid., p. 717, entry of 13 November 1976; see also p. 719, entry of 12 December 1976. 206 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 69. 207 Churbanov, Moy test’, p. 88; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 70, 77; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 308. 208 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 684, entry of 11 September 1976. 209 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 79. 210 Ibid., p. 69. 211 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112693, BRESHNEW, p. 5. 212 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 809, l. 50. 213 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 303–306. 214 Dokuchaev, Moskva. Kreml’. Okhrana, p. 175. 215 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 800, entry of 12 July 1977; see also p. 789, entry of 12 June 1977. 216 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 88 f. 217 Ibid., p. 90. 218 Evgeniy Karasayev i dr.: Vospominaniya sotrudnikov okhrany, here: Gennadiy Pavlyuk, voditel’ A.N. Kosygina s 1970 po 1980 gody, in: Baybakov, Kosygin, pp. 224–229, here pp. 227 f. 219 Vishnevskaya, Galina, p. 162. 220 Velikzhanina, Preyemnikom Brezhneva. 221 Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 128 f., 131 f. 222 Vishnevskaya, Galina, p. 304. 223 Larisa Kaftan: Taynaya lyubovnitsa Brezhneva, in: Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 1 March 2002, no. 38, 27. 224 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 397. 225 Mlechin Brezhnev, p. 92.

Notes

409

226 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 397; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 91. 227 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 483. 228 See also Dzhermen Gvishani: Chelovek, kotoryy byl mne dorog, in: Baybakov, Kosygin, pp. 174–210, here p. 206; Karasayev, Vospominaniya, here Aleksey Sal’nikov, sotrudnk okhrany A.N. Kosygina, p. 228. 229 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 258. 230 Churbanov, Vse kak bylo, p. 359. 231 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 497. 232 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 53; Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 159. 233 Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, pp. 474 f. 234 Ibid., p. 428. 235 Igmand, Ya odeval, p. 60. 236 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 63, 639, 702, 780, entries of 2 and 26 June, 9 October 1976 and 3 May 1977. 237 Igmand, Ya odeval, p. 15. 238 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 84; Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 145. 239 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 771, entry of 11 April 1977. 240 Velikzhanina, Preyemnikom Brezhneva. 241 Ibid. 242 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 689, entry of 18 September 1976. 243 Ibid., pp. 664, 673, entries of 15 and 26 August 1976. 244 Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 156. 245 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 810, 826, entries of 28 August 1977 and 3 August 1977. 246 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 42 f.

Chapter 6: Live and Let Live, or ‘Everyone should be able to live and work in peace’ 1 2 3 4

Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 436. Aleksandr Bovin, cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 436. Dokuchayev, Moskva. Kreml’. Okhrana, p. 181. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 274; D. Granin: Sobstvennoye mneniye, rasskaz, in: Novyy mir, no. 8, August 1956, 129–137. 5 George Breslauer: On the Adaptability of Soviet Welfare-State Authoritarianism, Amherst 1978; Stefan Plaggenborg/Galina Ivanova (eds): Entstalinisierung als Wohlfahrt. Sozialpolitik in der Sowjetunion 1953–1970, Frankfurt am Main 2015; Stefan Plaggenborg: Experiment Moderne. Der sowjetische Weg, Frankfurt am Main 2006, pp. 223 ff.; Lukas Mücke: Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956–1972, Stuttgart 2013. 6 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 43, entry of 15 October 1964. 7 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 42. 8 RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1, l. 144. 9 Ibid., l. 181. 10 Ibid., l. 214. 11 James R. Millar: The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism, in: Terry L. Tompson/Richard Sheldon (eds): Soviet Society and Culture. Essays in Honor of

410

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

Notes Vera S. Dunham, Boulder 1988, pp. 3–19; Linda Cook: The Soviet ‘Social Contract’ and Gorbachev’s Reforms, in: Soviet Studies 44 (1992) 1, 37–56; Vladimir Shlapentokh: Standard of Living and Popular Discontent, in: Michael Ellman/Vladimir Kontorovich (eds): The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insider’s History, Armonk 1998; Wolfgang Teckenberg: Wirtschaftsreformen in der UdSSR aus soziologischer Sicht, in: Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung (1985) 2, 188–195; Stephen White: Economic Performance and Communist Legitimacy, in: World Politics 38 (1986) 3, 462–482. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 215: Protokol No. 15 Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 7.12.1970 g., l. 41. Ibid. Ibid., l. 42. Ibid. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 227: Stenogramma Martovskogo Plenuma, 22.3.1971 g., l. 16. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 282: Stenogramma zasedaniya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 18.12.1972 g., l. 85. Ibid. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 317: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 10.12.1973 g., l. 44. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366: Stenogramma zasedaniya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 1.12.1975 g., l. 46. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 380: Stenogramma Fevral’skogo Plenuma, 20.2.1976 g., l. 14. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 55. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya Iyul’skogo Plenuma, 3.7.1978 g., l. 5 f. Ibid., l. 6. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537, l. 46. Ibid., l. 51. Ibid., l. 51 f. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 550: Stenogramma zasedaniya Fevral’skogo Plenuma, 20.2.1981 g., l. 21. See also RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587: Stenogramma utrennego zasedaniya Mayskogo Plenuma, 24.5.1982 g., l. 5. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 980, l. 55, entry of 14 September 1967. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 504, entry of 12 May 1972. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331: Zapiski pomoshchnikov A. Aleksandrova, A. Blatova, E. Samoteykina i G. Tsukanova 1963–1979 gg., l. 67, 76 f. Interview with Vladimir Musael’yan, 16 March 2016. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 489, l. 42. Mücke, Altersrentenversorgung, pp. 81, 112. RGANI, f. 3, op. 28, d. 9: Poryadok ustanovleniya pensiy, 9.1.1964–4.3.1966 g., l. 69, l. 90. RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 139: Zapiska Brezhneva o predstavlenii proyekta obrashchеniya TsK KPSS, SM SSSR i VTsSPS, l. 28 ff. Stefan Plaggenborg: Lebensverhältnisse und Alltagsprobleme, in: idem (ed.): Handbuch der Geschichte Russlands, vol. 5: 1945–1991. Vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs bis zum Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion, 2nd half-volume, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 786–848, here p. 790. RGANI, f. 3, op. 28, d. 9, l. 204, 207. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 979, l. 82–85. RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1, l. 193–197. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 44, l. 101. Ibid., l. 100.

Notes

411

43 Ibid. 44 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 78: Protokol No. 6, zasedaniye Sentyabr’skogo Plenuma, 26.9.1967 g., l. 10–14. 45 Ibid., l. 14. 46 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 277. 47 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 980, l. 160, entry of 11–12 December 1967. 48 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 78, l. 15. 49 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 230: Martovskiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 22.3.1971 g., l. 46. 50 Ibid., l. 17–20. 51 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 47. 52 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum 25.–26.10.1976 g., stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, utrennego, l. 55. 53 Ibid., l. 56. 54 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 230, l. 18. 55 RGANI, f. 2. op. 3, d. 550: Fevral’skiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 20.2.1981 g., l. 27. 56 Anatoliy Kovalev: Midovtsy i genseki. Diplomaticheskiye novelly, in: Novoye vremya, 1993, no. 38, 42–44, here p. 43. 57 Ibid. 58 Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 389. 59 Ibid., p. 166. 60 Kozlov, Otdykhay, strana, p. 10. 61 Mücke, Altersrentenversorgung, p. 277. 62 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 789: Materialy k protokolu No. 12 Sentyabr’skogo Plenuma 1965 g., l. 81. 63 Cf. also Plaggenborg, Lebensverhältnisse, pp. 792 f. 64 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 19. 65 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 47. 66 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 431, 451. 67 Sergey Novikov: Bol’shaya istoricheskaya entsiklopediya, Moscow 2003, p. 476. 68 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 780: Martovskiy Plenum, stenogramma pervogo i vtorogo zasedaniya, 24.3.1965 g., l. 6. 69 Ibid., l. 9 f. 70 Ibid., l. 47, 54. 71 Ibid., l. 14. 72 Ibid., l. 47; cf. Zhores Medvedev: Vzlet i padeniye Lysenko. Istoriya biologicheskoy diskussii v SSSR (1929–1966), Moscow 1993; Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 202; Valeriy Soyfer: Vlast’ i nauka. Razgrom kommunistami genetiki v SSSR, 4th edition, Moscow 2002, p. 804. 73 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 780, l. 52, 54. 74 Ibid., l. 58, 64. 75 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 782: Martovskiy Plenum, stenogramma pyatogo zasedaniya, l. 75 f. 76 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 19. 77 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 44: Dekabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma tret’ego zasedaniya, 12– 13.12.1966 g., l. 99. 78 Cf. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 501. 79 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 21: Stenograficheskiy otchet Mayskogo Plenuma, 25–27.5.1966 g., l. 298. 80 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 21, l. 295. On Brezhnev’s relationship with Matskevich, cf.: Gavrilyuk, Teper’ muzhik skazhet, pp. 262 f.

412 81 82 83 84 85 86

Notes

One pud is a Russian measurement equivalent to 16.38 kilograms. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 121: Protokol No. 9 Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, 30–31.10.1968 g., l. 26. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 121, l. 25. Ibid., l. 17, 26 f. Ibid., l. 32. See also the regulations in RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 313: Postanovleniye Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 10.–11.12.1973 g., l. 1. 87 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981: Rabochiye zapisi v bloknote, l. 1–36, entry prior to 12 February 1968. 88 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 277. 89 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 121, l. 23. 90 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 123: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, 30.10.1968 g., l. 14. 91 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 125: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma tret’ego zasedaniya, 31.10.1968 g., l. 127. 92 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 159, l. 143. 93 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 296: Aprel’skiy Plenum, stenogramma tret’ego zasedaniya, 27.4.1973 g., l. 1 f., 9 f. 94 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 159, l. 143 f. 95 Cit. Elena Zubkova: Russia after the War. Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–57, Armonk, New York, 1998, p. 176. 96 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 159, l. 143. 97 Ibid., l. 144. 98 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 296, l. 1 f., 9 f. 99 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 276, l. 127–132, entry of 21 November 1969. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 186: Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya Iyul’skogo Plenuma, 2.7.1970 g., l. 11. 103 Ibid., l. 14. 104 Ibid., l. 17. 105 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 318: Dekabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma vtorogo zasedaniya, 10.12.1973 g., l. 46. 106 Ibid., l. 33. 107 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 186, l. 18. 108 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 215: Protokol Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 7.12.1970 g., l. 40. 109 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251: L.I. Brezhnev, doklad: ‘O mezhdunarodnoy deyatel’nosti TsK KPSS posle 24 s”ezda’, l. 1, 4; d. 282, l. 84. 110 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 533, entry of 13 October 1972. 111 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 324: Zapiski, informatsii, spravki sekretarey TsK KPSS, sel’sko-chozyaystvennogo otdela TsK KPSS, ministerstv i vedomstv po voprosam sel’skogo khozyaystva s rezolyutsiyami i avtografami L. Brezhneva, l. 103, 111, 133, 137, 144 f. 112 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 324, l. 211. 113 Ibid., l. 189. 114 Ibid., l. 206–208. 115 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 570, entry of 24 July 1973; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 513. 116 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 324, l. 211. 117 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 49.

Notes

413

118 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 333: Zapiski pomoshchnika General’nogo sekretar’ya V. Golikova na imya L. Brezhneva, 1974–1982, l. 52. 119 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 501. 120 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 403, l. 16. 121 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 332: Zapiski pomoshchnika Genseka TsK KPSS V. Golikova na imya L. Brezhneva s rezolyutsiyami i avtografami L. Brezhneva, 1965–1973 gg., l. 140. 122 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 502. 123 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 3, 7, 12. 124 Ibid., l. 7 f. 125 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 489, l. 49. 126 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 915 f., entry of 20 June 1978; see also pp. 964, 970, entries of 20 August 1979 and 18 September 1979. 127 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 513: Noyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 27.11.1979 g., l. 2; d. 534, l. 157. 128 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 534, l. 157. 129 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. 1, p. 27; cf. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 987, l. 1–27ob., entry of 28 November 1978. 130 RGANI, f 80, op. 1, d. 320: Zapiski, informatsii otdelov TsK KPSS […]: o partiynom stroitel’stve, l. 219. 131 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 519: Vystupleniye Brezhneva na Oktyabr’skom Plenume, 21.10.1980, l. 10. 132 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 59 f. 133 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587: Mayskiy Plenum, stenogramma utrennego zasedaniya, 24.5.1982 g., l. 5 f. 134 Ibid., l. 8. 135 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 404, l. 125; d. 570, l. 56. 136 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 57. 137 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 333, l. 41. 138 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168: Protokol No. 12 Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 15.12.1969 g., l. 30; f. 80, op. 1, d. 332, l. 138; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 513. 139 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 753, entry of 12 January 1977. 140 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 146: Stenogramma zasedanya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 9.12.1968 g., l. 63. 141 Ibid., l. 63. 142 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168, l. 10. 143 Ibid., l. 49–51. 144 Ibid., l. 51. 145 RGANI, f. 80, op. 332, l. 57. 146 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 50. 147 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 452: Stenogramma zasedaniya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 13.12.1977 g., l. 70. 148 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 838, entry of 6 October 1977. 149 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 9. 150 Ibid., l. 28. 151 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587: Mayskiy Plenum, stenogramma utrennego zasedaniya, 24.5.1982 g., l. 12. 152 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 72. 153 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 312: Doklad, vystupleniya i soobshcheniya L. Brezhneva na zasedaniyakh PB TsK KPSS […] l. 109. 154 Plaggenborg, Experiment Moderne, p. 241.

414 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

162 163 164 165 166 167

168

169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179

180 181 182 183 184 185 186

Notes RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 489, l. 48; see also d. 513, l. 64; d. 537, l. 52. Cit. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 345. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 332, l. 162 ff. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 324, l. 13, 15. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 5; see also f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 62. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 324, l. 84, 87. Intelligence Memorandum, Washington, September 13, 1972, The View from the Kremlin Three Months after the Summit, https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v15/d45, accessed 2.6.2017; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 21, 185. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 953, entry of 16 May 1979. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 329, l. 74, 76. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1015, entry of 1 August 1980. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587, l. 16. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537, l. 57. Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, pp. 455 f.; David Lane: Soviet Economy and Society, Oxford 1985; Vladimir Kontorovich: Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform, in: Soviet Studies 40 (1988) 2, 308–316. D.V. Schwartz (ed.): Resolutions and Discussions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Toronto 1982: On Improving Industrial Management, pp. 49–56; Teckenberg, Wirtschaftsreformen in der UdSSR; Gertrude E. Schroeder: The Soviet Economy on a Treadmill of ‘Reforms’, in: Soviet Economy in a Time of Change: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Washington, D.C. 1979, pp. 312–366. Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, p. 112; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 494. RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 207, l. 20. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 789, l. 72. Ibid., l. 78. Ibid., l. 79. Ibid., l. 81. Ibid., l. 83, 91, 92. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 790: Materialy k protokolu No. 12: Stenogramma zasedaniya komissii, l. 11. Ibid., l. 108 ff. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 804: Sentyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma chetvertogo zasedaniya, 29.9.1965 g., l. 36 ff. Rossiyskiy Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Ekonomiki (henceforth: RGAE), f. 4372, op. 66: Gosudarstvennyy planovoy komitet pri Sovmine 1965–1966 gg., d. 3: Materialy k protokolu pervogo zasedaniya Gosplana, 19.3.1965 g., l. 170–173. RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 796: Materialy k protokolu No. 12, l. 33. Ibid., l. 19 f., 41. See also Natalya Chernyshova: Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, London, New York 2013. RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 11: Aprel’skiy Plenum, stenogramma odinnadtsatogo zasedaniya, 5.4.1966 g., l. 38. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 18: Prikazy po Gosplanu, l. 2. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 431: Dokladnyye zapiski rukovodstvu o bytovym obsluzhivanii, l. 3 f. See Plaggenborg, Lebensverhältnisse, p. 817.

Notes

415

187 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 430: Porucheniye TsK KPSS, Sovmin, VSNKh i rukovodstva Gosplana o razvitii obsluzhivaniya naseleniya i materialy po vypolneniyu porucheniy 1965 g., l. 3–5. 188 Ibid., l. 39. 189 Plaggenborg, Experiment Moderne, p. 241. 190 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 230, l. 20. 191 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537, l. 47; see also Plaggenborg, Experiment Moderne, p. 241. 192 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537, l. 57. 193 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 55. 194 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 321: Zapiski, informatsii sekretarey TsK KPSS, Sovmina, Gosplana, Minfina, G. Tsukanova, l. 33 f. 195 Ibid., l. 159, 188. 196 Ibid., l. 199–205. 197 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 312, l. 144. 198 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 513, l. 68. 199 Ibid. 200 RGANI, f. 5, op. 67, d. 368: Zapiski i spravki […] po zapisku GenSeka v chasti ulucheniya stilya i metodov raboty […], l. 10. 201 RGANI, f. 5, op. 59, d. 221: Zapiski, pis’ma, informatsionnyye soobshcheniya Otdela torgovli, l. 67. 202 Ibid., l. 55. 203 Ibid., l. 70. 204 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330. l. 5. 205 Sergey Zhuravlev et al.: Avtovaz mezhdu proshlym i budushchim. Istoriya Volzhskogo avtomobil’nogo zavoda, 1966–2005, Moscow 2006, p. 33; Luminita Gatejel: Appealing for a Car: Consumption Policies and Entitlement in the USSR, the GDR, and Romania, 1950s–1980s, in: Slavic Review 75 (2016) 1, 122–145. 206 RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 3: Materialy k protokolu, […] doklad Kosygina, l. 176. 207 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 809, l. 50. 208 Ibid. 209 Ibid. 210 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 789, l. 92. 211 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 45: Dekabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, 12.12.1966 g., l. 40. See also Zhuravlev, Avtovaz mezhdu proshlym i budushchim, p. 46. 212 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 980, l. 31. 213 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 112. 214 Zhuravlev, Avtovaz mezhdu proshlym i budushchim, p. 671; Lewis H. Siegelbaum: Cars for Comrades. The Life of the Soviet Automobile, Ithaca, NY, London 2008, p. 238. 215 Plaggenborg, Lebensverhältnisse, p. 819. 216 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 118. 217 Ibid., p. 119; Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 387, 401; Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, p. 251; Lyudmila Gvishani-Kosygina: Ob ottse, in: Baybakov, Kosygin, pp. 164–174, here p. 169. 218 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 140; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 497. 219 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 295: Stenogramma vtorogo zasedaniya Aprel’skogo Plenuma, 26.–27.4.1973 g., l. 17, 56–79. 220 See e.g. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 380: Stenogramma zasedaniya Fevral’skogo Plenuma, 20.2.1976 g., l. 30, 32.

416

Notes

221 Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, p. 98; RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 797: Sentyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma pervogo zasedaniya, 27.9.1965 g., l. 16 ff.; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 493. 222 Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, pp. 121, 252. 223 Abrasimov, Vospominaya proshedshiye gody, p. 266. 224 Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, p. 123. 225 Ibid., p. 126. 226 RGANI, f. 2, op. 1, d. 809, l. 38. 227 Ibid., l. 40. 228 Ibid., l. 42. 229 Abrasimov, Vospominaya proshedshiye gody, p. 266; Petr Rodionov: Kak nachinalsya zastoy. Iz zametok istorika partii. Izvorotlivaya, khitraya i lovkaya posredstvennost’, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 145–167, here p. 155; see also Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 503. 230 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 146. 231 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168, l. 36. 232 Ibid., l. 40–42. 233 Ibid., l. 43. 234 Ibid., l. 44. 235 Ibid. 236 Ibid., l. 45 f. 237 Ibid., l. 47. 238 Ibid., l. 47 f. 239 Ibid., l. 48. 240 Ibid., l. 53 f. 241 Ibid., l. 49, 54. 242 Ibid., l. 58. 243 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 146 f. 244 Ibid., p. 147. 245 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 2, p. 393. 246 Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (henceforth: AdsD), Depositum Egon Bahr, file 434: V.L. [Valeriy Lednev], Der Staatssekretär, Bonn, den 27. April 1970, Dem Bundeskanzler und Bundesminister, streng vertraulich, persönlich, no fol. number. 247 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Note pour M. le Président de la République, Paris, 17.9.1970, p. 5: Situation actuelle de l’Union Soviétique. 248 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 147. 249 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 240: Aprel’skiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 9.4.1971 g., l. 2–5. 250 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168, l. 59. 251 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 282, l. 104. 252 Ibid., l. 110. 253 Ibid., l. 88. 254 Ibid., l. 110. 255 Ibid. 256 Ibid., l. 112. 257 Ibid., l. 115 f. 258 Ibid., l. 100. 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid., l. 101. 261 Ibid., l. 95.

Notes 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287

288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307

417

Ibid., l. 97. Ibid., l. 86. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 317, l. 41 f. Ibid., l. 52. Ibid., l. 53. Ibid. Ibid., l. 56 f., 61. Ibid., l. 65. Ibid., l. 66 f. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 113. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 331: Stenogramma zasedaniya Iyul’skogo Plenuma, 24.7.1974 g., l. 25. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 342: Stenogramma zasedaniya Dekabr’skogo Plenuma, 16.12.1974 g., l. 191–195. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 61. Ibid. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 48. Ibid., l. 56. Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, pp. 124, 127. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 366, l. 56. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402, l. 61. Ibid., l. 67. Ibid., l. 62. Ibid., l. 70. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 452, l. 62. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402, l. 76. Ibid. RGANI, f. 5, op. 67, d. 67: Informatsii, spravki, […] o meropriyatiyakh po vypolneniyu postanovleniya Sekretariata ot 19.02.1974 g. […] o sovershenstvovanii stilya i metodov raboty part. i sov. organov, l. 25–27. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402, l. 65. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 513, l. 70. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537, l. 65. Ibid. Ibid. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 56. Ibid. Ibid., l. 61. Ibid., l. 63. Ibid., l. 70. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587, l. 10. Ibid., l. 19. Ibid., l. 23. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 45. Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 389. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 52. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 94, l. 68 f. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 73. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168, l. 47. Ibid., l. 59; see also d. 366, l. 58.

418 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323

324 325 326 327

328 329 330 331 332 333 334

Notes RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168, l. 59. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 186, l. 19. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 489, l. 50. Ibid. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 50. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 537, l. 57; see also d. 452, l. 75. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402, l. 79. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 452, l. 61. Ibid., l. 71. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 256. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 74. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 332, l. 176–178. Ibid., l. 179. RGANI, f. 5, op. 67, d. 371, l. 7–9, 37. Willerton, Patronage and Politics in the USSR, pp. 132–187. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 312: Zapiski i spravki otdelov TsK KPSS o khode vypolneniya postanovleniya TsK KPSS ot 20.2.1975 g. ‘O merakh po usileniyu bor’by s khishcheniyami i razbazirovaniyem sotsialisticheskoy sobstvennosti’, l. 1. Ibid., l. 2. Ibid., l. 3. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 74. RGANI, f. 5, op. 88, d. 72: Informatsiya TsK soyuznykh respublikov i spravka otdela ob itogakh obsuzhdeniya […] zakrytogo pis’ma TsK KPSS ‘Ob usilenii bor’by s khishcheniyami sotsialisticheskoy sobstvennosti, vzyatochnichestvom, skepulyatsiey’, 1981–1982 gg., l. 125. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 466. Luc Duhamel: The KGB Campaign against Corruption in Moscow, 1982–1987, Pittsburgh 2010, p. 73. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 463. Cit. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, o. 124; see also RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 11, dok. 134, l. 1. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 84. Ibid., p. 83. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Note pour M. le Président, Paris, 27.12.1972, p. 2.

Chapter 7: ‘Developed Socialism’, or Re-launching the Soviet Project? 1

2 3 4 5

L.I. Brezhnev: Pyat’desyat let velikikh pobed sotsializma, in: idem: Voprosy upravleniya еkonomikoy razvitogo sotsialisticheskogo obshchestva. Rechi, doklady, vystupleniya, Moscow 1976, p. 147; idem: Dela Lenina zhivet i pobezhdaet, in: ibid., p. 220; idem: Iz otchetnogo doklada TsK KPSS XXIV s”ezdu KPSS, in: ibid., pp. 277–279. Cf. also Joachim Zweynert: ‘Developed Socialism’ and Soviet Economic Thought in the 1970s and Early 1980s, in: Russian History 41 (2014), pp. 354–372. See also Mark Sandle: Brezhnev and Developed Socialism. The Ideology of Zastoy?, in: idem/Bacon, Brezhnev Reconsidered, pp. 165–188. Brezhnev, Pyat’desyat let velikikh pobed sotsializma, p. 147. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 320: Spravka o razvitom sotsialisticheskom obshchestve, napravlennaya na imya L.I. Brezhneva, ne raneye 4.1970 g, l. 59.

Notes 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

419

Ibid., l. 60. Ibid., l. 61–63. Ibid., l. 63. Ibid., l. 63 f. L.I. Brezhnev: O 50-letii SSSR, in: idem, Voprosy upravleniya, p. 380. L.I. Brezhnev: Resheniya XXIV s”ezda KPSS – boyevaya programma deyatel’nosti sovetskikh profsoyuzov, in: idem, Voprosy upravleniya, p. 346. Brezhnev, O 50-letii SSSR, p. 380. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 429, l. 3. Ibid., l. 4. L.I. Brezhnev: Zaklyuchitel’noye slovo na vneocherednoy sed’moy sessii Verkhovnogo Soveta, 7.10.1977 g., in: idem, Leninskim Kursom. Rechi i stat’i, vol. 6, Moscow 1978, p. 543. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 55, l. 21. L.I. Brezhnev: O proyekte konstitutsii (osnovnogo zakona) SSSR i itogakh ego vsenarodnogo obsuzhdeniya, in: idem: Leninskim Kursom, vol. 6, p. 518. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 441: Oktyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 3.10.1977 g., l. 8. Fond Gorbacheva, f. 5: Shakhnazarov, op. 1, kartochka 14555: Informatsionnaya zapiska ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh propagandy v svete itogov obsuzhdeniya proyekta konstitutsii SSSR’, l. 1. Ibid., l. 2. Ibid., l. 6; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 441, l. 16. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 449. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 265: Protokol No. 399, Mayskiy Plenum, 19.5.1972 g., l. 89–91. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 506, entry of 31 May 1972. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 312, l. 134–137. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 550, l. 32. Fonds Gorbacheva, f. 5: Shakhnazarov, op. 1, kartochka 14570, l. 1 f. Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 88. Ibid. Ibid. All details here and below are provided by Leonid Mlechin, who clearly had access to the minutes. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 303. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 168, l. 58. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 166. Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 307; Shelest, however, gives the date as 19 December: Da ne sudimy budete, p. 444. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 429, l. 20. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 25, dokument 5: ‘O stoletii so dnya rozhdeniya Stalina’, l. 1. Cit. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 139. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 332, l. 10. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 264. RGANI, f. 5, op. 60, d. 61: O nastroyeniyakh nekotorykh pisateley, o zhurnale ‘Novyy mir’, d. 4. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 122. Churbanov, Moy test’, pp. 113 f. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 125 f. Cit. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 511. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 257.

420

Notes

46 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 265. 47 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 296: Aprel’skiy Plenum, stenogramma tret’ego zasedaniya, 27.4.1973 g., l. 103. 48 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 122. 49 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 265. 50 Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 387. 51 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, pp. 264 f.; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 80. 52 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 57: Protokol No. 5 zasedaniya Iyunskogo Plenuma za podpis’yu sekretarya TsK L.I. Brezhneva, 20.–21.6.1967 g., l. 5; d. 70, l. 4; d. 296, l. 165. 53 Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 387. 54 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 120. 55 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 400, 411, 413. 56 To what extent this was due to the fact Brezhnev held compromising material documenting how Andropov had had the local party elite arrested when he was party secretary of Karelia in 1949/50 is a matter of conjecture. See Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 415 f.; E. Zhirnov: Neotrazimyy krasavets, geroy anekdotov, lyubitel’ podarkov i podkhalimov. Byvshiy urpavlyayushchiy delami Sovmina SSSR Mikhail Smirtyukov raskryvaet kremlëvskiye tayny vremen pravleniya Brezhneva, in: Ekho Litvy, 28 June 1995, no. 126, p. 5. 57 Cit. Kovalëv, Midovtsy i genseki. Diplomaticheskiye novelly, p. 43. 58 Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 24. 59 Ludmilla Alekseyeva: Soviet Dissent. Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, Middletown, Conn. 1985, pp. vii–x; Marshall Shatz: Soviet Dissidents in Historical Perspective, Cambridge 1980, H. Gordon Skilling: Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Hampshire 1989; Aleksandr Daniel’: Wie freie Menschen. Ursprung und Wurzeln des Dissens in der Sowjetunion, in: Forschungsstelle Osteuropa (ed.): Samizdat. Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa. Die 60er bis 80er Jahre, Bremen 2000, pp. 38–51. 60 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 252 f. See also N.G. Tomilina et al. (ed.): Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura 1965–1972 g., dokumenty, Moscow 2009, pp. 35, 126. 61 RGANI, f. 5, op. 30: Zapiski otdelov TsK KPSS o diskussiyakh direktiv XXIII s”ezda, o reagirovanii tvorcheskoy intelligentsii na rabotu XXIII s”ezda, pis’ma na imya XXIII s”ezda, d. 486, l. 40–43. Alexander Ginsburg (ed.): Weissbuch in Sachen Sinjawskij/Daniel, Frankfurt am Main 1967. 62 Tomilina, Kul’tura i vlast’, pp. 125, 185, 204, 323, 475; Ginsburg, Weissbuch, pp. 28 ff. 63 Yuriy Gerchuk: Krovoizliyaniye v MOSKh ili Khrushchev v Manezhe, Moscow 2008. 64 See Ginsburg, Weissbuch; Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, pp. 252–254. 65 RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1, l. 212. 66 Julie Elkner: The Changing Face of Repression under Khrushchev, in: Melanie Ilic/Smith, Jeremy (eds): Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, London, New York 2009, pp. 142–161, here p. 153. 67 Zhores Medwedjew: Andropow. Der Aufstieg zur Macht, Hamburg 1983, pp. 97, 109; Peter Reddaway: Policy toward Dissent since Khrushchev, in: Thomas H. Rigby/Archie Brown/ Peter Reddaway (eds): Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR. Essays Dedicated to Leonard Schapiro, London 1983, pp. 158–192, here p. 160; Jonathan Steele/Eric Abraham: Andropov in Power: From Komsomol to Kremlin, Oxford 1983, p. 91, Amy W. Knight: The KGB. Police and Politics in the Soviet Union, Boston 1990, p. 200.

Notes

421

68 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 6, dokument 30, l. 2–4. 69 Ibid., l. 7. 70 Ibid., l. 5. 71 Nikita Petrov: Podrazdeleniya KGB SSSR po bor’be s inakomysliyem 1967–1991 goda, in: Yan Berends et al. (eds): Povsednevnaya zhizn’ pri sotsializme. Nemetskiye i rossiyskiye podkhody, Moscow 2015, pp. 158–184, here p. 158. 72 Petrov, Podrazdeleniya, p 160. 73 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 19, dokument 43, l. 1–3. 74 RGANI, f. 1, op. 5, d. 1, l. 97, 227, 229, 235. 75 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 429, l. 18. 76 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 19, dokument 43, l. 2 f.; dokument 45, l. 1. 77 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 28, dokument 21, l. 1. 78 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 17, dokument 48, l. 1–4. 79 RGANI, f. 5, op. 60, d. 29, l. 1. 80 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 25, dokument 32, l. 1. 81 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 25, dokument 33, l. 5. 82 Ibid., l. 2. 83 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 17, dokument 49, l. 6. 84 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 332, l. 27. 85 Ibid., l. 28. 86 Ibid., l. 29. 87 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 54. 88 Egon Bahr: Zu meiner Zeit, 3rd edition, Munich 1996, p. 454 f.; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 165 ff. 89 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 18, dokument 47, l. 1 f. 90 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 25, dokument 40, l. 1–4, perechen’ 18, dokument 60, l. 1. 91 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 437. 92 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 104 f. 93 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 37, dokument 46, l. 2 f. 94 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 37, dokument 50, l. 1–3. 95 RGANI, f. 5, op. 60, d. 29: […] Ob amerikanskikh instruktsiyakh radiostantsii ‘Svoboda’, l. 92–95. 96 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 296, l. 102. 97 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 37, dokument 4, l. 1–3. 98 Churbanov, Moy test’, pp. 113 f. 99 Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 235 100 Cf. the files in the Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, esp. the folder ‘Sakharov i vlast” 1966–1986. See also Joshua Rubenstein/Alexander Gribanov (eds): The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, New Haven 2005. 101 Roy Medvedev: Andrey Sakharov i Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in: Voprosy istorii (2001) 11–12, pp. 3–17, here p. 9; Vladimir Bukovskiy: Moskovskiy protsess, Paris 1996, p. 89; Joshua Rubenstein: Introduction. Andrei Sakharov, the KGB, and the Legacy of Soviet Dissent, in: idem/Gribanov, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, pp. 1–84, here pp. 3, 25. 102 Sakharov, Vospominaniya, pp. 269–274. 103 Harvey Fireside: Dissident Visions of the USSR: Medvedev, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, in: Polity 22 (1989) 2, 213–229, here p. 215; Medvedev, Sakharov i Solzhenitsyn, p. 4; Jay Bergman: Meeting the Demands of Reason. The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov, Ithaca 2009, p. xii. 104 Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, perechen’ PA dokumentov Arkhiva Prezidenta o A.D. Sakharove (henceforth: PA Sakharov), dokument 15: Zapiska Andropova: O rezkoy

422

105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132 133

Notes aktivizatsii deyatel’nosti Sakharova i dr. sozdateley ‘komiteta prav cheloveka’ // Prezidentskiy Arkhiv (henceforth: PA), f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 5–10, 18.1.1971 g. A.V. Korotkov (ed.): Kremlevskii samosud. Sekretenyye dokumenty Politbyuro o pisatele A. Solzhenitsyne, Moscow 1994, p. 215. Roy Medvedev: Neizvestnyy Andropov. Politicheskaya biografiya Yuriya Andropova, Moscow 1999, p. 192. Rubenstein, Introduction, p. 26. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA-1, dokument 3: Pis’mo Sakharova Brezhnevu 4.3.1971 g. s pros’boy o vstreche dlya besedy po shirokomu krugu problem vnutrennego i mezhdunarodnogo polozheniya strany // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 20–77. Sakharov, Vospominaniya, pp. 328–331. Ibid., p. 273. Arkhiv Sacharova Moskva, PA-1, dokument 1: Pis’mo A. Sakharova L. Brezhnevu ot 11.2.1967 // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 631, l. 60 f. Sakharov, Vospominaniya, pp. 276 f. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., pp. 286–288. Alexei Kojevnikov: Stalin’s Great Science. The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists, London 2004, p. 299; Rubenstein, Introduction, pp. 21 f. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 2: Zapiski KGB – O stat’e Sakharova ‘Razmyshleniya o progresse, mirnom sosushchestvovanii i intellektual’noy svobode’ // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 637, l. 20–24, 22.5.1968 g. See also Rubenstein/Gribanov, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, p. 86; Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, pp. 188 f. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 3: Zapiska KGB SSSR – Kharakteristika Sakharova i ego okruzheniya // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 637, l. 68–71, 13.6.1968 g. Sakharov, Vospominaniya, pp. 288, 300. Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 192; Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 308, Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 192; Kovalëv, Midovtsy i genseki. Diplomaticheskiye novelly, p. 43. Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 328. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 8: Zapiska KGB – Ob aktivizatsii politicheski vrednoy deyatel’nosti A. Sakharova // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 637, l. 152–153, 18.11.1970 g.; dokument 12: Zapiska KGB O merakh po presecheniyu politicheski vrednoy deyatel’nosti ‘Komiteta prav cheloveka’ // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 637, l. 161 f., 30.12.1970 g. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 8, l. 152 f. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 2, l. 23; dokument 3, l. 70. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 15, l. 7. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 16: Zapiska KGB O prinyatii neotlozhnykh mer v svyazi s aktivizatsiey politikheski vrednoy deyatelnosti Sakharova // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 11–15, 12.2.1971 g. Kovalëv, Midovtsy i genseki [memuary], p. 45. Ibid., p. 45. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 252. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 18: Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS – O A. Sakharove // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 19. Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 208. Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 28: Zapiska KGB – O povedenii Sakharova i dr. uchastnikov ‘komiteta’ // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 113–116, 2.10.1971 g.

Notes

423

134 Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 21: Zapiska KGB O deyatelnosti ‘Komiteta’ // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 80–85, 17.4.1971 g.; dokument 35: Zapiska KGB Ob aktivizatsii antiobshchestvennoy deyatel’nosti Sakharova i ego okruzheniya // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 638, l. 142 f., 10.7.1972 g. 135 F.D. Bobkov: KGB i vlast’, Moscow 1995, p. 282. 136 Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 395; RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 16, dokument 14: Zapiska Andropova i Rudenko v TsK KPSS, 2.8.1973 g., l. 1. 137 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 581, 583, entries of 8 and 12 September 1973. 138 Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 40: Zapiska Otdela nauki i uchebnykh zavedeniy TsK – O pis’me gruppy vedushchikh akademikov AN, protestuyushchikh protiv klevetnicheskikh vypadov Sakharova // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 639, l. 23–27, 27.8.1973 g.; dokument 58: Zapiska KGB – Dannyye o politicheski vrednoy deyatel’nosti Sakharova // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 640, l. 42 f., 5.10.1973 g. 139 Charles Rhéaume: Sakharov. Science, morale et politique, Saint-Nicolas (Québec) 2004, pp. 133–138. 140 Oleg Troyanovsky: The Making of Soviet Foreign Policy, in: Taubman/Khrushchev/ Gleason, Nikita Khrushchev, pp. 209–241; George F. Kennan: Im Schatten der Atombombe. Eine Analyse der amerikanisch-sowjetischen Beziehungen von 1947 bis heute, Cologne 1982; Bernd Stöver: Der Kalte Krieg, 1947–1991. Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters, Bonn 2007; Vladislav M. Zubok: Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. From Stalin to Khrushchev, Cambridge 1996; John L. Gaddis: The Cold War. A New History, New York 2005. 141 Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 81: Zapiska Andropova, Ustinova, Rudenko – ob administrativnom pereselenii iz Moskvy Sakharova i Bonner // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 641, l. 68–76, 16.11.1975 g. 142 Mike Bowker: Brezhnev and Superpower Relations, in: Bacon/Sandle, Brezhnev Reconsidered, pp. 90–109; Melvyn P. Leffler: For the Soul of Mankind. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, New York 2007, pp. 234–337; John J. Maresca: To Helsinki. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973–1975, Durham, N.C., 1985, pp. 31–69; Marie-Pierre Rey: The USSR and the Helsinki Process, 1969–75. Optimism, Doubt, or Defiance, in: Andreas Wenger (ed.): Origins of the European Security System. The Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–75, Abingdon 2008, pp. 65–81. 143 Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 96, postanovleniye Politbyuro – Zapiska KGB ot 26.5.1978 g. (O zlostnykh khuliganskikh vykhodkakh Sakharova) // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 642, l. 34–37, 8.6.1978 g.; dokument 99: Postanovleniye Politbyuro – O merakh po presecheniyu vrazhdebnoy deyatel’nosti Sakharova // PA, f. 3, op. 80, d. 642, l. 68–73, 3.1.1980 g. 144 Rhéaume, Sakharov, p. 262; Rubenstein, Introduction, p. 36. 145 Sakharov, Vospominaniya, p. 553. 146 Rubenstein, Introduction, p. 36. 147 Arkhiv Sakharova Moskva, PA Sakharov, dokument 99, l. 62. 148 Sakharov, Vospominaniya, pp. 556, 560. 149 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 996, entry of 23 January 1980. 150 Kunayev, Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 215. 151 Fond Gorbacheva, f. 3: Materialy V.V. Zagladina, op. 1, Kartochka 23.1.1980 g., l. 1. 152 Fond Gorbacheva, f. 3, op. 1, kartochka 14843, l. 2. 153 Nina Tumarkin: The Living and the Dead. The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York 1994, p. 135. 154 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, p. 135.

424

Notes

155 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 265. 156 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, p. 132. 157 Marc Edele: Soviet Veterans of the Second World War. A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society 1941–91, Oxford 2008, p. 86. 158 RGANI, f. 3, op. 28, d. 9, l. 145, 150, 171. 159 Ibid., l. 180. 160 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 48. 161 Mitrokhin, Russische Partei, p. 98. 162 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, p. 134. 163 Ibid., p. 135. 164 Ibid., p. 137. 165 ‘Siyay v vekakh, ogon’ slavy!’ Otkrytiye pamyatnika ‘Mogila neizvestnogo soldata’, in: Pravda, 9 May 1967, 1 f.; see also Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, pp. 128 f. 166 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 29. 167 Speech by General Secretary of the TsK KPSS L.I. Brezhnev at the Opening of the Memorial Site to the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad (Mamayev Kurgan) in Volgograd, 15 October 1967, http://www.russianparis.com/nostalgia/brezhnev_speech_mamaev. shtml, accessed 1.7.2016. 168 RGANI, f. 5, op. 60, d. 65: […] Pamyatniki Velikoy Otechestvennoy Voyne, l. 24. 169 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, p. 138. 170 Ibid. 171 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 333, l. 15 f. 172 Ivo Mijnssen: Heldenkult und Bringschuld. Hyperstabilität in der Heldenstadt Tula unter Breschnew, in: Boris Belge/Martin Deuerlein (eds): Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev-Ära, Tübingen 2014, pp. 37–53, here p. 48. 173 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 31. 174 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 333, l. 153. 175 Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, p. 133. 176 Christopher J. Ward: Brezhnev’s Folly. The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism, Pittsburgh 2009, pp. 2 ff. 177 Ibid., p. 4. 178 Baybakov, Sorok let v pravitel’stve, pp. 235, 278 f. 179 Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly, p. 2. 180 Soviet large-scale projects: the city Komsomolsk-on-Amur built by the Komsomol youth organization; the Magnitka steelworks in Magnitogorsk; the Turkestan–Siberian mainline (Turksib); the dam and what was then the world’s largest hydroelectric power station on the Dnieper, DneproGES; the similarly gigantic Bratsk hydroelectric power station in on the Angara River in Bratsk; and the truck factory on the River Kama, KamAZ. See also Esther Meier: Brežnevs Ingenieure. Die Stadt Naberežnye Čelny und das Lastwagenwerk KamAZ, in: Belge/Deuerlein, Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation, pp. 155–177. 181 L.I. Brezhnev: Rech’ na XVII s”ezde VLKSM, 23.4.1974 g., http://pedagogic.ru/books/ item/f00/s00/z0000008/st041.shtml, accessed 1.7.2016. 182 Johannes Grützmacher: Vielerlei Öffentlichkeiten: Die Bajkal-Amur-Magistrale als Mobilisierungsprojekt der Brežnev-Ära, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50 (2002) 2, 205–223, here p. 216. 183 Cit. Grützmacher, Vielerlei Öffentlichkeiten, p. 215. 184 Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly, p. 8.

Notes

425

185 Ibid., p. 44; Grützmacher, Vielerlei Öffentlichkeiten, p. 216. The correct spelling would be ‘obmanyvayet’, but with the unstressed first syllable it is pronounced ‘abmanyvayet’. 186 Grützmacher, Vielerlei Öffentlichkeiten, p. 216. 187 Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly, p. 11. 188 Ibid., pp. 58, 97. 189 Ibid., p. 14. 190 Grützmacher, Vielerlei Öffentlichkeiten, p. 221. 191 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1113, entry of 2 November 1981.

Chapter 8: Emotions and Pills in the Cold War, or How to Play the Western Statesman 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

Cit. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 270. Cf. also Vladislav M. Zubok: A Failed Empire. The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill 2009, p. 226. See Luc Ciompi/Elke Endert: Gefühle machen Geschichte. Die Wirkung kollektiver Emotionen – von Hitler bis Obama, Göttingen 2011; Luc Ciompi: Die emotionalen Grundlagen des Denkens. Entwurf einer fraktalen Affektlogik, Göttingen 1997; Susan J. Matt/Peter N. Stearns (eds): Doing Emotions History, Urbana 2014; Martha C. Nussbaum: Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge 2001; Jan Plamper/ Benjamin Lazier (eds): Fear. Across the Disciplines, Pittsburgh, Pa., 2012; Joanna Bourke: Fear. A Cultural History, London 2005, Frank Costigliola: Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, Princeton 2012; idem: Reading for emotion, in: idem/Michael J. Hogan (eds): Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, New York 2016, pp. 356–373. See Jan Arend: Ist Stress westlich? Zum zeitgeschichtlichen Ort der Belastungssorge, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45 (2019), 245–274. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 45. Andrey Aleksandrov-Agentov: ‘20 let ryadom s Brezhnevym’, in: Voskresen’ye, 1993, no. 2, 18–21, here p. 18. RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 489: Proekt postanovleniya TsK, zapiski i spravki MID […], l. 147. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 460. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 352, entry of 7 February 1969; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 34. RGAĖ, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 87: Zapisi besed predsedatelya Gosplana SSSR i ego zamestiteley s predstavitelyami zarubezhnykh stran, Feb.–Nov. 1965, l. 5 f.; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 1097, 1101, entries of 17 August and 1 September 1981; Wojciech Jaruzelski: Hinter den Türen der Macht. Der Anfang vom Ende einer Herrschaft, translated by Ekkehard Grube, Leipzig 1996, pp. 48, 275. RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 489, l. 13–15; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 436; Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 426. Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 430. Ibid., pp. 265 f. Laurien Crump: The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered. International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–69, London 2015, p. 203. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 45 ff.: Voprosy k resheniyu 20 go oktyabrya.

426

Notes

16 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 329: Zapiski i spravki otdelov TsK KPSS, ministerstv i vedomstv po mezhdunarodnym voprosam […], l. 16; Rukopisnyye zametki L. Brezhneva vo vremya razgovorov s rukovoditelyami bratskikh partiy, 29.10.1964 g. 17 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 440. 18 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 45, l. 54. 19 Ibid., l. 53. 20 Ibid., l. 55. 21 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 329, l. 1–16. 22 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 169; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 179. 23 Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 184. 24 Lorenz M. Lüthi: The Sino-Soviet Split. Cold War in the Communist World, Princeton 2008, pp. 288–291; Austin Jersild: The Sino-Soviet Alliance. An International History, Chapel Hill 2014, pp. 173 f.; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, pp. 184 f.; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 463 ff.; Crump, The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered, pp. 117 f. 25 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 86 f., entry of 18 June 1965. 26 Crump, The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered, pp. 202–204. 27 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 217. 28 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 513, 648, 655, 660–662, entry of 15 July 1972, 24 July, 3, 9–11 August 1976; Hans-Hermann Hertle/Konrad Jarausch (eds): Risse im Bruderbund. Die Gespräche Honecker–Breshnew 1974 bis 1982, Berlin 2006; Klaus Wiegrefe: Honecker und Brežnev auf der Krim. Eine Aufzeichnung über das Treffen vom 19. August 1976, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 41 (1993) 4, 589–620. 29 Edvard Gerek o Leonide Brezhneve, in: Literaturnaya Gazeta, 26 September 1990, p. 14. 30 Svetlana Sukhova: Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich [interview with Vladimir Musael’yan], in: Itogi, 12 November 2012, 42–47, here p. 46. 31 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 424, entry of 19 August 1969, see also fn. 236 on p. 446; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 41. 32 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402, l. 83; f. 80, op. 1, d. 312, l. 84; Pravda, 21 August 1977, http:// istmat.info/node/23070, accessed 12.8.2016. 33 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 565, entry of 4 July 1973; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 41. 34 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 524: Iyun’skiy Plenum, stenogramma utrennego zasedaniya, 23.6.1980 g., l. 13. 35 Kremlin–PCF. Conversations secrètes, Paris 1984 [Brezhnev in conversation with the French Communist Party leader Waldeck Rochet, Moscow, 16 July 1968], p. 63. 36 Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 216; Remarks by Leonid Brezhnev at a Meeting of Top CPCz Officials in Prague, December 9, 1967, in: Jaromir Navratil (ed.): The Prague Spring 1968, Budapest 2006, pp. 18–20, here p. 18. 37 Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS: ‘O poyezdke t. Brezhneva L.I. v Chekhoslovakiyu’, in: N.G. Tomilina et al. (eds): Chekhoslovatskiy krizis 1967–1969 gg v dokumentakh TsK KPSS, Moscow 2010, p. 47; Kremlin–PCF, p. 62; Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 124. 38 Dokument 75: Stenografische Niederschrift der Beratung der fünf ‘Bruderparteien’ mit der KPČ in Dresden, 23. März 1968, in: Stefan Karner et al. (eds): Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968, vol. 2: Dokumente, Cologne 2008, pp. 411–509, here p. 429. See also Kremlin–PCF, op. 63; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, pp. 146 f. 39 Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, p. 264. 40 Kremlin–PCF, p. 63.

Notes

427

41 Rudol’f Pikhoya: Moskva, kreml’, vlast’: Sorok let posle voyny, 1945–1985, Moscow 2007, p. 44. 42 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, l. 25 f. 43 Michail Prozumenščikov: Die Entscheidung im Politbüro der KPdSU, in: Stefan Karner et al. (eds): Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968, vol. 1: Beiträge, Cologne 2008, pp. 205–242, here p. 208; Zubok, A Failed Empire, p. 207; Kremlin–PCF, p. 63. 44 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, l. 5. 45 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, l. 4, 26ob., 34ob., 64ob., 77. 46 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 173; Jan Pauer: Prag 1968. Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes. Hintergründe – Planung – Durchführung, Bremen 1995, p. 46. 47 Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘O pis’me Politbyuro TsK KPSS v adres Prezidiuma TsK KPCh’, 21 March 1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 57; Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 36. 48 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 173; Vasil Bilak: Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe. Der ‘Prager Frühling’ aus der Sicht eines Beteiligten, Berlin 2006, p. 23. 49 Dokument 75, Stenografische Niederschrift, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, p. 429. 50 Ibid., p. 439. 51 Ibid., p. 443. 52 Dokument 114: Stenogramm der Gespräche der Delegation des Politbüros des ZK der KPdSU, des Präsidiums des ZK der KPČ und des Präsidenten der ČSSR, L. Svoboda, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, pp. 935–975, here p. 949. 53 Cit. Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 133. 54 Letter from Leonid Brezhnev to Alexander Dubček Expressing Concern about Events in Czechoslovakia, April 11, 1968, in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 98–101, here p. 98. 55 Ibid., p. 99. 56 Stenographic Account of the Soviet–Czechoslovak Summit Meeting in Moscow, May 4–5, 1968 (Excerpts), in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 114–126, here p. 123. 57 Ibid., p. 118. 58 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 322; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, pp. 60, 64. 59 Cit. Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 65 [APRF f. 3, op. 91, d. 100, l. 11]. 60 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, Operatsiya ‘Opuchol”, l. 24. 61 Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 56. 62 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, l. 26. 63 Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 60. 64 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 307, 310, 328, 345. 65 Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘O pravedenii soveshchaniya predstaviteley bratskikh partiy’, 3.7.1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 117; Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘O pis’me TsK KPSS v adres t. A. Dubcheka’, 6.7.1968, in: ibid., pp. 117 f.; Top-Secret from Ambassador Stepan Chervonenko to Moscow Regarding the CPCz CC Presidium’s Decision not to Attend the Warsaw Meeting, July 9, 1968, in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 207–210, here p. 209; see also Zdenek Hejzlar: Reformkommunismus. Zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei der Tschechoslowakei, Cologne 1976, p. 235; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, pp. 329–331. 66 Archive of the Research Centre for Eastern European Studies at the University of Bremen (henceforth: FSO), fonds 01-166: Ernst Orlovskiy, therein: Ludvik Vaculik: Dve tysyachi slov (complete literary translation), 8 fols; fonds 01-079: Georgiy Davydov, ibid. (shorter translation into Soviet jargon), 5 fols.

428

Notes

67 Tsentral’nomu Komitetu Kommunisticheskoy partii Chekhoslovakii, in: Tomilina, Chechoslovatskiy krizis, p. 130. 68 Josef Smrkovský: Das unvollendete Gespräch, in: Jan Skála (ed.): Die ČSSR. Vom Prager Frühling zur Charta 77, Berlin 1978, pp. 129–168, here p. 145. 69 Tsentral’nomu Komitetu Kommunisticheskoy partii Chechoslovakii, in: Tomilina, Chechoslovatskiy krizis, p. 131. 70 Ibid., p. 130. 71 Ibid., p. 131. 72 Dokument 38: Über die Bilanz des Treffens der Delegationen der kommunistischen und Arbeiterparteien der sozialistischen Staaten in Warschau. Sitzung des Plenums des ZK der KPdSU. Rede des Generalsekretärs des ZK der KPdSU, L.I. Brežnev, 17.7.1968, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, pp. 219–245, here pp. 239–241. 73 Dokument 44: Brežnev: ‘Nutzen wir alle politischen Mittel.’ Schlusswort des Generalsekretärs des ZK der KPdSU, L.I. Brežnev. Sitzung des Plenums des ZK der KPdSU, 17.7.1968, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, pp. 271–273. 74 Postanovleniye Politbyuro KPSS ‘Voprosy Chekhoslovakii’, 19.7.1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 137; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 151; Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 151. 75 Zubok, A Failed Empire, p. 208; Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 175. 76 Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 70; Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, pp. 130 f. 77 Cit. Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 70 [APRF rabochaya zapis’ zasedaniya Politbyuro, 1968, l. 425]. 78 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, l. 48. 79 Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 72. 80 Dokument 49: Konkrete Vorbereitungen zum Einmarsch. Politbüro-Beschluss des ZK der KPdSU, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, p. 301. 81 Prozumenščikov, Die Entscheidung im Politbüro, p. 228; Kieran Williams: New Sources on Soviet Decision Making during the 1968 Czechoslovak Crisis, in: Europe-Asia Studies 48 (1996) 3, 457–470, here p. 458; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 74; Zubok, A Failed Empire, p. 208. 82 Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘O vstreche rukovoditeley bratskikh partiy sotsialisticheskikh stran’, 27 July 1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 157. 83 Postanovleniye Politbyuro KPSS ‘Voprosy Chekhoslovakii’, 19.7.1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 138. 84 Alexander Dubček: Leben für die Freiheit, Munich 1993, p. 246. 85 Alexander Dubček’s Recollections of the Crisis: Events Surrounding the Čierna nad Tisou Negotiations, in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 300–307, here p. 301. 86 Smrkovskij, Das unvollendete Gespräch, p. 147. 87 Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, p. 246. 88 Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘Ob ukazaniyakh sovposlu v ChSSR’, 24.7.1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 147. 89 Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘O telegramme Poslu SSSR v ChSSR’, 26.7.1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, p. 155. 90 Ibid. 91 Dokument 48: Ausschluss der Presse in Čierna nad Tisou, 26.7.1968, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, p. 299. 92 Smrkovskij, Das unvollendete Gespräch, p. 148; Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 135. 93 Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 302. 94 Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 135. 95 Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 358.

Notes 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

429

FSO Archive, 02-082/5-30: Tamara Reymanova: O soveshchanii v Chierne nad Tissoy i o vstuplenii sovetskikh voysk v Pragu 21 avgusta 1968 goda, p. 1. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 367. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 151. Bilak, Wir riefen Moskau, p. 119; Smrkovskij, Das unvollendete Gespräch, p. 150; Medvdev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 132; Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 139. Pavel Tigrid speaks of a four-hour speech that amounted to a single attack: Pavel Tigrid: Why Dubcek Fell, London 1971, p. 83; see also Reymanova, O soveshchanii v Chierne, p. 2; Hejzlar, Reformkommunismus, p. 240. Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 302; Williams, New Sources, p. 458. Cit. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 365. Ibid. Cit. nach Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 152. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 366; Postanovleniye Politbyuro TsK KPSS ‘O vstreche rukovoditeley bratskikh partiy sotsialisticheskikh stran’, 30.7.1968, in: Tomilina, Chekhoslovatskiy krizis, vol. 2, pp. 159 f. Karen Dawisha: The Kremlin and the Prague Spring, Berkeley 1984, p. 259; Tigrid, Why Dubcek Fell, p. 87. Smrkovskij, Das unvollendete Gespräch, p. 148; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 380; Bilak, Wir riefen Moskau, p. 122; Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 132. Cit. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 368. Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 165; Dawisha, The Kremlin and the Prague Spring, p. 259. Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 302. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 367 f., 382. Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 303. Dokument 114, Stenogramm der Gespräche, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, p. 953. Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 303; Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 166; Prozumenščikov, Die Entscheidung im Politbüro, p. 228. Speeches by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexander Dubček and Aleksej Kosygin at the Čierna nad Tisou Negotiations, July 29, 1986 (Excerpts), in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 284–297, here p. 284. Tamara Reymanova relates how the Soviet side collected all notes and papers: Reymanova, O soveshchanii v Chierne, p. 6. Aleksander Bovin reports that he kept excerpts of the transcript in his private archive: Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 175; Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 169. Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 303. Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 173. Bilak, Wir riefen Moskau, p. 134. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 384. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, pp. 249 f. The Bratislava Declaration, August 3, 1968, in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 326–329, here p. 328. Ibid., pp. 327 f.; Pauer, Prag 1968, p. 174. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, p. 251. Alexander Dubček’s Recollections, p. 303. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 390; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 79. Dokument 57: Telefongespräch L.I. Brežnevs mit A.S. Dubček vom 13.8.1968, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, pp. 329–343, here p. 343. Valeriy Musatov: Brezhnev vstretil utro vvoda voysk na komandnom punkte, in: Novoye vremya, 1992, no.16, p. 39.

430 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

134

135 136 137 138

139 140

141 142 143 144 145

146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

Notes Dokument 57, Telefongespräch, p. 333. Ibid., p. 335. Ibid. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 343. Ibid., p. 341. Jiri Valenta: Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia 1969: Anatomy of a Decision, Baltimore 1979, pp. 15 f.; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 299, 309; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, pp. 52 f., 69. I. William Zartman: The Norms of Intervention, in: idem (ed.): Czechoslovakia. Intervention and Impact, New York 1970, pp. 105–119, here p. 108; Zubok, A Failed Empire, p. 208. Dokument 75, Stenografische Niederschrift, p. 437; Dokument 114, Stenogramm der Gespräche, p. 961, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 155; Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 131. Speeches by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexander Dubček and Aleksej Kosygin, in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, p. 296. Minutes of the U.S. National Security Council Meeting on the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia, August 20, 1968, in: Navratil, The Prague Spring 1968, pp. 445–448, here p. 448; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 71; Valenta, Soviet Intervention, pp. 128–134. Cit. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 149. See also Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 216. Dokument 62: Nach dem Hilferuf der moskautreuen tschechoslowakischen Kommunisten: Einberufung der entscheidenden Konferenz in Moskau. Die ZKBeschlüsse und die Anweisungen zur Durchführung. Politbüro-Beschluss des ZK der KPdSU, 17.8.1968, in: Karner, Prager Frühling, vol. 2, pp. 355–363. Original reproduced in Pauer, Prag 1968, pp. 196 f.; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 385. Zdenek Mlynarzh: Kholodom veyet ot Kremlya, 2nd edition, New York 1988, p. 264. Ibid., p. 169. Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 140; Mlynarzh, Kholodom veyet ot Kremlya, p. 247. Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 139; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, p. 85; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 397; Martina Winkler: Panzer in Prag. Der fotografische Blick auf die Invasion von 1968, Düsseldorf 2018. Mlynarzh, Kholodom veyet ot Kremlya, p. 247; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 398; Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 47. Zdeněk Mlynář: Nachtfrost. Das Ende des Prager Frühlings, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 299. Bilak, Wir riefen Moskau, p. 180. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, p. 299; Mlynář, Nachtfrost, pp. 267 f. Smrkovskij, Das unvollendete Gespräch, p. 161. Dokument 114, Stenogramm der Gespräche, p. 971. Medvedev, Neizvestnyy Andropov, p. 141; Pikhoya, Moskva, kreml’, vlast’, pp. 86 f. Mlynář, Nachtfrost, p. 293. Winkler, Panzer in Prag, pp. 223–225. Dubček, Leben für die Freiheit, pp. 344, 365. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 130: Stenogramma chetvertogo zasedaniya Oktyabr’skogo Plenuma, 30–31.10.1968 g., L.I. Brezhnev: O vnezhnepoliticheskoy deyatel’nosti, l. 2–25.

Notes 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

168 169 170 171 172 173

174 175 176 177

178 179

180 181 182 183 184 185 186

187 188 189

431

Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 155. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 981, l. 97ob. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 460–462; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 37 f. Zubok, A Failed Empire, p. 208. S. Kovalev: Suverenitet i internatsional’nyye obyazannosti sots. stran, in: Pravda, 26 September 1968. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 130, l. 24 f. Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, p. 292; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 265, l. 266 ff. Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, pp. 268, 272. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 74; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 382. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 460; Kolesnichenko, Kak popast’ v istoriyu, p. 28. See also Donald J. Raleigh: ‘Soviet’ Man of Peace. Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev and his Diaries, in: Kritika 17 (2016) 4, 837–868; Svetlana Savranskaya/William Taubman: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1962–1975, in: The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2: Crises and Détente, ed. by Melvyn Leffler/Odd Arne Westad, Cambridge 2010, pp. 134–157, here p. 141. Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 255. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 85, entry of 24/25 May 1965. RGANI, f. 1, op. 1, d. 1, l. 46. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 230, l. 11. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 45. Gespräch Schmidt mit Breschnew, 23.11.1981, 18:00 bis 19:35 Uhr, im Eichensaal des Schlosses Gymnich, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1981, vol. 3, p. 1816. Willy Brandt: Erinnerungen. Mit den ‘Notizen zum Fall G’, Munich 2003, p. 201. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 197. Willy Brandt: Berliner Ausgabe, ed. by Helga Grebing, Gregor Schöllgen and Heinrich August Winkler, 10 vols, Bonn 2000–2009 (vol. 9, p. 333); interview for Der Spiegel, 6 July 1981, http://www.willy-brandt.de/fileadmin/stiftung/Downloads/Berliner_ Ausgabe/BA_09_gesamt.pdf, accessed 15.10.2014. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 132. Gespräch Schmidt mit Breschnew 28.10.1974, Treffen von ganzer Delegation im Katharinensaal 17–19 Uhr, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1974, vol. 2, p. 1343. Helmut Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, Berlin 1987, p. 18. Ibid., p. 49. Gerald R. Ford: A Time to Heal. The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford, London 1979, p. 218. Ibid., p. 223. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/101, Deuxième tête-à-tête, 11.1.1974, Zaslavl/Minsk, p. 2. Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, pp. 178 ff. Ibid., p. 197; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, pp. 264 f.; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 24; Raymond L. Garthoff: Soviet Leaders and Intelligence. Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War, Washington, D.C. 2015, p. 39. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 42. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 166. Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, p. 259.

432

Notes

190 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 133. 191 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 42. 192 A. Chernyayev: … i lichno tovarishch Brezhnev L.I. K stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, in: Novaya gazeta, no. 97, 21–24 December 2006, prilozheniye: Le Monde diplomatique, December 2006, pp. 20 f.; Arbatov, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, pp. 83 f.; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 167; Mitrokhin, Russische Partei, p. 117. 193 RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 486, l. 147–153; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 265. 194 Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 285. 195 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 184. 196 Ibid., p. 217; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 210; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, pp. 239 f.; Chernyayev, Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, p. 266. 197 Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, p. 148. 198 Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 216. 199 RAGNI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 70, l. 193. 200 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 265, l. 43 201 Ibid., l. 50 f. 202 Ibid., l. 44. 203 RGANI, f. 5. op. 30, d. 486, l. 36; f. 2, op. 1, d. 790, l. 41. 204 Ford, A Time to Heal, p. 298; Iz vystupleniya GenSeka Brezhneva na obede, dannom v ego chest’ Prezidentom Frantsii Zh. Pompidu v Versale 25 oktyabrya 1971 g., in: Sbornik osnovnykh dokumentov po voprosu razoruzhenii, ed. by Ministerstvo Innostrannych Del, vol. 13, Moscow 1974, p. 394. 205 Rey, The USSR and the Helsinki Process, p. 67. 206 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251, l. 70. 207 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1017, Traduction non-officielle, Moscow, 1 August 1970. 208 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1017, Projet de réponse, 6 August 1970. 209 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251, l. 70. 210 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251, l. 78; Willy Brandt: Begegnungen und Einsichten. Die Jahre 1960–1975, Hamburg 1976, p. 448. 211 See Frank Costigliola: Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances. How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, Princeton 2012, p. 12. 212 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XV, Soviet Union, June 1972–August 1974, document 123: Conversation Between President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, Washington, June 18, 1973, https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v15/d123, accessed 24.11.2014. 213 Valentin Falin: Politische Erinnerungen, Munich 1993, p. 87. 214 Schmidt mit Breschnew am 4.5.1978, 16:35 Uhr, im Bundeskanzleramt, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1978, vol. 1, p. 644. 215 Report by Seydoux to Schumann, 15.11.1970, in: Ministère des affaires étrangères (ed.): Documents diplomatiques français, 1970, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 647 f.; see Frédéric Bozo : France, ‘Gaullism’, and the Cold War, in: The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2, pp. 158–178, here pp. 169–172; Jussi M. Hannimäki: Détente in Europe, 1962–1975, in: ibid., pp. 198–218, here p. 201–202; Marie-Pierre Rey: La tentation du rapprochement. France et URSS à l’heure de la détente (1964-1974), Paris 1991, pp. 42 ff., 146 ; Anton W. DePorte: De Gaulle’s Europe : Playing the Russian Card, in : French Politics and Society 8 (1990) 4, 25−40. 216 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Second tête-à-tête entre le Président de la république et M. Brejnev 26.10.1971, Elysée, 16:15–20:15, p. 24. 217 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Premier tête-à-tête entre le Président de la république et M. Brejnev, 25.10.1971, 15:35–17:10, p. 10 f.

Notes

433

218 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Abrasimov: Audiences chez Pompidou, 30.6.1972; 1.8.1972; 21.9.1972; 26.10.1972. 219 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Oreanda, 27 juillet 1973, Brejnev–Jobert; Michel Jobert : L’autre regard, Paris 1976, p. 314. 220 Cit. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 30. 221 Brandt an Kossygin, Brief vom 19.11.1969, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1969, vol. 2, Munich 2000, p. 1313. 222 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 293. 223 Aufzeichnung des Staatssekretärs Bahr, Bundeskanzleramt, 24.12.1969, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1969, vol. 2, p. 1465. 224 Ibid.; Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 87; RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 47; Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit dem Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU, Breschnew, in Moskau, Dolmetscher-Protokoll, 15:30–19:30 Uhr, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1457. 225 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 324. 226 Bahr an Brandt, 1.8.1970, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1335. 227 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 326. 228 Aufzeichnung des Staatssekretärs Bahr, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1969, vol. 2, p. 1465; Willy-Brandt-Archiv (henceforth: WBA) in AdsD, fonds A 8, folder 190, fol. 7. 229 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 434: V.L., MDg Dr. Sanne, Bonn 14.11.1970, Vermerk über ein Gespräch von StS Bahr in Berlin am 12.11.1970, no page number. 230 Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 186. 231 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 434: V.L., no page number, no letter head: ‘Nach dem Besuch bei Breschew ist der Freund direkt am 24.3. um 0:30 zu Lathe gekommen …’ 232 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, pp. 293 f. 233 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 434: V.L., ‘Der Staatssekretär, Bonn den 27. April 1970, Dem Bundeskanzler und Bundesminister streng vertraulich, persönlich’, no page number. 234 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 434: V.L., letter from Valera Lednev, 12 November 1970. 235 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 294. 236 4-Augen-Gespräch Scheel mit Gromyko, Moskau, 7.8.1970, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1421. 237 Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit dem Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU, Breschnew, in Moskau, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1450. 238 Gespräch Scheel–Breschnew, 19.5.1973, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1973, vol. 2, p. 735. 239 Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit dem Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU, Breschnew, in Moskau, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1461. 240 Aufzeichnung des Bundeskanzlers Brandt, 19. August 1970: Bewertung Gespräche mit Breschnew und Kossygin, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1504. 241 Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten, p. 453. 242 Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 196. 243 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 332. 244 Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit dem Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU, Breschnew, in Moskau, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik

434

245 246 247

248 249

250 251 252

253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261

262 263 264 265

266

Notes Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1458; see also A.V. Keller: Novaya vostochnaya politika Villi Brandta v kontekste ekonomicheskogo sotrudnichtestva mezhdu FRG i SSSR 1963−1973 gg., in: Ural’skiy Istoricheskiy Vestnik 50 (2016) 1, 100− 108, here p. 104. AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 434: V.L., Bonn, den 13. August 1970, Der Staatssekretär, Vermerk, vertraulich, no fol. number. Ibid. Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 331; Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers Brandt mit dem Generalsekretär des ZK der KPdSU, Breschnew, in Moskau, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1970, vol. 2, p. 1457. Cit. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 156. Aufzeichnung des Bundeskanzlers Brandt, Oreanda, 17. September 1971, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1971, vol. 2, p. 1383; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 351: Protokol No. 9 zasedaniya Aprel’skogo Plenuma, 16.4.1975 g., l. 14 f. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251, l. 78; Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 460. See Marie-Pierre Rey : La tentation du rapprochement. France et URSS à l’heure de la détente (1964−1974), Paris 1991. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Audience de M. Valerian Zorine, Ambassadeur de l’URSS, 21 juillet 1969; Audience de M. Valerian Zorine, 18 septembre 1969; Entretien du Président de la République avec les dirigeants soviétiques au Kremlin, 6.10.1970, 16:30–18:40. Entretien Pompidou avec Brejnev […], Moscou, 7.10.1970, in: Documents diplomatiques français, 1970, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 417, 442. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Entretien du Président de la République avec les dirigeants soviétiques au Kremlin, 6.10.1970, 16:30–18:40, p. 9. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Entretien entre le Président de la république et M. Brejnev, Kremlin 13.10.1970, 10:30–11:40, p. 1. Ibid., pp. 1 f. Ibid., p. 8. Entretien Pompidou avec Brejnev […], Moscou, 7.10.1970, in: Documents diplomatiques français, vol. 1, pp. 417 f., 430. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Entretien entre le Président de la république et M. Brejnev, Kremlin, 13.10.1970, 10:30–11:40, p. 9. Brejnev, Kosyguine, Podgorny et Pompidou pendant le dîner, 12.10.1970, in: Documents diplomatiques français, 1970, vol. 1, p. 455. Aufzeichnung Staatssekretär Bahr, 1.9.1971, über Gespräch Brandt mit Falin, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1971, vol. 2, p. 1311; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 485. RGANI, d. 2, op. 3, d. 240, l. 5. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 385. Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 206; Ibid., Begegnungen und Einsichten, p. 460. AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 430: Krim 16.–18. September 1971, 7. September 1971, Der Staatssekretär, Taktischer Ablauf, ohne Blattangabe; Politisches Archiv AA, fonds B 41: Sowjetunion 1957–1972, Best.-Nr. 116: Vorbereitung Ratifizierung 1971–1971, Krimbesuch Brandts, p. 241. Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 207; idem, Begegnungen und Einsichten, p. 462; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 102; Velikzhanina, Preemnikom Brežneva; Schlips ab zum Gespräch. Was Willy Brandt auf der Krim aushandelte, wie er mit dem sowjetischen Parteichef Breschnew baden ging und warum sich der Kanzler so salopp gekleidet an den Verhandlungstisch setzte, in: Stern, no. 40, 23 September 1971, 26–31.

Notes

435

267 Velikžanina, Preemnikom Brežneva; zum Programm siehe AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 430: Krim, 2 Varianten von Besuchsprogramm, no fol. number. 268 AdsD WBA, A 23, folder 100: Krim; A 23.1 – Fotoalben, folder 34: Breschnew und Brandt in Oreanda. Also from on an interview of 7 July 2016 with Fritz Pleitgen, who was in Crimea. 269 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, folder 430: Krim, Oreanda, 17. September 1971, Vermerk: Über Gespräch mit Breschnew während der Fahrt von Simferopol nach Oreanda am Abend des 16. September 1971, no fol. number. 270 Aufzeichnung des Bundeskanzlers Brandt, Oreanda, 17. September 1971, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1971, vol. 2, p. 1384. See also Gottfried Niedhart: ‘The Transformation of the Other Side’. Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and the Liveral Peace Concept, in: Frédéric Bozo/Marie-Pierre Rey/Bernd Rother/N. Piers Ludlow (eds): Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europa, 1945–1990, New York 2012, pp. 149–612, here p. 155. 271 See Costigliola, Reading for Emotion, p. 360; Andrei V. Keller: ‘Muzhskaya druzhba’? Villi Brandt i Leonid Brezhnev v kontekste energeticheskogo dialoga mezhdu FRG i SSSR v1970−1973 gg., in: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (2016), pp. 1−34. 272 Interview with the interpreter who took the minutes, Eggert Hartmann, on 16 December 2015; Aufzeichnung des Bundeskanzlers Brandt, 18.9.1971, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1971, vol. 2, p. 1419; Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 209; idem, Begegnungen und Erinnerungen, pp. 460, 462. 273 Willy Brandt: Vertrauensvolle Gegnerschaft, ursprünglich: Der Spiegel, 15 November 1982, here: Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, Dokument 79, p. 385. 274 Arkhiv Vneshney Politiki Rossiyskoy Federatsii (henceforth: AVP RF), f. 136, op. 55, papka 120, d. 142, l. 1–4. 275 Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 149. 276 Iz vystupleniya GenSeka Brezhneva na obede, dannom v ego chest’ Prezidentom Frantsii Zh. Pompidu v Versale 25.10.1971 g., in: Sbornik osnovnykh dokumentov, p. 393; AVP RF, f. 136, op. 55, d. 9, papka 120, l. 12–14. 277 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Premier tête-à-tête entre Brejnev et Pompidou, 25.10.1971, 15:35–17:10, p. 1. 278 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Quatrième tête-à-tête entre Brejnev et Pompidou, 29.10.1971, 11:20–14:00, pp. 11 f. 279 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Premier tête-à-tête entre Brejnev et Pompidou, 25.10.1971, 15:35–17:10, pp. 5, 12. 280 Ibid., p. 7. 281 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Second tête-à-tête entre Brejnev et Pompidou, 26.10.1971, 16:50–20:15, pp. 8 f. 282 Ibid., p. 1 283 Musael’yan, Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, p. 45; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/754, URSS, Brejnev, Voyage officiel en France du 25–30.10.1971, Hébergement. 284 Iz sovetsko-frantsuzskoy deklaratsii 30 oktyabrya 1971, in: Sbornik osnovnykh dokumentov, p. 549; Yu.V. Dubinin: Diplomaticheskaya byl’. Zapiski posla vo Frantsii, Moscow 1997, pp. 171 ff. 285 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 27. 286 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251, l. 63. 287 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 215, l. 48. 288 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 430: Krim, Bonn, den 18. September 1971, Bundeskanzler, ergänzender Vermerk, no fol. number; Botschafter Sahm, Moskau, an Staatssekretär

436

289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301

302 303

304

305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315

316 317

Notes Frank, 28. April 1973: Gespräch mit Breschnew am 26. April 1973, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1973, vol. 2, pp. 601–603. Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 392. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 103. Ibid., p. 107. Henry A. Kissinger: White House Years. The First Volume of His Classic Memoirs, New York et al. 2011, p. 1551. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 109, 112. Ibid., p. 120. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 265, l. 30. Ibid., l. 32 f. Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten, p. 473; AdsD WBA, fonds A 8, folder 74, fol. 27: Bonn, 19. Mai 1972, Brandt an Breschnew. Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten, p. 453; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Quatrième tête-à-tête, 29.10.1971, pp. 9 f. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 28. Ibid., l. 48; f. 2, op. 1, d. 790, l. 41. Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 250; A.F. Dobrynin: Sugubo doveritel’no. Posol v Vashingtone pri 6i prezidentakh SShA (1962–1986), Moscow 1997, p. 175; see Frank Costigliola: US foreign policy from Kennedy to Johnson, in: Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2, pp. 112−133, here p. 129. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 70, l. 198 f. AdsD WBA, Depositum Brandt, file 434: V.L., Bonn, 30. Juni 1972, Der Staatssekretär: Nur für den BK, streng vertraulich, persönlich, ohne Blattangabe; Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, pp. 186 f. Henry A. Kissinger: Foreword, in: Soviet-American Relations. The Détente Years 1969–1972, ed. by Edward C. Keefer et al., Washington, D.C. 2007, pp. xiii–xiv; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 474, entry of 21 July 1971; see also Arvid Schors: Doppelter Boden. Die SALT-Verhandlungen, 1963–1979, Göttingen 2016, p. 193. See Barbara Keys: Henry Kissinger: The Emotional Statesman, in Diplomatic History 35 (2011) 4, 587−609, here p. 595. Kissinger, Foreword, p. xvi. Ibid., pp. xiii–xiv. RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 329, l. 21. Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 215. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 70, l. 199. V.M. Vinogradov: Diplomatiya: Lyudi i sobytiya. Iz zapisok posla, Moscow 1998, pp. 231 ff. Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 87; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 223; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 83. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 276; Kissinger, Foreword, pp. xv, xiii; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 223. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 251, l. 75 f., 78; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 242. On Kissinger, see Bernd Greiner: Henry Kissinger. Wächter des Imperiums. Eine Biografie, Munich 2020; Mario Del Pero: The Eccentric Realist. Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, Ithaca 2010; Jussi Hanhimäki: The Flawed Architect. Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, New York 2004; Jeremy Suri: Henry Kissinger and the American Century, Cambridge 2007. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1533; cf. also Schors, Doppelter Boden, p. 270. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1533.

Notes 318 319 320 321

322 323 324 325 326 327

328

329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344

345 346 347 348 349

350 351 352

437

Ibid., p. 1538. Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 248. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1534. Henry A. Kissinger: Years of Upheaval. The Second Volume of his Classic Memoirs, London 2011, pp. 292–293; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1017, Ambassadeur Seydoux, Moskau, 20 mai 1972, pour le ministre et le sécretaire générale seulement. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 297 f. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, pp. 307–311, 315; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 298. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, pp. 311. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 298. Cit. Richard Nixon: RN. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, New York et al. 2013, p. 728. Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon: The Soviet Leaders, Washington, undated, https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v14/d232, accessed 14.11.2014. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 265, l. 43, l. 72 : see also Andrei Kozovoi : La rencontre BrejnevNixon de 1972 et la culture de guerre froide soviétique, in : Revue Historique 109 (2009) 4, p. 867−914 ; Donald J. Raleigh : ‘I Speak Frankly Because You Are My Friend’. Leond Ilich Brezhnev’s Personal Relationship with Richard M Nixon, in: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (2018), 1−32. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1629; Nixon, RN, p. 715; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, pp. 280 ff. Cit. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1630; Keefer, Soviet-American Relations, p. 834. Nixon, RN, pp. 716–717. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1639. Schors, Doppelter Boden, pp. 295 f. Nixon, RN, p. 717. Ibid., p. 718. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1521, 1660; Schors, Doppelter Boden, pp. 272, 287. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1650. Nixon, RN, p. 719. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 291 f. Ibid., pp. 292 f.; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1654 ff. Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, pp. 247 f. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1656. Nixon, RN, p. 720. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1658; Nixon, RN, p. 722; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 293; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Voyage en URSS du président, Pitsounda, 12/13. March 1974, p. 2. Nixon, RN, p. 728. Ibid. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 87. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 295, l. 17. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 296, l. 164–166; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 82; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Paris, 6 March 1974, note pour M. le Président de la République, A/S rencontre avec M. Brejnev, 12 and 13 March 1974, p. 2. Sahm an das AA, 28. April 1973, über ZK-Plenum 26./27. April 1973, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1973, vol. 1, p. 608. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 67–71; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 223. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112694: Besuch Breschnew II, Besuche und Reisen in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1973–1974, Bonn, 23. Mai 1973, Entwurf,

438

353 354 355 356 357 358 359

360

361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378

379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387

Notes An den Generalsekretär für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten Herrn Botschafter Dr. Walter Wodak, Außenamt Wien, p. 2; AdsD WBA, fonds A 8, folder 142, fol. 10, Bonn, den 2. Mai 1973, Vermerk: Besuch des Generalsekretärs, hier: Gespräch Staatssekretär–Falin. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 36. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 544, entry of 11 January 1973; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Entretien à Minsk, 11–12 January 1973. Interview with Eggert Hartmann, 16 December 2015. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 151. Nixon, RN, p. 967; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 331. Nixon, RN, p. 957. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112694, 28. Mai 1973, Dr. MeyerLandrut zur Information, p. 3, 6, Bewertung des Breschnew-Besuches aus der Sicht des AA, p. 1. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, reference code 112694, Ergebnisse des Breschnew-Besuchs in Bonn, Juni 1973; AdsD WBA, fonds A 8, folder 187, fol. 3, Interview des Generalsekretärs mit dem ZDF-Journalisten Terjung am 19. Mai 1973. Nixon, RN, p. 962. Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 356. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 11. Nixon, RN, p. 962; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 320. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 386; Nixon, RN 723. Nixon, RN, p. 723. Gespräch Scheel mit Breschnew, 19. Mai 1973, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1973, vol. 2, p. 747; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 321. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 25, 136. Cit. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 25. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 385. Nixon, RN, p. 971. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 324. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112693, BRESHNEW, p. 4. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/678, Paris, 12. October 1971, Le Chef du Protocole, NOTE pour le secretariat Général de la Présidence, p. 2. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Quatrième tête-à-tête, 29.10.1971, p. 2. Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 245. Ibid., p. 246; interview with Eggert Hartmann, 16 December 2015; Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 157; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 113. AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 434: V.L., Herrn Bundesminister, no date, no fol. number; file 435, folder 1: Anruf Podewils, 24. Mai 1973; MD Dr. C.W. Sanne, 28. Mai 1973, An den Chef des Protokolls, 25. Mai 1973. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 324; Nixon, RN, p. 962. Nixon, RN, pp. 962–963. De l’Arc de Triomphe à l’Hôtel de Ville, in: Le Monde, 27 October 1971, p. 7. Cit. Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, pp. 246 f. Nixon, RN, p. 960; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 374. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 378; Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112694, Bonn, 23. Mai 1973, p. 2. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 373. Ibid., p. 383; Nixon, RN, pp. 968–969; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 269. Nixon, RN, p. 968.

Notes

439

388 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 332; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 382. 389 Nixon, RN, p. 968. 390 AdsD WBA, fonds A 8, folder 58: Brief Breschnew an Brandt, Übersetzung 20. März 1973, fol. 226; Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112693, BRESHNEW, p. 5; AVP RF, f. 136, op. 55, d. 9, papka 120, god 1971, l. 4. 391 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/754, URSS Brejnev, Le chef du protocole, NOTE, 27. September 1971, p. 2. 392 Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 187. 393 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, pp. 323 f. 394 Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1517; Years of Upheaval, p. 297. 395 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, pp. 69–71. 396 Keefer, Soviet-American Relations, p. 697. 397 Cit. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 175. 398 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 324. 399 Ibid., p. 331. 400 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 59. 401 Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 263; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 384; Nixon, RN, p. 964; Agreement Between The United States of America and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Prevention of Nuclear War, http://fas.org/nuke/control/prevent/text/ prevent1.htm, accessed 19.9.2016. 402 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, pp. 109 f.; Conversation Between President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, Washington, June 18, 1973. 403 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Troisième entretien, 27.6.1973, 10:35–11:30, p. 7. 404 Ibid., p. 1. 405 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/672, Pitsounda (URSS), Voyages à l’étranger 1974, Programme; 1019, Voyage en URSS du Président, Pitsounda, 12./13.3.1974, pp. 1 f. 406 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1019, Voyage en URSS du Président, Pitsounda, 12./13.3.1974, Entretien de M. le Président avec M. Brejnev à Pitsounda le 12 Mars 1974, de 18:30 à 21:30, p. 3; AVP RF, f. 136, op. 58, d. 11, papka 131, god 1974, l. 2, l. 46 f. 407 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Premier tête-à-tête entre le Président et M. Brejnev, 25.10.1971, 15:35–17:10, p. 4. 408 Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 186; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 148. 409 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 459; Aufzeichnung des Vortragenden Legationsrats I. Klasse Meyer-Landrut, 13. Mai 1974, über die Moskauer Reaktionen auf den Rücktritt Willy Brandts, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1974, vol. 1, p. 624; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 179. 410 Cit. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 176. 411 Cit. Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 459; AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 434: V.L., E.B., Bonn, 7. Mai 1974, Vermerk, no fol. number. 412 Cit. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 176. 413 Ibid., p. 179. 414 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 371 415 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 341; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, pp. 300–302. 416 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1467; Nixon, RN, p. 1148. 417 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval p. 1479; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 305. 418 Nixon, RN, p. 1154. 419 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 1488. 420 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 434: V.L., E.B., Bonn, 7. Mai 1974, Vermerk, no fol. number.

440

Notes

421 Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, Moscow, August 10, 1974, 1747Z, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v16/ d6, accessed 14.11.2014. 422 Aufzeichnung des Vortragenden Legationsrats I. Klasse Meyer-Landrut, 13. Mai 1974, über die Moskauer Reaktionen auf den Rücktritt Willy Brandts, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1974, vol. 1, p. 624. 423 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 435, 10. Mai 1973, Moskau, Heinz Lathe an Chefredakteur Robert Schmelzer. 424 AdsD, Depositum Bahr, file 434: V.L., folder 190: Minister an Herrn Bundeskanzler, persönlich und verschlossen, fol. 6. 425 AdsD WBA, fonds A 9, folder 7, 31. März 1975, Hochverehrter Herr Brandt, no fol. number. 426 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Second tête-à-tête entre le Président et M. Brejnev, 26.10.1971, p. 2. 427 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 385; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 65. 428 Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon: The Soviet Leaders. 429 Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1536. 430 Conversation Between President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev, Washington, June 18, 1973, 11:31 a.m.–12:30 p.m., https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v15/d123, accessed 14.11.2014; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 17; Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 418. 431 Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 373; Nixon, RN, p. 971. 432 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 95; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 359. 433 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 2/1018, Second tête-à-tête entre le Président et M. Brejnev, 26.10.1971, p. 4. 434 Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1633; idem, Years of Upheaval, p. 294; Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112694, Bonn, 23. Mai 1973, Entwurf an Wodak, p. 2; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 305. 435 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, pp. 51 f., 61 f.; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 342, l. 200. 436 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 127 f. 437 Schors, Doppelter Boden, p. 347. 438 Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft) to President Ford, Washington, October 24, 1974, https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v16/d65; Memorandum From the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Scowcroft) to President Ford, Washington, October 25, 1974, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v16/d68, both accessed 14.11.2014. 439 Ford, A Time to Heal, p. 213. 440 Ibid., p. 214; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 110. 441 Ford, A Time to Heal, p. 216; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 349. 442 Ford, A Time to Heal, p. 216. 443 Ibid., p. 217. 444 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 352; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 325; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 281. 445 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 128; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 111. 446 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 60, d. 28, papka 270, god 1973/74, O reaktsii v SShA na dostignutuyu vo Vladivostoke dogovorennost’, l. 34; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 282; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XVI, Soviet Union, August 1974– December 1976, p. 1032: 277. Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, April 8, 1976,

Notes

447 448

449

450

451 452 453 454 455

456 457 458 459 460 461 462

463 464

465 466 467

468 469 470 471 472

441

4:54–5:55 p.m., https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v16/d277, accessed 24.11.2014. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 100. Deutsch-sowjetisches Regierungsgespräch in Helsinki, 31.7.1975, mit: K, Genscher, Sanne, Breschnew, Gromyko, Blatow, Bondarenko, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1975, vol. 1, p. 1099; Gespräch Schmidt mit Breschnew, 23.11.1981, Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik, p. 1820. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/3356, Voyage de M. Brejnev, 4–7.12.1974, Le Chef du protocole, Note pour M. Robin, Paris, 30 November 1974: Visite de M. Brejnev, p. 1; Le Chef du protocole, Paris, 25.11.1974, Quai d’Orsay, Note pour M. Sauzay: Séjour à Paris de M. Brejnev, p. 1. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing: Macht und Leben. Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1988, p. 30; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/3356, Voyage de M. Brejnev, Cérémonial, p. 2. Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 31. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 128. Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 32. Dubinin, Diplomaticheskaya byl’, pp. 185 f. Ibid., p. 187; AVP RF, f. 136, op. 58, d. 11, papka 131, god 1974, l. 17 ff. See also GeorgesHenri Soutou: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his Vision of the End of the Cold War, in: Bozo/Rey/Rother/Ludlow, Visions of the End of the Cold War, pp. 208−222. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 205. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/3342 Voyage officiel en URSS, 14–18 October 1975, Programme. Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 37. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 176. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/1092, Visite officielle de M. Brejnev, 20–22 June 1977, Paris, 18 May 1977, Le Chef de Cabinet – Note à l’attention de M. le Président, p. 1; Paris, 17 February 1977, Note pour M. le Président; 30 March 1977, lettre du Président à Brejnev; lettre de Brejnev, 3 February 1977; 22 September 1976, Note pour le Président, Audience de Tchervnonenko, p. 2. Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/1092, Extrait du relevé de décisions du Conseil des ministres du 23 juin 1977. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133148: Stellung Breschnews, 1979, Bonn, 29. März 1979, Herrn Staatssekretär zur Unterrichtung, Betr.: Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, p. 1. Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 45. Ibid., pp. 45 f. Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, interview with Der Spiegel, 18 May 1981, p. 311; see also Michael Cotey Morgan: The Final Act. The Helsinki Accords and the Transformaton of the Cold War, Princeton 2018, p. 210. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 18. September 1975, Betr.: Stellung Breschnews, p. 1. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 128. Ibid., p. 131. See also V.G. Grushko: Sud’ba razvedchika. Kniga vospominaniy, Moscow 1997, p. 127. Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 500. Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 81.

442

Notes

473 Ford, A Time to Heal, p. 303. 474 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 131. 475 Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 344; Dubinin, Diplomaticheskaya byl’, p. 208; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 380, p. 9. 476 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 37, document 4: Zapiska KGB ‘O vrazhdebnoy deyatel’nosti tak nazyvaemoy “gruppy sodeystviya vypolneniya Khel’sinskikh soglasheniy” ’, 15.11.1976, l. 1 ff. 477 Cf. also Schors, Doppelter Boden, p. 463. 478 Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 283; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 453; Jimmy Carter: Keeping Faith. Memoirs of a President, London 1982, p. 217. 479 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 342, d. 28, O nekotorykh elementakh politicheskoy filosofii i stilya prezidenta Kartera (spravka), 23.4.1979 g., l. 76; d. 30: Podborki vyskazaniy prezidenta Kartera i predstaviteley administratsii po sovetskim-amerikanskim otnosheniyam […], l. 30; Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 146, 149; see also Bernd Rother: Common Security as a Way to Overcome the (Second) Cold War? Willy Brandt’s Strategy for Peace in the 1980s, in: Bozo/Rey/Ludlow/Rother, Visions of the End of the Cold War, pp. 239−252, here p. 239; Nancy Mitchell: The Cold War and Jimmy Carter, in: The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, pp. 66−88, here p. 71. 480 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 343, d. 30 (god 1979), l. 30. 481 Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 259. 482 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 342, d. 28, Ob amerikanskoy ‘Kampanii v zashchitu prav cheloveka’ na sovremennom etape, 26.12.1979, l. 154 f. 483 Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 146; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 84. 484 Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 217. 485 Brandt, Erinnerungen, p. 196; Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 45; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 84. 486 Cit. Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 46. 487 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 815, entry of 6 August 1977. 488 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 312, l. 127 f. 489 Ibid., l. 128; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 801, entry of 14 July 1977; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 305. 490 Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 219–221. 491 Ibid., p. 221. 492 Gespräch BK mit Breschnew auf Schloß Gymnich, 5.5.1978, 10:00–12:15 Uhr, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1978, vol. 1, p. 652. 493 Interview with Eggert Hartmann, 16 December 2015; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 184 f. 494 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 815, entry of 6 August 1977; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 89. 495 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 90. 496 Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1978, vol. 1, pp. 648, 652. 497 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 402, l. 97. 498 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, pp. 90 ff.; Gespräch BK mit Breschnew auf Schloß Gymnich, 5.5.1978, Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik, pp. 652, 661; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 191, 196. 499 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 385. 500 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 321, 323 f. 501 Ibid., pp. 322 f.

Notes

443

502 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, pp. 96, 97. 503 Interview with Eggert Hartmann, 16 December 2016; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 909, entry of 4 May 1978; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 209; Gespräch BK mit Breschnew auf Schloß Gymnich, 5.5.1978, Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik, pp. 661, 692; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 98. 504 Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 239. 505 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, vol. VI, Soviet Union, 197. Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) to President Carter, Washington, May 29, 1979, p. 570. https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v06/d197, accessed 05.11.2020. 506 Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 243 f. 507 Ibid., p. 245. 508 Brutents, Tridctsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 403. 509 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, pp. 356 ff. 510 Edvard Gerek o Leonide Brezhneve, p. 14. 511 Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 244 f.; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 360; AVP RF, f. 156, god 1979, op. 46, papka 69, d. 7, l. 62; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 453. 512 AVP RF, f. 156, god 1979, op. 46, papka 69, d. 7, l. 62 f. 513 Ibid.; Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 249. 514 AVP RF, f. 156, god 1979, op. 46, papka 69, d. 7, l. 63; Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 258. 515 Cit. Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 361; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 454. 516 Melor Sturua: Dve fotografii k odnomu portretu, in: Aksyutin, Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, pp. 167–178, here p. 173. 517 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 368. 518 Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 261; Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 371; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 454; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 365. 519 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 371. 520 Ibid., p. 372; Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 259. 521 Sturua, Dve fotografii k odnomu portretu, p. 175. 522 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 125; Gespräch BK Schmidt mit Breschnew, 23. November 1981, 11–14 Uhr, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1981, vol. 3, pp. 1793, 1851. 523 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 333. 524 Mitchell, The Cold War and Jimmy Carter, pp. 74 f. 525 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 306; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, pp. 283 f.; Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 222. 526 Cf. Schors, Doppelter Boden, p. 381. 527 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 508. 528 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 524, l. 40. 529 Ibid., l. 9, 14. 530 Arbatov, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, p. 78; Arkadiy Nikolayevich Shevchenko: Mein Bruch mit Moskau, 5th edition, Bergisch Gladbach 1986, p. 244; cf. also Schors, Doppelter Boden, p. 164. 531 Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 294. 532 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 200. 533 Ibid., p. 9; Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 294. 534 Cit. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 271. 535 Ibid., p. 502. 536 Manfred Sapper: Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges auf die Sowjetgesellschaft. Eine Studie zum Legitimitätsverlust des Militärischen in der Perestrojka, Münster 1994,

444

537 538 539 540 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554

555 556 557 558 559

560 561

Notes p. 75; Sarah E. Mendelson: Changing Course. Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Princeton 1998, p. 53; William Maley: The Afghanistan Wars, London 2002, p. 33; Gregory Feifer: The Great Gamble. The Soviet War in Afghanistan, New York 2009, p. 11; Diego Cordovez/Selig S. Harrison: Out of Afghanistan. The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford 1995, p. 48; Sekretnyye dokumenty iz osobykh papok: Afganistan, in: Voprosy istorii (1993) 3, pp. 3–33; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 386 f.; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 485; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 151. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 981, entry of 10 December 1979, see also fn. 183 on p. 993; vol. 2, p. 960. Ibid. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 21: ‘K polozhenii v “A” ’, 12.12.1979 g., l. 1. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 2, p. 961. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 21, l. 1; see also Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 483, 485. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 32: O khode vypolneniya postanovleniya TsK KPSS No. II 176/125 ot 12/12 1979 g., l. 1. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 123; Arbatov, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, p. 77; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 88. Afganistan. God spustya, in: Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 2, February 1990, pp. 92–96. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 405. Arbatov, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, p. 77. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, pp. 451 f. Sitzung des Politbüros des Zentralkomitees der KPdSU, 17. März 1979, in: Sapper, Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges, p. 375. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 25: Zapis’ besedy Brezhneva s N.M. Taraki, 20.3.1979 g., l. 4. Sitzung des Politbüros des Zentralkomitees der KPdSU, 19.3.1979, in: Sapper, Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges, p. 395. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 26: Zapis’ besedy Kosygina, Gromyko, Ustinova, Ponomareva s Taraki, 20.3.1979 g., l. 2. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 25, l. 4. Ibid. Bernhard Chiari: Kabul, 1979: Militärische Intervention und das Scheitern der sowjetischen Dritte-Welt-Politik in Afghanistan, in: Hilger, Die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Welt, pp. 259–280, here p. 277. Sapper, Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges, p. 71; Chiari, Kabul, 1979, p. 274; Mendelson, Changing Course, p. 49. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 123; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 151; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 969, entry of 11 September 1979. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 979, entry of 22 November 1979. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 513: Noyabr’skiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 27.11.1979 g. AdsD WBA, fonds A 9, folder 7: Inoffizielle Übersetzung, An Brandt, no date [after the invasion of Afghanistan], no fol. number; Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 467. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 35: Zapiska Andropova, Gromyko, Ustinova, Ponomareva ‘K sobytiyam v Afganistane 27–28.12.1979 g., TsK KPSS, 31.12.1979, l. 2–4. AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 342, d. 28, god 1979, Obzory pressy, l. 110 f., 120, 124 f., 146; d. 29: Dnevnik po voenno-politicheskim voprosam i problemam razoruzheniya, l. 4, 12; papka 346, d. 53, l. 22 ff., l. 50 ff., 103, 137.

Notes

445

562 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 91; Deutsch-sowjetisches Regierungsgespräch in Moskau, 1.7.1980, 11–12:30 Uhr im Katharinensaal des Kreml, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1980, vol. 2, p. 1035. 563 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 387. 564 AdsD WBA, fonds A 11.15, folder 06, fols 11 f. 565 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 508; AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 342, d. 28, (god 1979), l. 88; Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/1095, 7 December 1979, lettre de M. le Président à M. Brejnev. 566 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 342, d. 28 (god 1979), l. 146; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 237. 567 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/1095, Message de M. Brejnev au M. le Président, 11 October 1979. 568 AdsD WBA, fonds A 9, folder 7: An Brandt, 7. November 1979, no fol. number. 569 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, pp. 246 f. 570 Gespräch Schmidt mit Breschnew, 23.11.1981, Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik, p. 1823. 571 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 331, l. 5 ff. 572 Ibid., l. 8. 573 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, papka 342, d. 28 (god 1979), l. 146; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 237. 574 Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 240. 575 AVP RF, f. 129, op. 65, d. 29, papka 342 (god 1979), l. 55. 576 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 506; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 247. 577 Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 471; RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 14, dokument 34: Ob otvete na obrashcheniye prezidenta Kartera, l. 2–4; Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 472. 578 Sapper, Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges, pp. 83, 91. 579 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 524, l. 10. 580 Chiari, Kabul, 1979, p. 260. 581 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 34, dokument 3, l. 2: Sovershenno sekretno. Osobaya papka, 27.1.1980 g. 582 Fond Gorbacheva, f. 3, op. 1, kartochka 14965, April 1980, l. 2. 583 Archives nationales Paris, 5 AG 3/1095, URSS entretien de Varsovie avec M. Brejnev et M. Guerek, 19 May 1980, 10:15–13:15, pp. 3–5. 584 AdsD WBA, fonds A 9, folder 7: Breschnew an Brandt vom 11. März 1980; 30. Juni 1981, Werter Vorsitzender Willy Brandt, Dr. Thomas Mirow, 6. Juli 1981, Gespräch Willy Brandt mit Gensek, Brief von Breschnew am 1. März 1982; Brandt an Breschnew am 17. März 1982, no fol. number. 585 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, fonds 133135: Reise Schmidt in die Sowjetunion, 1980, Unter Verschluß, Gespräche des Bundesministers mit dem BK, ohne Blattangabe; Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1980, vol. 1, p. 1017; AVP RF, f. 129, op. 68, d. 27, papka 391, god 1982, l. 7; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 277; AdsD WBA, fonds A 11.4, folder 108: Biermann an Peter Glotz, WB zur Kenntnis, betr.: Breschnew-Rede auf dem Komsomol-Kongress am 18. Mai 1982, fol. 150. 586 Andrzej Skrzypek: Polen im Sowjetimperium. Die polnisch-russischen Beziehungen von 1944 bis 1989, Klagenfurt 2016, pp. 279 ff. 587 Michael Kubina/Manfred Wilke: Einleitung, in: idem (eds): ‘Hart und kompromißlos durchgreifen’. Die SED contra Polen 1980/81. Geheimakten der SED-Führung über die Unterdrückung der polnischen Demokratiebewegung, Berlin 1995, pp. 19–22; Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 60. 588 Arbatov, Iz nedavnego proshlogo, p. 75.

446

Notes

589 See also the many entries in his notebooks documenting or commenting on conversations with the Polish leaders. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 1022 ff., entries of 26 August, 11 September, 30 September, 30 October, 13 November, 14 November, 27 November, 5 December 1980; pp. 1061 ff. – 29 January, 21 February, 30. March, 2 April, 15 April, 21 April, 30 April, 16 June, 20 July, 21 July, 11–15 August, 29 September, 19 October, 4 December, 7 December, 15 December, 19 December 1981. 590 Aufzeichnung des Legationsrats I. Klasse Libal, Moskau, 19. Mai 1981: Perspektiven der Entwicklung um Polen, der Faktor Sowjetunion, in: Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1981, vol. 2, p. 801. 591 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 550: Fevral’skiy Plenum, stenogramma zasedaniya, 20.2.1981 g., l. 4. 592 Dokumenty ‘komissii Suslova’. Sobytiya v Pol’she v 1981 g, in: Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya, no. 1, 1994, 84–105, here p. 99; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 570, l. 56; f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 49: Zasedaniye Politbyuro 14.1.1982 g. Ob itogakh peregovorov s chlenom PB PORP, MID Pol’skoy Narodnoy Respubliki Yu. Chirekom, l. 3. 593 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 66, dokument 1: Vypiska iz protokola No. 210 zasedaniya Politbyuro 25.8.1980 g. K voprosu o polozhenii v PNR, l. 1. Niederschrift über das Treffen zwischen Genossen Leonid Breschnew und Genossen Erich Honecker am 3. August 1981 auf der Krim, in: Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 333; Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 143; Skrzypek, Polen im Sowjetimperium, p. 280. 594 Skrzypek, Polen im Sowjetimperium, p. 282. 595 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 35: K itogam vizita v SSSR pervogo sekretarya PORP t. S. Kanya i predsedatelya SovMin PNR t. Yu. Pin’kovskogo 31.10.1980, l. 3. 596 Ibid., l. 2 f. 597 Ibid., l. 3. 598 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 51; see also Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1043, entry of 5 December 1980. 599 Stenografische Niederschrift des Treffens führender Repräsentanten der Teilnehmerstaaten des Warschauer Vertrages am 5. Dezember 1980 in Moskau, in: Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 188. 600 Ibid., p. 190. 601 Cit. Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 58. 602 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 39: K voprosu o polozhenii v Pol’she, 2.4.1981 g., zasedaniye Politbyuro 2.4.1981 g., l. 3; Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 114. 603 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 40: Ob itogakh vstrechi Andropova i Ustinova s pol’skimi druz’yami, zasedaniye Politbyuro, 9.4.1981 g., l. 2. 604 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 39, l. 6 f.; Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 117; Vermerk über das Treffen der Genossen Leonid Breschnew, Erich Honecker und Gustav Husak am 16. Mai 1981 im Kreml in Moskau, in: Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 271. 605 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 40, l. 2 f. 606 Ibid., l. 3. 607 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, pp. 143, 197, 255; RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 39, l. 3. 608 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 41: O besede L.I. Brezhneva s pervym sekretarem Pol’shi Kanei, 16.04.1981 g., l. 2; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1068, entry of 15 [sic] April 1981. 609 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 42: Ob itogakh peregovorov delegatsii KPSS s rukovodstvom PORP, zasedaniye Politbyuro 30.4.1981 g., l. 4.

Notes

447

610 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 66, dokument 3: Vypiska iz protokola No. 7 zasedaniya Politbyuro ot 23.4.1981 g. O razvitii obstanovki v Pol’she i nekotorykh shagakh s nashey storony, l. 2. 611 Ibid., l. 5 f.; Vermerk über das Treffen der Genossen Leonid Breschnew, Erich Honecker und Gustav Husak am 16. Mai 1981 im Kreml in Moskau, in: Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 284. 612 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 175. 613 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 44: Ob informatsii o besede Brezhneva s Kaney, l. 2; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1079, entry 16 June 1980. 614 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 44, l. 3. 615 Telefonat Breschnews mit Kania am 21. Juli 1981, fn. 6, in: Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 332; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1087, entry of 21 July 1981. 616 Fond Gorbacheva, f. 5, op. 1, kartochka 20662: 3 avgusta 1981 g.: Informaciya o zasedanii Komissii Politbyuro po pol’skomu voprosu i spravka ‘Pol’sha posle IX s”ezda’, l. 3; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 1095 f., entry of 14 and 15 August 1981. 617 Cit. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 458. 618 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1095, entry of 11–13 August 1980. 619 Niederschrift über das Treffen zwischen Genossen Leonid Breschnew und Genossen Erich Honecker am 3. August 1981 auf der Krim, in: Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 335. 620 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 264. 621 Ibid., p. 268. 622 Ibid., p. 265. 623 Fonds Gorbacheva, f. 5, op. 1, kartochka 20662, l. 2, 4. 624 Fonds Gorbacheva, f. 5, op. 1, kartochka 17686, 13 avgusta 1981 g.: O politicheskom krizise v Pol’she, G.Kh. Shakhnazarov, l. 3. 625 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 46: Obmen mneniyami po pol’skomu voprosu, 10.9.1981 g., l. 2 f. 626 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 47: Telegamma sovposla iz Berlina, 15.9.1981 g., zasedaniye Politbyuro 17.9.1981 g., l. 2. 627 RGANI, f. 89, perecen’ 42, dokument 48: Zasedaniye Politbyuro, 29.10.1981 g., Ob itogakh poezdki t. Rusakova v GDR, ChSSR, VNR i NRB, l. 4, 6. 628 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1110, entry of 19 October 1981. 629 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 66, dokument 4: Zapis’ telefonnogo razgovora Brezhneva s Yaruzel’skim, 19.10.1981 g., l. 3. 630 Ibid., l. 2, 5. 631 Dokumenty ‘komissii Suslova’, p. 101; Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 270. 632 RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 66, dokument 5: O priyëme v SSSR partiyno-gosudarstvennyye delegatsii PNR i ustnom poslanii t. Brezhneva Yaruzel’skomu, pp. 4 f. 633 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 426; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1118, entry of 7 December 1981. 634 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 426. 635 Ibid., p. 430. 636 Dokumenty ‘komissii Suslova’, p. 99. 637 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1118, entry of 7 December 1981. 638 Dokumenty ‘komissii Suslova’, p. 100. 639 Ibid.

448

Notes

640 Ibid., p. 99. 641 RGANI, f. 89, perecen’ 66, dokument 6: O Pol’she, zasedaniye Politbyuro, 10.12.1981 g., l. 10. 642 Ibid. 643 Dokumenty ‘komissii Suslova’, p. 102. 644 Ibid. 645 Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 584; Kubina/Wilke, Hart und kompromißlos, p. 25 (Introduction). 646 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 443. 647 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169: Sowjetische Führung, Stellung Breschnews, 1980–1982, Fernschreiben, 30. September 1982, Betr.: Moskau. Besuch der indischen Ministerpräsidentin, hier: Eindruck von sowjetischer Führung, no fol. number. 648 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 18. September 1975, Betr.: Stellung Breschnews, p. 3. 649 Ibid., Bonn, den 3. November 1976, Die zentralen Institutionen des sowjetischen Herrschaftsapparats, p. 4. 650 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 500. 651 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 384. 652 Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 71. 653 Nixon, RN, p. 728. 654 Dobrynin, Sugubo doveritel’no, p. 301. 655 Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, p. 500.

Chapter 9: Craving Glory and Physical Decline, or the Loneliness of the General Secretary 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev. Stranitsy iz zhizni i deyatel’nosti (fotodokumenty), Moscow 1981, no page number. Ibid. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 489. Gensek i fotograf. General Secretary and photographer. 100-letnemu yubileyu L.I. Brezhneva posvyashchayetsya, fotografii lichnogo fotografa L.I. Brezhneva Vladimira Musael’yana, Moscow 2006, p. 133. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 457; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 141; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 104. Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, p. 154. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 199. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 11. Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, p. 158. Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 242–244. Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th, revised edition, Tübingen 1976, p. 147; E.A. Rees: Leader Cults: Varieties, Preconditions and Function, in: Balázs Apor et al. (eds): The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships.

Notes

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

449

Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, Houndmills 2004, pp. 3–28, here p. 4; Jan Plamper: The Stalin Cult. A Study in the Alchemy of Power, New Haven, London 2012. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 35–36; Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, p. 418; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 289. Soobshcheniye, Pravda, 24 January 1969, 2. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 348; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 291. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 318, l. 27. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 468, l. 38. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 550, l. 37. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 295. l. 17. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 318, l. 33. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 403, l. 56. Rodionov, Kak nachinalsya zastoy, p. 160. The collection is currently held by the Historical Museum in Kam’yans’ke, which turned them into an exhibition complete with catalogue in 2006: Muzey Istorii Dneprodzerzhinska (ed.): I lichno Leonidu Il’ichu, Dneprodzerzhinsk 2006. RGANI, f. 89, perechen’ 42, dokument 67: Zasedaniye Politbyuro, 27.4.1976 g., l. 3. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 256; Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev: Stranitsy zhizni – stranitsy epokhi. Fotodokumenty, Moscow 1976; Slavnyy syn kommunisticheskoy partii i Sovetskogo naroda. K 70-letiyu General’nogo sekretarya TsK KPSS tovarishcha Leonida Il’icha Brezhneva, Moscow 1977; Povest’ o kommuniste, directed by: Igor’ Bessarabov, Aleksandr Kochetkov, Filmstudio: Tsentrnauchfil’m 1976. http://heroesoforderandchaos.ru/img.php?url=http://cs320730.vk.me/v320730876/25ea/ hgkkEkrKuPU.jpg, accessed 16.6.2017. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Bonn, den 22. Dezember 1976, Über Herrn Staatssekretär Herrn Bundesminister zur Information vorgelegt, Betr.: Der 70. Geburtstag Breschnews, p. 2. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 285. Syn partii, syn naroda: Metodicheskiye rekomendatsii massovym bibliotekam po propogande knigi tov. Brezhneva ‘Vospominaniya’, Moscow 1981. RGANI, f. 5, op. 75, d. 206: Otkliki radioslushateley na radioperedachu ‘Po stranitsam vospominaniy L.I. Brezhneva “Malaya zemlya” ’, l. 6. Ibid., l. 8. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, 22. Dezember 1981, Fernschreiben, Betr.: Feierlichkeiten aus Anlaß des 75. Geburtstags Breschnews, no fol. number. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 228. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 311. Ibid., p. 285. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, Leningrad, nachrichtlich: Moskau, Betr.: Stellung Breschnews, no fol. number; Leningrad, 16. August 1982, no fol. number; Viktor Golyavkin: Yubileynaya rech’, in: Avrora, December 1981, p. 75. Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete, pp. 268 f. Ibid., p. 493. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Der 70. Geburtstag Breschnews, p. 4. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 128. Ibid., pp. 85 f.

450

Notes

46 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 664, 673, 682; AVP RF, f. 156, god 1979, op. 46, papka 69, d. 7, l. 70 ff. 47 Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 258. 48 Churbanov, Moy test’, pp. 132 f. 49 Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 258. 50 Musael’yan, Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, p. 47. 51 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 894. 52 K 75 godam Leonid Il’ich sovsem rasslabilsya. Beseda nashego korrespondenta Pavla Korobova s vrachem Mikhailom Kosarevym, in: Vlast’, no. 44, 11–17.11.2002, 72; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 554. 53 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 85. 54 Kevorkov, Moscow, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 129; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 88. 55 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 88. 56 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 68. 57 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, pp. 138 f.; Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 584 f. 58 K 75 godam Leonid Il’ich sovsem rasslabilsya, p. 72. 59 Ibid.; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 119; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 554. 60 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 128. 61 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1235, l. 37. 62 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1235, l. 42. 63 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 132. 64 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 176 f. 65 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 132. 66 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 564. 67 K 75 godam Leonid Il’ich sovsem rasslabilsya, p. 72. 68 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, pp. 138 f.; Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 584 f. 69 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 90. 70 Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 106. 71 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 185. 72 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 140; Chernyayev, Sovmestny iskhod, p. 195. 73 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Moskau, 10. März 1976, Botschaft Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Moskau, Betr.: Parteitag der KPdSU, here: personelle Entscheidungen, p. 3. 74 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 617, 724. 75 Ibid., p. 683. 76 Ibid., p. 694. 77 Ibid., p. 703. 78 Ibid., p. 788. 79 Ibid., pp. 772 f. 80 Ibid., pp. 806 f. 81 Ibid., p. 823. 82 Ibid., p. 886. 83 Ibid., p. 889. 84 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133148, Bonn, 29. März 1979, Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, p. 1. 85 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 895 ff. 86 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133148, Bonn, 29. März 1979, Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, p. 2. 87 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 948 ff.

Notes

451

88 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133148, 29. März 1979, Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, p. 1; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 947, 949. 89 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133148, ‘Sowjetunion’, London, 2 April 1979 (ddp), no fol. number. 90 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 148. 91 Andrey Brezhnev: Chto lyubil Brezhnev [s vnukom L.I. Brezhneva A. Brezhnevym besedoval V. Tseplyayev], in: Argumenty i fakty, 2002, no. 45 (November), 23. 92 K 75 godam Leonid Il’ich sovsem rasslabilsya, 72. 93 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 148. 94 Ibid.; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1000. 95 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 980, 1136. 96 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 130. 97 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 157. 98 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 887. 99 Ibid., pp. 533, 809, 833, 841 f., 850 f., 857, 911, 927, 1110. 100 Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 205. 101 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, 1. April 1982, Fernschreiben: Betr. Sowjetische Führung, hier: Beobachtungen und Gerüchte, no fol. number. 102 Ibid., Leningrad, 4. August 1982, Betr.: Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, p. 1; Kolesnichenko, Kak popast’ v istoriyu, p. 29; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, pp. 96 f. 103 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, 1. April 1982, no fol. number. 104 Ibid., Leningrad, 4. August 1982, Betr.: Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, p. 1; Kolesnichenko, Kak popast’ v istoriyu, p. 29; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, pp. 96 f. 105 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 2, pp. 1081–1090. 106 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 98. 107 Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 281. 108 Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 6, p. 321, http://www.willy-brandt.de/fileadmin/stiftung/ Downloads/Berliner_Ausgabe/BA_06_gesamt.pdf, accessed 15.10.2014; vol. 9, p. 384. 109 Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, pp. 45. 110 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, 12. März 1982, Betr.: Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, no fol. number. 111 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 271. 112 Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 155. 113 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 18. September 1975, Betr.: Stellung Breschnews, p. 2. 114 RZB-Exklusiv-Gespräch: Mit kleinen Schritten erfolgreich zum Ziel [interview with Dr Wilhelm Osing], in: Rheinisches Zahnärzteblatt April 1998, no. 4, F 5892, 4−8, here 7; Torsten Casimir: Ein Mann mit Neigung zum Löcherstopfen, Rheinische Post, 27 November 1996. I am deeply grateful to Dr Osing for telling me not only about the trips he undertook with his colleague Conrad Jakob to treat Brezhnev, but also about his special relationship with the latter; Brezhnev also invited him to go hunting in Zavidovo, to the Caucasus, and twice invited his whole family to spend a summer holiday at the Kremlin residence in Crimea. However, he still feels bound by medical confidentiality and hence did not relate what kind of treatment he administered. 115 Sukhodrev, Yazyk moy, p. 359; Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 95; Brezhnev, Chto lyubil Brezhnev, p. 23.

452

Notes

116 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 626, 629, 633, 637, 639, 648, 655, 658, 661; Grishin, Katastrofa, p. 38; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 554. 117 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, 12. März 1982, Betr.: Gesundheitszustand Breschnews, no fol. number; Rodionov, Kak nachinalsya zastoy, p. 152. 118 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133148, ‘Sowjetunion’, London, 2. April 1979 (ddp), no fol. number. 119 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, Leningrad, 4. August 1982, Betr.: Gesundheitszustand Breschnews. 120 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 18. September 1975, p. 2; Bonn, den 3. September 1976, p. 3. 121 Kuznetsov, I Brezhnev takoy molodoy, p. 4; Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 273. 122 Cit, Musael’yan, Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, p. 43. 123 Ibid. 124 Kolesnichenko, Kak popast’ v istoriyu, p. 29. 125 Ibid., p. 29; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 575. 126 Musael’yan, Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, p. 43. 127 Musael’yan, Gensek i fotograf, p. 6. 128 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 575. 129 Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 457; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 141; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 104. 130 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 1235, l. 50–57. 131 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. 1, p. 18. 132 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112753, Bonn, den 3. November 1976, Die zentralen Institutionen des sowjetischen Herrschaftsapparates, p. 7. 133 Cit. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 575. 134 Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 495. 135 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 966. 136 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 347, 417, 452. 137 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 452, l. 1, 163; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 303. 138 RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 467, l. 1; d. 501, l. 9; d. 570, l. 1. 139 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 66; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, pp. 205 f. 140 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 40–42. 141 Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 133169, 12. März 1982, no fol. number. 142 Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 15. 143 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 550, Volkogonov, 7 vozhdey, vol. 2, p. 76. 144 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 167; Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 179. 145 Jaruzelski, Hinter den Türen der Macht, p. 63. 146 Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 131 ff. 147 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 887 f. 148 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 262. 149 Ibid., p. 394. 150 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 776. 151 Brezhneva, Plemyannitsa, p. 398. 152 RGANI, f. 80, op. 1, d. 330, l. 1–16. 153 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 195; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 128. 154 Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 180, 185. 155 Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 761.

Notes 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196

453

RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 391, l. 8; d. 441, l. 3, d. 493, l. 6. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 131. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 632, 660, 671, 673, 684, 763. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 495; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 565. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 188. Ibid., p. 257; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 749, 859. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 1136. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587, l. 1 f.; d. 577, l. 105. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 250. Ibid., p. 251. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. 1, p. 202. Brutents claims Kirilenko had fallen out of favour for raising the issue of Brezhnev’s health; see Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 502. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 166; RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 587, l. 1 f.; d. 577, l. 105; Grushko, Sud’ba razvedchika, p. 130. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, pp. 164, 167; see also Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 353; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 513. Giscard d’Estaing, Macht und Leben, p. 148. Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte, p. 112. Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, p. 403. Velikzhanina, Preyemnikom Brezhneva, pp. 6 f. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 268. Kolesnichenko, Kak popast’ v istoriyu, p. 29. Keworkow, Moskau, KGB, Ostpolitik, p. 197. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 422. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 888, 931. Ibid., pp. 762, 863. Ibid., p. 889. Ibid., pp. 952 f.; Yakovlev, Kak sozdavalis’ memuary Brezhneva, p. 289. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 52. Mlechin, Brezhnev, pp. 539 f.; Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 269; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 30. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 52; Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, pp. 455 f.; Duhamel, The KGB Campaign against Corruption, p. 104. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 795, 890, 897, 975, 999. Ibid., pp. 794, 871. Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 473; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, p. 905. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 129; Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 201; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, p. 296. Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 716, 778, 804, 844, 891, 899, 900, 908, 949, 972, 975. Ibid., pp. 763, 922, 967. Ibid., pp. 645, 674, 805, 811 f., 814, 822. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, pp. 46, 62; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 118. Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 48; Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 1, pp. 662 f. Меdvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 1994, p. 82. Меdvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 100; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 166. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, pp. 505 f.

454

Notes

197 198 199 200

Brezhnev, Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, vol. 2, p. 1119. Меdvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 101. Ibid. Меdvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 102; Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, p. 464; Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 168. 201 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 612; Vadim Boreyko: O bednom Genseke zamolvite slovo: O politike SSSR L.I. Brezhneva, in: Ekspress, 22 December 2006, 21. 202 Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 612; Мedvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 104. 203 Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, p. 155.

Epilogue 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

O material’nom obespechenii sem’i L.I. Brezhneva. Postanovleniye TsK KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR ot 13 noyabrya 1982 g., in: Kommersant” VLAST’, 11–17 November 2002, p. 76; Karpov, Vecherniye besedy, pp. 466 ff.; Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 613. Churbanov, Moy test’, pp. 5, 255. Oberemko, Krivolapaya sud’ba; idem: ‘Garem’ dlya Brezhnevoy. Doch’ genseka lyubila shampanskoye, brillianty i muzhchin, in: Argumenty i fakty, no. 39, 24. September 2008; http://www.aif.ru/society/people/garem_dlya_brezhnevoy_doch_genseka_lyubila_ shampanskoe_brillianty_i_muzhchin, accessed 5.1.2017. Ob uvekovechenii pamyati Leonida Il’icha Brezhneva, in: Kommersant” VLAST’, 11–17 November 2002, p. 76. Musael’yan, Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, p. 162. V Dneprodzerzhinske snesut pamyatnik Brezhnevu, 5 July 2015, https://lenta.ru/ news/2015/07/05/breznevsnoss/, accessed 16.5.2017. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, pp. 168 f.; Medvedev, Chelovek za spinoy, 2010, p. 103. William Taubman: Gorbatschow. Der Mann und seine Zeit. Eine Biographie, Munich 2017, pp. 33 f. See Alexey Yurchak: Everything was Forever, Until it was No More. The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, Oxford 2006. AVP RF, f. 129, op. 68, papka 393, d. 37 (god 1982): Pokhorony Brezhneva Leonida Il’icha. Soboleznovaniya, priezd delegatsii SShA na pokhorony, l. 8, 37a, 96, 102; Brandt, Berliner Ausgabe, vol. 9, pp. 384, 386. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 248. Mlechin, Brezhnev, p. 440. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva, p. 248. Semichastnyy, Bespokoynoye serdtse, p. 417. Politisches Archiv AA, Zwischenarchiv, Best.-Nr. 112694, 28. Mai 1974, Dr. Meyer-Landrut zur Information, p. 6. Bodyul, Dorogoy zhizni, pp. 142 f. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 341. Ibid., p. 488. Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, p. 171. Chazov, Zdorov’ye i vlast’, p. 15. Brutents, Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, p. 499. Bahr, Zu meiner Zeit, pp. 296 f. Chernyayev, Sovmestnyy iskhod, p. 254.

Sources and Bibliography Archives Abbreviations in Russian archival citations f.

fond

fonds

op.

opis’

finding aid

d.

delo

file

l.

list

folio

ob.

oborot

verso

Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen (Archiv FSO) Fonds 01-166: Ėrnst Orlovskij Fonds 01-079: Georgij Davydov Fonds 02-082: György Dalos Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD) der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Willy-Brandt-Archiv (WBA) Fonds A 8: Bundeskanzler und Bundesregierung 1969–1974 Fonds A 9: Geheim Fonds A 11.4: Erich-Ollenhauer-Haus, zentrale Arbeitsgemeinschaften und Verbände Depositum Egon Bahr File 434: V.L. [Valeriy Lednëv] File 435: Besuch Leonid Breschnew 1973 Archives nationales de la République française 5 AG 2: Archives de la présidence de la République, 1969–1974 (Georges Pompidou) 5 AG 3: Archives de la présidence de la République, 1974–1981 (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing) Arhiva Naţională a Republicii Moldova (ANRM) f. R-2848: Sovet Ministrov Moldavskoy respubliki f. R-1936: Narodnyy kontrol’ Arhiva Organizaţiilor Social-Politice a Republicii Moldova (AOSPRM) f. 51: Tsentral’nyy komitet KP Moldavii Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstana (APRK) f. 708: TsK KP Kaz, 1937–1991 f. 811, op. 24: Institut istorii partii Arkhiv Sakharova Folder ‘Sakharov i vlast’, 1966–1986 Fonds: Prezidentskiy Arkhiv (PA)

455

456

Sources and Bibliography

Arkhiv Vneshney Politiki Rossiyskoy Federatsii (AVP RF) f. 129 f. 136 Derzhavniy Arkhiv Dnipropetrovs’koyi Oblasti (DADO), filial Partiynyy Arkhiv f. 18: Dnepropetrovskiy gorodskoy komitet partii f. 19: Dnepropetrovskiy oblastnoy komitet partii f. R-5575: Narodnyy komissariat tyazhelyy promyshlennosti SSSR, upravleniye kadrov i uchebnykh zavedeniy Kamenskiy vecherniy metallurgicheskiy tekhnikum, 1934–1973 f. R-5853: Dneprodzerzhinskiy industrial’nyy institut im. M.I. Arsenicheva Derzhavniy Arkhiv Zaporiz’koyi Oblasti, (DAZO) f. 102: Zaporiz’kiy oblastniy komitet partii, 1939–1962, 1965–1991 f. 157: Zaporiz’ky mis’ki komitet partii, 1930–1991 Fond Gorbacheva f. 5: G.Kh. Shakhnazarov f. 3: V.V. Zagladin Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Rossiyskoy Federatsii (GARF) f. R-7523: Sovet Ministrov SSSR Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Sverdlovskoy oblasti (GASO) f. R-158: Sverdlovskiy okruzhnyy ispolnitel’nyy komitet Sovetov rabochikh, krest’yanskikh i krasnoarmeyskikh deputatov, 1924–1930 f. R-160: Zemel’noye upravleniye ispolnitel’nogo komiteta Sverdlovskogo okruzhnogo Soveta rabochikh, krest’yanskikh i krasnoarmeyskikh deputatov, 1924–1930 Muzey Istorii mista Kam’yans’kogo (Dniprodzerzhinska) (MIK) Autograph collection on L.I. Brezhnev Politisches Archiv des Außenamts Berlin (Politisches Archiv AA) Fonds B 2: Büro Staatssekretäre, 1949–1984 Fonds B 41: Sowjetunion, 1957–1972 Fonds B 41 – Zwischenarchiv: Sowjetunion, 1973–1984 Fonds Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Moskau Rossiyskiy Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE) f. 4372, op. 66: Gosudarstvennyy planovoy komitet pri Sovmine, 1965–1966 gg Rossiyskiy Gosudarstvennyy Arkhiv Noveyshey Istorii (RGANI) f. 1: S”ezdy KPSS f. 2: Plenumy TsK KPSS f. 3: Politbyuro TsK KPSS f. 5: Otdely TsK KPSS f. 10: Mezhdunarodnyye soveshchaniya, vstrechi, konferentsii predstaviteley kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii sotsialisticheskikh, kapitalisticheskikh, razvivayushchikhsya stran f. 80: Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev Rossiyskiy Gosudarstevnnyy Arkhiv Social’no-Politicheskoy Istorii (RGASPI) f. 84: Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan f. 666: Petr Efimovich Shelest Tsentr Dokumentatsii Obshchestvennykh Organisatsii Sverdlovskoy Oblasti (TsDOOSO) f. 4: Sverdlovskiy obkom, partiynyye dokumenty f. 6: Sverdlovskiy okruzhkom VKP(b), 1923–1930 f. 434: Bisertskiy rayonnyy komitet VKP(b) Tsentral’nyy Arkhiv Ministerstva Oborony (TsAMO) f. 32 f. 33

Sources and Bibliography

457

f. 141 f. 224 f. 276 f. 42426

Memoirs and documents Abrasimov, Petr: Vospominaya proshedshiye gody. Chetvert’ veka posla Sovetskogo Soyuza, Moscow 1992 Aksyutin, Yu.V. (ed.): L.I. Brezhnev. Materialy k biografii, Moscow 1991 Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. by Institut für Zeitgeschichte by commission of the Auswärtiges Amt [German Foreign Office], Munich 2000 ff. Aleksandrov-Agentov, A.M.: Ot Kollontay do Gorbacheva. Vospominaniya diplomata, sovetnika A.A. Gromyko, pomoshchnika L.I. Brezhneva, Yu.V. Andropova, K.U. Chernenko i M.S. Gorbacheva, Moscow 1994 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Andrey: 20 let ryadom s Brezhnevym, in: Voskresen’ye, 1993, no. 2, 18–21 Andronov, Iona: Dorogami voyny, in: Novoye vremya, 1972, no. 9, 18–24 Arbatov, Georgiy : Chelovek sistemy. Nablyudeniya i razmyshleniya ochevidtsa eye raspada, Moscow 2002 Arbatov, Georgiy: Zatyanuvsheesya vyzdorovleniye (1953–1985). Svidetel’stvo sovremennika, Moscow 1991 Ashimbayev, Daniyar/Khlyupin, Vitaliy : Kazakhstan. Istoriya vlasti, opyt rekonstruktsii, AlmaAta 2008 Attwood, William: The Reds and the Blacks. A Personal Adventure, London 1967 Bahr, Egon: Zu meiner Zeit, 3rd edition, Munich 1996 Bardin, Ivan Pavlovich: Izbrannyye trudy v 2kh tomakh, vol. 1, Moscow 1963 Bilak, Vasil: Wir riefen Moskau zu Hilfe. Der ‘Prager Frühling’ aus der Sicht eines Beteiligten, Berlin 2006 Bodyul, I.I.: Dorogoy zhizni. Vremya, sobytiya, razdum’ya, Chişinău 2002 Bovin, Aleksandr: XX vek kak zhizn’. Vospominaniya, Moscow 2003 Brandt, Willy: Begegnungen und Einsichten. Die Jahre 1960–1975, Hamburg 1976 Brandt, Willy: Berliner Ausgabe, ed. by Helga Grebing, Gregor Schöllgen and Heinrich August Winkler, 10 vols, Bonn 2000–2009, http://www.willy-brandt.de/fileadmin/stiftung/ Downloads/Berliner_Ausgabe/BA_06_gesamt.pdf, http://www.willy-brandt.de/fileadmin/ stiftung/Downloads/Berliner_Ausgabe/BA_09_gesamt.pdf, both accessed 15.10.2014 Brandt, Willy: Erinnerungen. Mit den ‘Notizen zum Fall G’, Munich 2003 Brezhnev, Andrey: Chto lyubil Brezhnev: [s vnukom L.I.B. A. Brezhnevym besedoval V. Tseplyayev], in: Argumenty i fakty, 2002, no. 45 (November), 23 Brezhnev, Leonid: Trilogy. Little Land, Rebirth, The Virgin Lands, Moscow 1980 Brezhnev, Leonid: Memoirs, Oxford 1982 Brezhnev, L.I.: Glavy iz knigi ‘Vospominaniya’. Moldavskaya vesna, Kosmicheskiy Oktyabr’, in: Novyy mir 59 (1983) no. 1, 3–67 Brezhnev, L., sekretar’ TsK KP (b) Moldavii: Kritika i samokritika – ispytannyy metod vospitaniya kadrov, in: Bol’shevik, no. 17, September 1952, 50–58 Brezhnev, L.I.: Leninskim Kursom, 9 vols, Moscow 1970–1982 Brezhnev, L.I.: ‘Vo imya dela partii, dela naroda.’ Vrucheniye Leninskoy premii General’nomu Sekretaryu TsK KPSS Predsedatelyu Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR L.I. Brezhnevu, 31 marta 1980, Moscow 1980

458

Sources and Bibliography

Brezhnev, L.I.: Voprosy upravleniya ekonomikoy razvitogo sotsialisticheskogo obshchestva. Rechi, doklady, vystupleniya, Moscow 1976 Brezhneva, Luba: The World I Left Behind. Pieces of a Past, New York 1995 Brezhneva, Lyubov’: Plemyannica Genseka, Moscow 1999 Brutents, Karen N.: Tridtsat’ let na staroy ploshchadi, Moscow 1998 Bukovskiy, Vladimir: Moskovskiy protsess, Paris 1996 Burlatsky, Fedor: Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring. The Era of Khrushchev through the Eyes of his Adviser, New York 1988 Carter, Jimmy: Keeping Faith. Memoirs of a President, London 1982 Chazov, Evgeniy: Zdorov’ye i vlast’. Vospominaniya ‘kremlevskogo vracha’, Moscow 1992 Chernyayev, A.: … i lichno tovarishch Brezhnev L.I. K stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, in: Novaya gazeta, no. 97, 21–24 December 2006, prilozheniye: Le Monde diplomatique, December 2006, 20 f. Chernyayev, Anatoliy : Moya zhizn’ i moye vremya, Moscow 1995 Chernyayev, Anatoliy: Sovmestnyy iskhod. Dnevnik dvukh epoch, 1972–1991 gody, Moscow 2010 Chruschtschow erinnert sich, ed. by Strobe Talbott, Reinbek 1971 Chruschtschow, Sergej: Die Geburt einer Supermacht. Ein Buch über meinen Vater, Klitzschen 2003 Churbanov, Yuriy: Moy test’ Leonid Brezhnev, Moscow 2007 Danilov, V., et al. (eds): Tragediya sovetskoy derevni. Kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivaniye. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939, 5 vols, Moscow 1999 DneproGES snova v stroyu, in: Izvestiya, 5 March 1947, 1 Dobrynin, A.F.: Sugubo doveritel’no. Posol v Vashingtone pri 6i prezidentakh SShA (1962– 1986), Moscow 1997 Dokuchayev, Mikhail: Moskva. Kreml’. Okhrana, Moscow 1995 Dokumenty ‘komissii Suslova’. Sobytiya v Pol’she v 1981 g, in: Novaya i noveyshaya istoriya (1994) 1, 84–105 Dubček, Alexander: Leben für die Freiheit, Munich 1993 Dubinin, Yu.V.: Diplomaticheskaya byl’. Zapiski posla vo Frantsii, Moscow 1997 Dubovskiy, Mark (ed.): Istoriya SSSR v anekdotakh, 1917–1992, Smolensk 1993 Falin, Valentin: Politische Erinnerungen, Munich 1993 Ford, Gerald R.: A Time to Heal. The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford, London 1979 Fursenko, A. (ed.): Prezidium TsK KPSS 1954–64, 3 vols, Moscow 2004 Generaloberst Halder: Kriegstagebuch, vol. III: Der Rußlandfeldzug bis zum Marsch auf Stalingrad (22.6.1941–24.9.1942), ed. by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Stuttgart 1964 Gensek i fotograf. General Secretary and photographer. 100-letnemu yubileyu L.I. Brezhneva posvyashchayetsya, fotografii lichnogo fotografa L.I. Brezhneva Vladimira Musael’yana, Moscow 2006 Gerek, Edvard o Leonide Brezhneve, in: Literaturnaya Gazeta, 26 September 1990, 14 Ginsburg, Alexander (ed.): Weissbuch in Sachen Sinjawskij/Daniel, Frankfurt am Main 1967 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry: Macht und Leben. Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1988 Gorbachev, M.S.: Zhizn’ i reformy, 2 vols, Moscow 1995 Grechko, A.A.: Cherez Karpaty, Moscow 1970 Grishin, Viktor: Genseki SSSR. Politicheskiye portrety pyati gensekov, Moscow 2013 Grishin, V.V.: Katastrofa. Ot Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva, Moscow 1996 Grushevoy, K.S.: Togda, v sorok pervom …, Moscow 1974 Grushko, V.G.: Sud’ba razvedchika. Kniga vospominaniy, Moscow 1997 Heikal, Mohammed: The Road to Ramadan, New York 1975

Sources and Bibliography

459

Hejzlar, Zdenek: Reformkommunismus. Zur Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei der Tschechoslowakei, Cologne 1976 Hertle, Hans-Hermann/Jarausch, Konrad (eds): Risse im Bruderbund. Die Gespräche Honecker–Breshnew 1974 bis 1982, Berlin 2006 Igmand, Aleksandr Danilovich: Ya odeval Brezhneva, ed. by Anastasiya Yushkova, Moscow 2008 Imanbayeva, U.K.: Akh, Samara, Alma-Ata 2010 Jakowlew, Alexander: Die Abgründe meines Jahrhunderts. Eine Autobiographie, Leipzig 2003 Jaruzelski, Wojciech: Hinter den Türen der Macht. Der Anfang vom Ende einer Herrschaft, translated from the Polish by Ekkehard Grube, Leipzig 1996 Jobert, Michel: L’autre regard, Paris 1976 K 75 godam Leonid Il’ich sovsem rasslabilsya. Beseda nashego korrespondenta Pavla Korobova s vrachem Mikhailom Kosarevym, in: Vlast’, no. 44, 11–17.11.2002, pp. 71–76 Kaganovich, Lazar’: Pamyatnyye zapiski rabochego, kommunista-bol’shevika, profsoyuznogo, partiynogo i sovetsko-gosudarstvennogo rabotnika, Mosocw 1996 Karner, Stefan, et al. (eds): Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968, vol. 2: Dokumente, Cologne 2008 Karpov, Vladimir Vasil’yevich: Vecherniye besedy s Viktoriey Brezhnevoy, in: idem: Rasstrelennyye marshaly, Moscow 1999, pp. 399–477 Kavun, Maksim: Leonid Brezhnev: Kar’yera i zhizn’ genseka, in: Nedvizhimost’ v dvizhenii, no. 14 (120), 19 April 2006 Keworkow, Wjatscheslaw : Moskau, der KGB und die Bonner Ostpolitik, Berlin 1995 Khlevnyuk, Oleg, et al. (eds): Politbyuro TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov SSSR, 1945–54, Moscow 2002 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich: Memuary. Vstrecha s Adenauerom, in: Voprosy istorii (1993) 9, 73–103 Khrushchev, Sergey: Nikita Khrushchev – Reformator. Trilogiya ob ottse, Moscow 2010 Kissinger, Henry A.: White House Years. The First Volume of His Classic Memoirs, New York et al. 2011 Kissinger, Henry A.: Years of Upheaval. The Second Volume of his Classic Memoirs, New York et al. 2011 Kolesnichenko, Aleksandr: Kak popast’ v istoriyu i anekdot. Leonid Il’ich byl odnim iz samykh ‘riskovykh’ sovetskikh vozhdey. [Rasskaz Aleksandra Ryabenko], in: Argumenty i fakty, no. 21, 26 May 2010, 28 f. Kolokolov, B.L.: Professiya – diplomat. Memuary, Moscow 2006 Korotkov, A.V. (ed.): Kremlevskii samosud. Sekretnyye dokumenty Politbyuro o pisatele A. Solzhenitsyne, Moscow 1994 Kovalev, Anatoliy: Midovtsy i genseki [memuary], in: Novoye vremya, 1993, no. 37, 42–46 Kovalev, Anatoliy : Midovtsy i genseki. Diplomaticheskiye novelly, in: Novoye vremya, 1993, no. 38, pp. 42–44 Kovalev, S.: Suverenitet i internatsional’nyye obyazannosti soc. stran, in: Pravda, 26 September 1968 Kremlin–PCF. Conversations secrètes, Paris 1984 [Brezhnev in conversation with the French Communist Party Leader Waldeck Rochet in Moscow on 16 July 1968] Kubina, Michael/Wilke, Manfred (eds): ‘Hart und kompromißlos durchgreifen’. Die SED contra Polen 1980/81. Geheimakten der SED-Führung über die Unterdrückung der polnischen Demokratiebewegung, Berlin 1995 Kumanev, G.A. (ed.): Ryadom so Stalinym, Smolensk 2001 Kunayev, Dinmukhamed: Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva (V aspekte istorii Kazakhstana), Alma-Ata 1994

460

Sources and Bibliography

Lenin, V.I.: Izbrannyye proizvedeniya v 2kh tomakh, Moscow 1935 Leonid Brezhnev. Rabochiye i dnevnikovyye zapisi, ed. by Federal’noye arkhivnoye agenstvo et al., 3 vols, Moscow 2016 Leonid I. Brezhnev. Pages from his Life, with a foreword by Leonid I. Brezhnev, written under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, New York 1978 Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev: Stranitsy zhizni – stranitsy epokhi. Fotodokumenty, Moscow 1976 Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev. Stranitsy iz zhizni i deyatel’nosti (fotodokumenty), Moscow 1981 Leonid Ily’ich Brezhnev: A Short Biography, ed. by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee, Oxford et al. 1977 Mayakovsky, Vladimir: Mayakovsky Maximum Access. Selected Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Translated by Jenny Wade, Mill Valley, CA 2018 Medvedev, Vladimir: Chelovek za spinoy. Vospominaniya nachal’nika lichnoy okhrany Brezhneva i Gorbacheva, Moscow 1994 Medvedev, Vladimir: Chelovek za spinoy, 2nd edition, Moscow 2010 Mikoyan, Anastas: Tak bylo. Razmyshleniya o minuvshem, Moscow 1999 Ministère des affaires étrangères (ed.): Documents diplomatiques français, 1970, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main 2013 Mlynář, Zdeněk: Nachtfrost. Das Ende des Prager Frühlings, Frankfurt am Main 1988 Mlynarzh, Zdenek: Kholodom veyet ot Kremlya, 2nd edition, New York 1988 Mukhitdinov, N.A.: Reka vremeni. Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Vospominaniya, Moscow 1995 Musael’yan, Vladimir: Brezhnev, kotorogo ne znali, in: Kollektsiya Karavan Istoriya, no. 7, July 2015, 134–163 Muzey Istorii Dneprodzerzhinska (ed.): I lichno Leonidu Il’ichu, Dneprodzerzhinsk 2006 Naumov, V./Sigachev, Yu. (eds): Lavrentiy Beriya. 1953. Stenogramma Iyul’skogo Plenuma TsK KPSS i drugiye dokumenty, Moscow 1999 Navratil, Jaromir (ed.): The Prague Spring 1968, Budapest 2006 Nikita Khrushchev 1964. Stenogrammy Plenuma TsK KPSS i drugiye Dokumenty, ed. by A.N. Artizov et al., Moscow 2007 Nixon, Richard: RN. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, New York et al. 1978 O material’nom obespechenii sem’i L.I. Brezhneva. Postanovleniye TsK KPSS i Soveta Ministrov SSSR ot 13 noyabrya 1982 g., in: Kommersant” VLAST’, 11–17 November 2002, 76 Partiyno-politicheskaya rabota sredi stroiteley, in: Pravda, 11 April 1947, 1 Pechenev, Vadim: Vzlet i padeniye Gorbacheva glazami ochevidca. (Iz teoretiko-memuarnykh razmyshleniy: 1975–1991 gg.), Moscow 1996 Peredovoy otryad ‘Zaporozhstroya’, in: Pravda, 10 October 1947, 1 Plenum Dnepropetrovskogo Obkoma KP(b)U 27–28 sentyabrya 1940, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 29 September 1940, 1 Plenum Dneprovskogo Obkoma KP(b)U, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 24 April 1941, 1 Protsess antisovetskogo trotskistskogo tsentra. Dopros podsudimogo Pyatakova, in: Pravda, 24 January 1937, 4 Rasskaz o kommuniste [Tale of a Communist], directed by Igor’ Bessarabov, Aleksandr Kochetkov, film studio: Tsentrnauchfil’m 1976 Rubenstein, Joshua/Gribanov, Alexander (eds): The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, New Haven 2005 Sakharov, Andrey: Vospominaniya. Polnoye izdaniye v odnom tome, Moscow 2011 Sbornik osnovnykh dokumentov po voprosu razoruzheniy, ed. by Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del SSSR, vol. 13, Moscow 1974 Schewtschenko, Arkadij Nikolajewitsch: Mein Bruch mit Moskau, 5th edition, Bergisch Gladbach 1986

Sources and Bibliography

461

Schmidt, Helmut: Menschen und Mächte, Berlin 1987 Schwartz, D.V. (ed.): Resolutions and Discussions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Toronto 1982 Sekretnyye dokumenty iz osobykh papok: Afganistan, in: Voprosy istorii (1993) 3, 3–33 Semichastnyy, V.E.: Bespokoynoye serdtse, Moscow 2002 Semjonow, Wladimir S.: Von Stalin bis Gorbatschow. Ein halbes Jahrhundert in diplomatischer Mission 1939–1991, Berlin 1995 Shakhnazarov, G.Kh.: S vozhdyami i bez nikh, Moscow 2001 Shelest, P.E.: … da ne sudimy budete. Dnevnikovyye zapisi, vospominaniya chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS, Moscow 1995 Siyay v vekakh, ogon’ slavy! Otkrytiye pamyatnika ‘Mogila neizvestnogo soldata’, in: Pravda, 9 May 1967, 1 f. Skála, Jan (ed.): Die ČSSR. Vom Prager Frühling zur Charta 77, Berlin 1978 Slavnyy syn kommunisticheskoy partii i Sovetskogo naroda. K 70-letiyu General’nogo sekretarya TsK KPSS tovarishcha Leonida Il’icha Brezhneva, Moscow 1977 Sovetskiy Kosmos. Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii, spetsial’noye izdaniye k 50-letiyu poleta Yuriya Gagarina, Moscow 2011 Soviet-American Relations. The Détente Years 1969–1972, ed. by Edward C. Keefer et al., Washington, D.C. 2007 Stalin, I.V.: Werke, vol. 13, Berlin 1955 Sukhodrev, Viktor Michaylovich: Yazyk moy – drug moy. Ot Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva, 2nd edition, Moscow 2008 Sukhova, Svetlana: Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich [interview with Vladimir Musael’yan], in: Itogi, 12 November 2012, 42–47 Syn partii, syn naroda: Metodicheskiye rekomendatsii massovym bibliotekam po propogande knigi tov. L.I. Brezhneva ‘Vospominaniya’, Moscow 1981 Tigrid, Pavel: Why Dubcek fell, London 1971 Tomilina, N.G., et al. (eds): Chekhoslovatskiy krizis 1967–1969 gg. v dokumentakh TsK KPSS, Moscow 2010 Tomilina, N.G., et al. (eds): Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Apparat CK KPSS i kul’tura 1965–1972 gg., dokumenty, Moscow 2009 Tschertok, B.E.: Raketen und Menschen. Der Sieg Koroljows, Klitzschen 2000 Vazhnoye obyazatel’stvo vosstanoviteley zavoda ‘Zaporozhstal”, in: Pravda, 16 March 1947, 1 Velikzhanina, Anna: Preyemnikom Brezhneva dolzhen byl stat’ Shcherbitskiy [interview with V.G. Musael’yan], in: Komsomol’skaya Pravda v Ukraine, 4 July 2014 Vinogradov, V.M.: Diplomatiya: Lyudi i sobytiya. Iz zapisok posla, Moscow 1998 Vishnevskaya, Galina: Galina. Istoriya zhizni, expanded edition, Moscow 2006 Wiegrefe, Klaus: Honecker und Brežnev auf der Krim. Eine Aufzeichnung über das Treffen vom 19. August 1976, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 41 (1993) 4, 589–620 XX s”ezd Kommunisticheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, 14–25.02.1956 g., stenograficheskiy otchet, 2 vols, Moscow 1956 Zakhorov, Nikolay: Krestnyy otets razvitogo zastoya, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 12 November 1997, p. 2 Zhirnov, E.: Neotrazimyy krasavets, geroy anekdotov, lyubitel’ podarkov i podkhalimov Byvshiy urpavlyayushchiy delami Sovmina SSSR Mikhail Smirtyukov raskryvayet kremlevskiye tayny vremen pravleniya Brezhneva, in: Ekho Litvy, 28 June 1995, no. 126, 5 Zhukov, Georgiy Konstantinovich: Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya [1969], vol. 3, Moscow 1984 Zhukov, L.G.: Nezabyvayemoye, Pavlodar 2002

462

Sources and Bibliography

Author’s interviews Hartmann, Eggert: interview with Susanne Schattenberg, 16 December 2015 Musael’yan, Vladimir Gurgenovich: interview with Susanne Schattenberg, 16 March 2016 Osing, Wilhelm: interview with Susanne Schattenberg, 30 December 2020 Pleitgen, Fritz: interview with Susanne Schattenberg, 7 July 2016

Online sources Brezhnev, L. I.: Rech’ General’nogo sekretarya TsK KPSS na otkrytiye pamyatnika-assamblya ‘Geroyam Stalingradskoy bitvy’ (Mamayev Kurgan) v Volgograde, 15 October 1967, http:// www.russianparis.com/nostalgia/brezhnev_speech_mamaev.shtml, accessed 1.7.2016 Brezhnev, L.I.: Rech’ na XVII s”ezde VLKSM, 23 April 1974, http://pedagogic.ru/books/item/ f00/s00/z0000008/st041.shtml, accessed 1.7.2016 Brezhnev. Online exhibition of the Russian Federal Archive Authority and the RGANI as part of the exhibition cylce ‘Leaders of the Soviet Epoch’, http://liders.rusarchives.ru/brezhnev/, accessed 24.4.2017 Foreign Relations of the United States, Nixon Ford Administration, 1969–1976, vols 12–14: Soviet Union; Carter Administration, 1977–1980, vol. 6, https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v15/d123, accessed 24.11.2014 Golikov, Viktor: ‘Ya veryu i nadeyus’ …’ Posledneye interv’yu, documented by Konstantin Podyma, 3.5.2012, http://www.novodar.ru/index.php/novohistory-punkt/5683-vgpi-052012?format=pdf, accessed 15.7.2015 Grechko, A.A.: Bitva za Kavkaz, Moscow 1967, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/grechko_ aa_1/06.html, accessed 29.4.2015 Grechko, A.A.: Gody voyny, Moscow 1976, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/grechko_ aa2/04.html, accessed 27.4.2015 Grigorenko, P.G.: V podpol’ye mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys …, New York 1981, http://militera. lib.ru/memo/russian/grigorenko/23.html, accessed 27.4.2015 Moyseyenko, Gennadiy: Epokha pobediteley. Dokumental’no-istoricheskaya povest’, 2nd, expanded edition, Moscow 2012, http://kniga.seluk.ru/k-tehnicheskie/1226382-11-moiseenko-epoha-pobediteley-dokumentalno-istoricheskaya-povest-vtoroe-izdaniedopolnennoe-pererabotannoe-kn.php, accessed 24.4.2017 Murzin, Aleksandr: Kak pisalis’ memuary. Ispoved’ suflera, http://leonidbrezhnev.ucoz.ru/ publ/stati_zametki_intervju/kak_pisalis_memuary/2-1-0-25, accessed 28.9.2016 Oberemko, Valentina: ‘Garem’ dlya Brezhnevoy. Doch’ genseka lyubila shampanskoye, brillianty i muzhchin, in: Argumenty i fakty, no. 39, 24 September 2008, http://www.aif.ru/ society/people/garem_dlya_brezhnevoy_doch_genseka_lyubila_shampanskoe_ brillianty_i_muzhchin, accessed 5.1.2017 Oberemko, Valentina: Krivolapaya sud’ba. Pochemu druz’ya otvernulis’ ot Galiny Brezhnevoy [interview with Mila Moskalëva], in: Argumenty i fakty, no. 17, 28. April 2010, http://www. aif.ru/society/people/krivolapaya_sudba_pochemu_druzya_otvernulis_ot_galiny_ brezhnevoy, accessed 6.7.2015 Ortenberg, D.I.: Sorok tretiy. Rasskaz-khronika, Moscow 1991, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/ russian/ortenberg_di3/04.html, accessed 17.4.2015 Shinel’ka: Sekretari Dneprodzerzhinskogo gorkoma VKP(b), 2 December 2013, http:// forum3.sobitie.com.ua/index.php?/topic/23214-секретари-днепродзержинскогогоркомавкпб/ accessed 16.3.2015

Sources and Bibliography

463

Stalin, J. V.: Dizzy with Success. Concerning Questions of the Collective-Farm Movement, in: Pravda, no. 6, 2 March 1930, trans. in idem: Works, vol. 12. Moscow: Foreign Publishing House 1955, pp. 197–205, reproduced at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm XIX s”ezd VKP(b) – KPSS (5–14.10.1952 g.). Dokumenty i materialy, p. 83, http://publ.lib.ru/ ARCHIVES/K/KPSS/_KPSS.html#020, accessed 4.8.2015

Secondary literature Afganistan. God spustya, in: Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’, no. 2, February 1990, 92–96 Alekseyeva, Ludmilla: Soviet Dissent. Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights, Middletown, Conn., 1985 Alexijewitsch, Svetlana: Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht, Berlin 2004 Andronov, Iona: Dorogami voyny, in: Novoye vremya, no. 9, 1972, 18–24 Arend, Jan: Ist Stress westlich? Zum zeitgeschichtlichen Ort der Belastungssorge, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 45 (2019), 245−274 Autio-Sarasmo, Sari: Khrushchev and the Challenge of Technological Progress, in: Jeremy Smith/Melanie Ilic (eds): Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Policy and Government in the Soviet Union 1953–1964, London 2011, pp. 133–149 Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman: Sila i bessiliye Brezhneva. Politicheskiye etyudy, 2nd, expanded edition, Frankfurt am Main 1980 [1979] Baberowski, Jörg: Der Feind ist überall. Stalinismus im Kaukasus, Munich 2003 Babichenko, Denis: Neizvestnyy Brezhnev, in: Itogi, 30 October 2001, 46 Bacon, Edwin/Sandle, Mark (eds): Brezhnev Reconsidered, Houndmills, Basingstoke 2002 Baybakov, N.K.: Sorok let v pravitel’stve, in: idem: Sobraniye sochineniy v 10 tomakh, vol. 4, Moscow 2011 Baybakov, N., et al. (eds): Kosygin. Vyzov prem’yera, Moscow 2012 Belge, Boris/Deuerlein, Martin (eds): Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev-Ära, Tübingen 2014 Berends, Yan, et al. (eds): Povsednevnaya zhizn’ pri sotsializme. Nemetskiye i rossiyskiye podkhody, Moscow 2015. Bergman, Jay: Meeting the Demands of Reason. The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov, Ithaca 2009 Bloch, Marc: The Historian’s Craft, translated from the French by Peter Putnam, with a Preface by Peter Burke, Manchester 2004 Bobkov, F.D.: KGB i vlast’, Moscow 1995 Boden, Ragna: Die Grenzen der Weltmacht. Sowjetische Indonesienpolitik von Stalin bis Brežnev, Stuttgart 2006 Boeckh, Katrin: Stalinismus in der Ukraine. Die Rekonstruktion des sowjetischen Systems nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Wiesbaden 2007 Bomeshko, B.G.: Golod i zasukha v Moldavii v 1946–47 gg., Kishinev 1990 Boreyko, Vadim: O bednom Genseke zamolvite slovo: O politike SSSR L.I. Brezhneva, in: Ekspress, 22 December 2006, 21 Bourke, Joanna: Fear. A Cultural History, London 2005 Breslauer, George: On the Adaptability of Soviet Welfare-State Authoritarianism, Amherst 1978 Brezhnev iz Brezhnevo, in: Novosti Dneprodzerzhinska, 17 June 2009, http://gorod.dp.ua/dz/ news.php?page=2&id=17839, accessed 16.3.2015

464

Sources and Bibliography

Brown, Archie: The Power of the General Secretary of the CPSU, in: idem (ed.): Political Leadership in the Soviet Union, Oxford 1989, 135–157 Bulanova, Nataliya: Kam’yans’kiy etyudi v stili retro, 2nd, expanded and revised edition, Dnepropetrovsk 2011 Burlatskiy, Fedor: Yuriy Andropov i aristokraty dukha, Moscow 2009 Chernyshova, Natalya: Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, London, New York 2013 Chiari, Bernhard: Kabul, 1979: Militärische Intervention und das Scheitern der sowjetischen Dritte-Welt-Politik in Afghanistan, in: Andreas Hilger (ed.): Die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Welt. UdSSR, Staatssozialismus und Antikolonialismus im Kalten Krieg, 1945–1991, Munich 2009, pp. 259–280 Khinshteyn, Aleksandr: Pochemu Brezhnev ne smog stat’ Putinym. Skazka o poteryannom vremeni, Moscow 2011 Khizhnyakov, S.S./Khlevnyuk, O.V.: XVIII partkonferentsiya. Vremya, problemy, resheniya, Moscow 1990 Khlevnyuk, Oleg: Regional’naya vlast’ v SSSR v 1953 – kontse 1950kh godov. Ustoychivost’ i konflikty, in: Otechestvennaya istoriya (2007) 3, 31–49 Ciompi, Luc: Die emotionalen Grundlagen des Denkens. Entwurf einer fraktalen Affektlogik, Göttingen 1997 Ciompi, Luc/Endert, Elke: Gefühle machen Geschichte. Die Wirkung kollektiver Emotionen – von Hitler bis Obama, Göttingen 2011 Cook, Linda: The Soviet ‘Social Contract’ and Gorbachev’s Reforms, in: Soviet Studies 44 (1992) 1, 37–56 Cordovez, Diego/Harrison, Selig S.: Out of Afghanistan. The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford 1995 Corney, Frederick C.: Telling October. Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ithaca 2004 Costigliola, Frank: Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War, Princeton 2012 Costigliola, Frank: Reading for Emotion, in: idem/Michael J. Hogan (eds): Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, New York 2016, pp. 356–373 Crankshaw, Edward: Khrushchev. A Career, New York 1966 Crump, Laurien: The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered. International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–69, London 2015 Daniel’, Aleksandr: Wie freie Menschen. Ursprung und Wurzeln des Dissens in der Sowjetunion, in: Forschungsstelle Osteuropa (ed.): Samizdat. Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa. Die 60er bis 80er Jahre, Bremen 2000, 38–51 Dawisha, Karen: The Kremlin and the Prague Spring, Berkeley 1984 DePorte, Anton W.: De Gaulle’s Europe. Playing the Russian Card, in: French Politics and Society 8 (1990) 4, 25−40 Djagalov, Rossen/Evans, Christine: Moskau, 1960: Wie man sich eine sowjetische Freundschaft mit der Dritten Welt vorstellte, in: Andreas Hilger (ed.): Die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Welt. UdSSR, Staatssozialismus und Antikolonialsimus im Kalten Krieg, 1945–1991, Munich 2009, pp. 83–106 Dönninghaus, Viktor/Savin, Andrey: Lichnaya tragediya Brezhneva, https://lenta.ru/ articles/2015/04/26/brezhnev/ accessed 21.5.2917 Dornberg, John: Breschnew. Profil des Herrschers im Kreml, Munich 1973 Dornberg, John: Brezhnev. The Masks of Power, New York 1974 Duhamel, Luc: The KGB Campaign against Corruption in Moscow, 1982–1987, Pittsburgh 2010

Sources and Bibliography

465

Edele, Marc: Soviet Veterans of the Second World War. A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society 1941–91, Oxford 2008 Engermann, David C.: The Second World’s Third World, in: Kritika 12 (2011) 1, 183–211 Ennker, Benno: Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion, Cologne 1997 Feifer, Gregory: The Great Gamble. The Soviet War in Afghanistan, New York 2009 Fes’kov, V.I./Kalashnikov, K.A./Golikov, V.I.: Sovetskaya armiya v gody ‘kholodnoy voyny’ (1945–1991), Tomsk 2004 Filtzer, Donald: Die Chruschtschow-Ära. Entstalinisierung und die Grenzen der Reform in der UdSSR, 1953–1964, Mainz 1995 Fireside, Harvey: Dissident Visions of the USSR: Medvedev, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, in: Polity 22 (1989) 2, 213–229 Forschungsstelle Osteuropa (ed.): Samizdat. Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa. Die 60er bis 80er Jahre, Bremen 2000 Friedgut, Theodore H.: Paul J. Murphy. Brezhnev, Soviet Politician [book review] in: Canadian Slavonic Papers 25 (1983) 2, 315–317 Gabdullin, Bigel’dy: Velikoye kochev’ye. Istoricheskoye esse o tekh, kto stroil gosudarstvo Kazakhstan, in: Central Asia Monitor, no. 6, 10–16 February 2012, 7 Gaddis, John L.: The Cold War. A New History, New York 2005 Garthoff, Raymond L.: Soviet Leaders and Intelligence. Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War, Washington 2015 Gateyel, Luminita: Appealing for a Car: Consumption Policies and Entitlement in the USSR, the GDR, and Romania, 1950s–1980s, in: Slavic Review 75 (2016) 1, 122–145 Gerchuk, Yuriy: Krovoizliyaniye v MOSKh ili Khrushchev v Manezhe, Moscow 2008 Gorlizki, Yoram: Too Much Trust. Regional Party Leaders and Local Political Networks under Brezhnev, in: Slavic Review 69 (2010) 3, 676–700 Greiner, Bernd: Henry Kissinger. Wächter des Imperiums. Eine Biografie, Munich 2020. Grützmacher, Johannes: Die Bajkal-Amur-Magistrale. Vom stalinistischen Lager zum Mobilisierungsprojekt unter Brežnev, Munich 2012 Grützmacher, Johannes: Vielerlei Öffentlichkeiten: Die Bajkal-Amur-Magistrale als Mobilisierungsprojekt der Brežnev-Ära, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50 (2002) 2, 205–223 Hartmann, Martin: Die Praxis des Vertrauens, Berlin 2011 Hildermeier, Manfred: Die Russische Revolution 1905–1921, Frankfurt am Main 1989 Hoffmann, David L.: Peasant Metropolis. Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941, Ithaca 1994 Hough, Jerry: The Brezhnev Era. The Man and the System, in: Problems of Communism 25 (1976) 2, 1–17 Il’ich ne lyubil zhenshchin bez chulok, in: Torgovyy dom [Dnepropetrovsk], 22 April 1999, no. 6 Ilic, Melanie/Smith, Jeremy (eds): Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, London, New York 2009 Istoriya mist i sil Ukrayins’koyi RSR, ed. by P.T. Tron’ko et al., 26 vols, Kiev 1967–1974 Jersild, Austin: The Sino-Soviet Alliance. An International History, Chapel Hill, NC, 2014. K 100-letiyu L.I. Brezhneva. Odnakashniki – odnopolchane, in: Znamya Dzerzhinki. Gazeta trudovogo kollektiva OAO ‘Dneprovskiy metkombinat’, no. 50, 16 December 2006 Kaftan, Larisa: Taynaya lyubovnitsa Brezhneva, in: Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 1 March 2002, no. 38, 27 Karner, Stefan, et al. (eds): Prager Frühling. Das internationale Krisenjahr 1968, vol. 1: Beiträge, Cologne 2008 Katzer, Nikolaus: Dans la matrice discursive du socialisme tardif. Les ‘Mémoires’ de Leonid Il’ič Brejnev, in: Cahiers du Monde Russe 54 (2013) 1–2, 73–101

466

Sources and Bibliography

Kaul’, T.N.: Ot Stalina do Gorbacheva i daleye, Moscow 1991 Keller, Andrei V.: “Muzhskaya druzhba”? Villi Brandt i Leonid Brezhnev v kontekste energeticheskogo dialoga mezhdu FRG i SSSR v1970−1973 gg., in: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (2016), 1−34 Keller, A.V.: Novaya vostochnaya politika Villi Brandta v kontekste ekonomicheskogo sotrudnichestva mezhdu FRG i SSSR 1963−1973 gg., in: Ural’skiy Istoricheskiy Vestnik 50 (2016) 1, 100−108 Kennan, George F.: Im Schatten der Atombombe. Eine Analyse der amerikanischsowjetischen Beziehungen von 1947 bis heute, Cologne 1982 Keys, Barbara: Henry Kissinger. The Emotional Statesman, in: Diplomatic History 35 (2011) 4, 587−609 Kindler, Robert: Stalins Nomaden. Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan, Hamburg 2014 Knight, Amy W.: The KGB. Police and Politics in the Soviet Union, Boston 1990 Kojevnikov, Alexei: Stalin’s Great Science. The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists, London 2004 Komskiy, B.G., et al. (eds): Krasnoznamenskiy prikarpatskiy. Istoriya krasnoznamennogo prikarpatskogo voyennogo okruga, 2nd edition, Moscow 1982 Kondrat’yeva, I.: Brezhnev dalekiy i blizkiy, in: Znamya Dzerzhinkiy, no. 20, 15 May 2014, 11 Kontorovich, Vladimir: Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform, in: Soviet Studies 40 (1988) 2, 308–316 Kozlov, Konstantin: Otdykhay, strana!, in: Liter, 17 April 2008, 10 Kozovoï, Andrëi: La rencontre Brejnev-Nixon de 1972 et la culture de guerre froide soviétique, in: Revue Historique 109 (2009) 4, 867−914 Krylova, Anna: Soviet Women in Combat. A History of Violence on the Eastern Front, Cambridge 2010 Kuznetsov, A.: I Brezhnev takoy molodoy …, in: Literaturnaya gazeta, no. 50, 13–19 December 2006, 4 Kuznetsov, Aleksandr: Kak Brezhnev ‘gayki zakruchival’, in: Tribuna, no. 228, 19 December 2001, 8 Lane, David: Soviet Economy and Society, Oxford 1985 Leffler, Melvyn P.: For the Soul of Mankind. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, New York 2007 Leffler, Melvyn/Westad, Odd Arne (eds): The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2: Crises and Détente, Cambridge 2010 Lewytzkyy, Borys: Die Sowjetukraine 1944–1963, Cologne 1964 Litvinov, V.: Istinnyy kazakhstanets. O pervotselinnike, geroye sotsialisticheskogo truda, veterane V.A. Liventsove, in: Megapolis [Kazakhstan], 22 July 2004, 11 Liventsova Tselina. Vospominaniya pervotselinnika V.A. Liventsova o tselinoy epopeye (Zapisal Vladimir Litvinov), in: Novoye pokoleniye, 4 April 2003, 7 Lyashchevskiy, Vladislav/Romanchuk, Lyubov’: Nash Il’ich. 5 neizvestnykh faktov iz zhizni Leonida Brezneva, in: Dnepr vecherniy, 19 December 2009, no. 190, 12 Luhmann, Niklas: Vertrauen. Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität, 4th edition, Stuttgart 2009 Lüthi, Lorenz M.: The Sino-Soviet Split. Cold War in the Communist World, Princeton 2008 MacDuffie, Marshall: Der rote Teppich. Fünfzehntausend Kilometer durch Sowjetrußland, Munich 1955 Maley, William: The Afghanistan Wars, London 2002 Manayenkov Iosif Petrovich (1896–1938). Zvezda i smert’ Iosifa Manayenkova, http://lib. dndz.gov.ua/?pid=421, accessed 16.3.2015

Sources and Bibliography

467

Maresca, John J.: To Helsinki. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1973–1975, Durham, NC, 1985 Markus, Vasyl: L’incorporation de l’Ukraine subcarpathique à l’Ukraine soviétique, 1944– 1945, Leuven 1956 Marples, David R.: Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s, London 1982 Matt, Susan J./Stearns, Peter N. (eds): Doing Emotions History, Urbana 2014 McCauley, Martin: Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture. The Virgin Land Programme 1953–1964, London 1976 Medvedev, Roy: Andrey Sakharov i Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in: Voprosy istorii (2001) 11/12, 3–17 Medvedev, Roy: Lichnost’ i epokha. Politicheskiy portret L.I. Brezhneva, Moscow 1991 Medvedev, Roy: Neizvestnyy Andropov. Politicheskaya biografiya Yuriya Andropova, Moscow 1999 Medwedew, Roy: Vom XX. zum XXII. Parteitag der KPdSU. Ein kurzer historischer Überblick, in: Crusius, Reinhard/Wilke, Manfred (eds): Entstalinisierung. Der XX. Parteitag der KPdSU und seine Folgen, Frankfurt am Main 1977, 23–49 Medvedev, Zhores: Vzlet i padeniye Lysenko. Istoriya biologicheskoy diskussii v SSSR (1929–1966), Moscow 1993 Medwedjew, Zhores: Andropow. Der Aufstieg zur Macht, Hamburg 1983 Mendelson, Sarah E.: Changing Course. Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Princeton 1998 Mick, Christoph: Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt: Lemberg 1914–1947, Wiesbaden 2010 Millar, James R.: The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism, in: Tompson, Terry L./Sheldon, Richard (eds): Soviet Society and Culture. Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, Boulder 1988, pp. 3–19 Misztal, Barbara A.: Trust in Modern Societies. The Search for the Bases of Social Order, Cambridge 1996 Mitchell, Nancy: The Cold War and Jimmy Carter, in: The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, pp. 66−88 Mitrokhin, Nikolay: Die ‘Russische Partei’. Die Bewegung der russischen Nationalisten in der UdSSR 1953–1985, Stuttgart 2014 Mlechin, Leonid: Brezhnev. Razocharovaniye Rossii, Moscow 2012 Mlechin, Leonid: Brezhnev. Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudey, vol. 1325, Moscow 2008 Montefiore, Simon Sebag: Stalin. Am Hof des Roten Zaren, Frankfurt am Main 2006 Morgan, Michael Cotey: The Final Act. The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War, Princeton 2018 Mücke, Lukas: Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956–1972, Stuttgart 2013 Murphy, Paul J.: Brezhnev. Soviet Politician, Jefferson, N.C., 1981 Musatov, Valeriy: Brezhnev vstretil utro vvoda voysk na komandnom punkte, in: Novoye vremya, 1992, no. 16, 39 Nash dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, in: Moy Dneprodzerzhinsk, no. 52, 16 November 2011 Naumov, V.P.: Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede N.S. Chruschtschows auf dem 20. Parteitag der KPdSU, in: Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte (1997) 1, 137–177 Nemec, Frantishek/Moudry, Vladimir: The Soviet Seizure of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Toronto 1955 Novikov, Sergey: Bol’shaya istoricheskaya entsiklopediya, Moscow 2003 Nussbaum, Martha C.: Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge 2001

468

Sources and Bibliography

Ob uvekovechenii pamyati Leonida Il’icha Brezhneva, in: Kommersant” VLAST’, 11–17 November 2002, 76 Overy, Richard: Russlands Krieg, 1941–1945, Hamburg 2003 Pauer, Jan: Prag 1968. Der Einmarsch des Warschauer Paktes. Hintergründe – Planung – Durchführung, Bremen 1995 Pikhoya, Rudol’f Germanovich: Sovetskiy soyuz. Istoriya vlasti, 1945–1991, Moscow 1998 Pikhoya, Rudol’f: Moskva, kreml’, vlast’: Sorok let posle voyny, 1945−1985, Moscow 2007 Plaggenborg, Stefan: Experiment Moderne. Der sowjetische Weg, Frankfurt am Main 2006 Plaggenborg, Stefan (ed.): Handbuch der Geschichte Russlands, vol. 5: 1945–1991. Vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs bis zum Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion, 2nd half-volume, Stuttgart 2003 Plaggenborg, Stefan/Ivanova, Galina (eds): Entstalinisierung als Wohlfahrt. Sozialpolitik in der Sowjetunion 1953–1970, Frankfurt am Main 2015 Plamper, Jan: The Stalin Cult. A Study in the Alchemy of Power, New Haven, London 2012 Plamper, Jan/Lazier, Benjamin (eds): Fear. Across the Disciplines, Pittsburgh, PA, 2012 Pohl, Michaela: From White Grave to Tselinograd to Astana. The Virgin Lands Opening, Khrushchev’s Forgotten First Reform, in: Kozlov, Denis/Gilburd, Eleanor (eds): The Thaw. Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s, Toronto 2013, pp. 269–307 Pollock, Ethan: Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton 2006 Portnov, Andrey/Portnova, Tat’yana: Stolitsa zastoya? Brezhnevskiy mif Dnepropetrovska, in: Neprikasnovennyy zapas, no. 5 (97), 2014, 71–87 Predumyshlennyy golodomor 1946–47, http://rys-arhipelag.ucoz.ru/publ/predumyshlennyj_ golodomor_1946_1947_gg/31-1-0-2083, accessed 18.6.2015 Pshenichnyy, Stanislav: Pervaya vysota Leonida Brezhneva, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 4 November 2006, no. 43, http://dneprovka.dp.ua/t1472/, accessed 24.3.2015 Pushkash, Andrey : Tsivilizatsiya i varvarstvo. Zarkapat’ye 1918–1945, Moscow 2006 Raleigh, Donald J.: Russia’s Favorite. Reevaluating the Rule of Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev, 1964–1982. Guest Editor’s Introduction, in: Russian Studies in History 52 (2014) 4, 3–11 Raleigh, Donald J.: ‘Soviet’ Man of Peace. Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev and his Diaries, in: Kritika 17 (2016) 4, 837–868 Raleigh, Donald J.: “I Speak Frankly Because You Are My Friend”. Leond Ilich Brezhnev’s Personal Relationship with Richard M Nixon, in: The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (2018), 1−32 Rees, E.A.: Leader Cults: Varieties, Preconditions and Function, in: Apor, Balázs et al. (eds): The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, Houndmills 2004, pp. 3–28 Rey, Marie-Pierre: La tentation du rapprochement. France et URSS à l’heure de la détente (1964−1974), Paris 1991 Rhéaume, Charles: Sakharov. Science, morale et politique, Saint-Nicolas (Québec) 2004 Rigby, Thomas H.: How Strong is the Leader?, in: Problems of Communism 11 (1962) 5, 1–8 Rigby, Thomas H.: Political Elites in the USSR. Central Leaders and Local Cadres from Lenin to Gorbachev, Aldershot 1990 Rigby, Thomas H.: The Soviet Leadership: Towards a Self-Stabilizing Oligarchy?, in: Soviet Studies 22 (1970) 2, 176–191 Rigby, Thomas H./Brown, Archie/Reddaway, Peter (eds): Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR. Essays dedicated to Leonard Schapiro, London 1983 Rother, Bernd: Common Security as a Way to Overcome the (Second) Cold War? Willy Brandt’s Strategy for Peace in the 1980s, in: Frédéric Bozo/Marie-Pierre Rey/Bernd Rother/N. Piers Ludlow (eds): Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europa, 1945–1990, New York 2012, pp. 239−252

Sources and Bibliography

469

Sapper, Manfred: Die Auswirkungen des Afghanistan-Krieges auf die Sowjetgesellschaft. Eine Studie zum Legitimitätsverlust des Militärischen in der Perestrojka, Münster 1994 Schattenberg, Susanne: ‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’? How the Secret Speech was Translated into Everyday Life, in: Jones, Polly (ed.): Dilemmas of Destalinization. Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London 2006, pp. 64–79 Schattenberg, Susanne: Die Angst vor Erniedrigung. Die U-2-Krise und das Ende der Entspannung, in: Greiner, Bernd/Müller, Christian Th./Walter, Dierk (eds): Angst im Kalten Krieg, Hamburg 2009, 220–251 Schattenberg, Susanne: Frieden im Weltall: Mir + Shuttle = ISS, in: Kucher Katharina/Thum, Gregor/Urbansky, Sören (eds): Stille Revolutionen. Die Neuformierung der Welt seit 1989, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 33–43 Schattenberg, Susanne: Les frontières du dicible. Du dialogue au silence. Les relations d’Andrej Saharov avec Hruščev et Brejnev, in: Cahiers du Monde Russe 54 (2013) 3–4, 441–466 Schattenberg, Susanne: Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren, Munich 2002 Schlips ab zum Gespräch. Was Willy Brandt auf der Krim aushandelte, wie er mit dem sowjetischen Parteichef Breschnew baden ging und warum sich der Kanzler so salopp gekleidet an den Verhandlungstisch setzte, in: Stern, no. 40, 23 September 1971, 26–31 Schneider, Jens: Dicker Max war gestern. Michael Müller will zeigen, dass Berlin mehr ist als Zentrum für Künstler. Mit dem Image des bescheidenen Arbeiters kommt der Regierende Bürgermeister an, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 August 2015 Schnell, Felix: Räume des Schreckens. Gewalträume und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine, 1905–1933, Hamburg 2012 Schors, Arvid: Doppelter Boden. Die SALT-Verhandlungen, 1963–1979, Göttingen 2016 Schröder, Hans-Henning: ‘Lebendige Verbindung mit den Massen’. Sowjetische Gesellschaftspolitik in der Ära Chruščev, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34 (1986) 4, 523–560 Schroeder, Gertrude E.: The Soviet Economy on a Treadmill of ‘Reforms’, in: Soviet Economy in a Time of Change: A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Washington, D.C. 1979, pp. 312–366 Semanov, Sergey: Brezhnev. Pravitel’ zolotogo veka, Moscow 2006 Semanov, Sergey: Dorogoy Leonid Il’ich, Moscow 2007 Semenov, Igor’: Tsarskiye okhoty vozhdey, in: Vse ob okhote v Kazakhstane, no. 2, February 2011, 26 f. Service, Robert: Lenin. Eine Biographie, Munich 2000 Shandor, Vincent: Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century. A Political and Legal History, Cambridge, MA, 1997 Shatz, Marshall: Soviet Dissidents in Historical Perspective, Cambridge 1980 Shepel’, R.K.: Brezhnev. Dva goda v Kazakhstane, http://www.nomad.su/?a=15-201301180012, accessed 29.10.2014 Shlapentokh, Vladimir: Standard of Living and Popular Discontent, in: Ellman, Michael/Kontorovich, Vladimir (eds): The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insider’s History, Armonk 1998 Siegelbaum, Lewis H.: Cars for Comrades. The Life of the Soviet Automobile, Ithaca, NY, London 2008 Skilling, H. Gordon: Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Hampshire 1989

470

Sources and Bibliography

Skilling, H. Gordon/Griffith, Franklyn (eds): Interest Groups in Soviet Politics, Princeton 1971 Skrzypek, Andrzej: Polen im Sowjetimperium. Die polnisch-russischen Beziehungen von 1944 bis 1989, Klagenfurt 2016 Slonevskiy, A.: Pod znamenem Lenina-Stalina, in: Ekspeditsiya XXI, no. 2 (128), 2013 Slonevskiy, A.: Rasskazy o Brezhneve, in: Znamya Dzerzhinkiy, no. 51, 20 December 2012, 12 f. Slonevs’kiy, Oleksandr: Yak na zavodi Dzerzhins’kogo Brezhnev z vragami narodu borovsya, in: Ekspeditsiya XXI, no. 12 (90) 2009, 6 f. Slonevskiy, Аleksandr: Sudebnyye protsessy i prestupnost’ v Kamenskom-Dneprodzerzhinske. Ocherki i dokumenty, Dnepropetrovsk 2010, http://lib.dndz.gov.ua/uploads/Judicial_ processes_and_crime_%28Last%29.pdf, accessed 17.3.2015 Soutou, Georges-Henri: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his Vision of the End of the Cold War, in: Frédéric Bozo/Marie-Pierre Rey/Bernd Rother/N. Piers Ludlow (eds): Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europa, 1945–1990, New York 2012, pp. 208−222 Soyfer, Valeriy: Vlast’ i nauka. Razgrom kommunistami genetiki v SSSR, 4th edition, Moscow 2002 Steele, Jonathan/Abraham, Eric: Andropov in Power: From Komsomol to Kremlin, Oxford 1983 Steinberg, Mark D.: Proletarian imagination. Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925, Ithaca 2002 Stöver, Bernd: Der Kalte Krieg, 1947–1991. Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters, Bonn 2007 Sztompka, Piotr: Trust. A Sociological Theory, Cambridge 1999 Tatu, Michel: Power in the Kremlin. From Khrushchev’s Decline to Collective Leadership, London 1969 Taubman, William: Khrushchev. The Man and his Era, New York 2003 Taubman, William: Gorbatschow. Der Mann und seine Zeit. Eine Biographie, Munich 2017 Taubman, William/Khrushchev, Sergei/Gleason, Abbott (eds): Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven, London 2000 Teckenberg, Wolfgang: Wirtschaftsreformen in der UdSSR aus soziologischer Sicht, in: Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung (1985) 2, 188–195 Timoshchenko, Mikhail: Brezhnev iz Brezhnevo, http://gazeta.dp.ua/read/brezhnev_iz_ brezhnevo, accessed 13.4.2016 Tompson, William: The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Harlow 2003 Tsaranov, V.I.: Problemy istorii Moldavii. Issledovaniya po istorii sovetskogo obshchestva, Chişinău 2007 Tumarkin, Nina: The Living and the Dead. The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York 1994 V Dneprodzerzhinske snesut pamyatnik Brezhnevu, 5 July 2015, https://lenta.ru/ news/2015/07/05/breznevsnoss/, accessed 16.5.2017 Valenta, Jiri: Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia 1969: Anatomy of a Decision, Baltimore 1979 Vasil’yeva, L.N.: Kremlevskiye zheny. Fakty, vospominaniya, slukhi, legendy i vzglyad avtora, Moscow 2008 Viola, Lynne: The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements, Oxford 2007 Vladimirov, Vladislav : Tandem. O L. Brezhneve i K. Chernenko, in: Kodry, 1990, no. 4, 150–193 Volkogonov, D.A.: 7 vozhdey. 4 vozhd’: Leonid Brezhnev, vol. 2, Moscow 1995

Sources and Bibliography

471

Ward, Christopher J.: Brezhnev’s Folly. The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism, Pittsburgh, PA 2009 Weber, Max: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th, revised edition, Tübingen 1976 Wenger, Andreas (ed.): Origins of the European Security System. The Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–75, Abingdon 2008 White, Stephen: Economic Performance and Communist Legitimacy, in: World Politics 38 (1986) 3, 462–482 Willerton, John P.: Patronage and Politics in the USSR, Cambridge 1992 Willerton, John P.: Patronage Networks and Coalition Building in the Brezhnev Era, in: Dallin, Alexander (ed.): The Khrushchev and Brezhnev Years, London 1992, 189–218 Williams, Kieran: New Sources on Soviet Decision Making during the 1968 Czechoslovak Crisis, in: Europe-Asia Studies 48 (1996) 3, 457–470 Winkler, Martina: Panzer in Prag. Der fotografische Blick auf die Invasion von 1968, Düsseldorf 2018 Wortman, Richard S.: Scenarios of Power. Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I, Princeton 1995 Wyradhe: Livejournal, 5 February 2014, http://wyradhe.livejournal.com/340176.html, accessed 16.3.2015 Yurchak, Alexei: Everything was Forever, Until it was No More. The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, Oxford 2006 Zachorov, Nikolay : Krestnoy otets razvitogo zastoya, in: Dneprovskaya Pravda, 12 November 1997, 2 Zartman, I. William (ed.): Czechoslovakia. Intervention and Impact, New York 1970 Zelnik, Reginald E.: A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia. The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov, Stanford 1986 Zhuk, Sergei I.: Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985, Baltimore 2010 Zhuravlev, Sergey, et al.: Avtovaz mezhdu proshlym i budushchim. Istoriya Volzhskogo avtomobil’nogo zavoda, 1966–2005, Moscow 2006 Zimovina, E.P.: Dinamika chislennosti i sostava naseleniya Kazakhstana vo vtoroy polovine XX veka, in: Demoskop weekly, no. 103–104, 3–16 March 2003, http://www.demoscope.ru/ weekly/2003/0103/analit03.php, accessed 17.7.2015 Zubkova, Elena: Russia after the War. Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–57, Armonk, New York, 1998 Zubok, Vladislav M.: A Failed Empire. The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill, NC, 2009 Zubok, Vladislav M.: Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War. From Stalin to Khrushchev, Cambridge 1996 Zverev, Nikita: Chernenko poznakomilsya s Brezhnevym v Kishinëve, in: Komsomol’skaya Pravda Moldavii, 12 March 2005, 11 Zweynert, Joachim: ‘Developed Socialism’ and Soviet Economic Thought in the 1970s and Early 1980s, in: Russian History 41 (2014), 354–372

Index The letter f after an entry indicates a page that includes a figure. Abrasimov, Pëtr Andreyevich 288 Academy of Sciences 166 Adenauer, Konrad 298 Afanas’yev, Viktor Grigor’yevich 172 Afghanistan 161, 321–4, 325–6, 362 Africa 158–60, 161 agriculture 27–34, 36, 211–20, 235 see also collectivization and kolkhozes Dnepropetrovsk 88–9 Kazakhstan 119–38 livestock 133–5, 218–19 maize policy 132–3 Moldavia 101–7, 109 ploughing 132, 133 sovkhozes 124, 125, 128–9, 131, 212, 215 sowing 132 Virgin Lands campaign 119–38 ‘year of desperation’ 135–7 Zaporozh’ye 79–80, 83 Akimov, Grigoriy 97 alcohol abuse 229 Aleksandrov-Agentov, Andrey Mikhailovich 158, 172, 180, 254 foreign policy 269, 289, 299, 325 Alexander Gardens, Moscow 262 Alfërov, Pavel Nikitovich 49, 51 Aliyev, Geydar Aliyevich 339 Allarth, Helmuth 289 Alliluyeva, Svetlana Iosifovna 185 Amin, Hafisullah 323–4 Andropov, Yuri Vladimirovich 175, 196, 210, 343–4, 346, 351f Afghanistan 322 Brezhnev, relationship with 259, 285, 352 corruption 239 dissidents 249–51, 252, 253–5, 256–60 editorial commissions 180 foreign policy 285, 288, 303, 311, 321, 325

472

health 351, 352, 357 holidays 191 as KGB chief 185, 250, 252 nickname 191 Poland 327, 330 Politburo 293, 303 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 256–60 as second secretary 352–3 succession 5, 357 Arbatov, Georgiy Arkad’yevich 8, 172, 285, 322, 347 Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation 7 archives 5–8, 143 armaments. See weapon systems Arsenichev Institute of Metallurgy 35 art 251, 254, 262 Aurora literary journal 341 Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman Genazovich 4 Baglanova, Roza Tazhibayevna 142 Bahr, Egon 288–9, 290, 291–2, 298, 331 Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) 241f–2, 263–5 BAM (Baikal-Amur Mainline) 241f–2, 263–5 Barzel, Rainer 298 Baybakov, Nikolay Konstantinovich 196, 216 as Gosplan head 226, 227, 228, 235 Poland 329 Beneš, Edvard 63 Beriya, Lavrentiy Pavlovich 115, 148, 199 Biden, Joe 260 Biľak, Vasiľ 275, 279, 281, 282 Bisert 29–32 Blatov, Anatoliy Ivanovich 285, 325, 352 blind trust 177–8 Bloch, Marc 3 Bobkov, Filipp Denisovich 258

Index Bodyul, Ivan Ivanovich 93, 98, 103, 107, 199 agriculture 215 Brezhnev 338 Bogoraz, Larisa Iosifovna 253 Bolshevik Party 20–2, 183, 267–8 see also Communist Party Borisov, Vladimir Evgen’yevich 255 Bovin, Aleksandr Evgen’yevich 172, 180, 181, 196, 285–6 Brandt, Willy 249, 266f–7, 284, 287, 331 Brezhnev, relationship with 266f–7, 284, 288, 289, 290–2, 293f–4, 295f, 297–8, 303, 310, 311 confidential channel 288, 289, 292 Moscow Treaties 290–1, 294, 297–8 Nobel Peace Prize 303 Pershing strategy 324 resignation 309, 310–11 Bratislava Conference 277 Brezhnev, Il’ya Yakovlevich (father) 17, 18–19, 22, 24 Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich LIFE : accident 346–7; addiction 9, 216, 268, 283, 310, 314–17, 320, 322, 330–1, 342–6, 359; affairs 70f–1, 142, 198–200, 309–10, 343; amateur dramatics xxf, 13f–14, 24–5, 41, 360; ambiguity 2–3; appearance xxf, 2–3, 14, 38f, 39f, 44, 56, 73, 92, 112, 154, 200–1, 295–6f, 304; assassination attempt 337–8; belief/religion; birth and childhood 15–20, 22; burial; cars 197–8, 305f, 306–7f; character 1–3, 12, 41–2, 54–5, 58, 75, 96–8, 153–4, 160–1, 184, 304, 331, 339, 359; death 355; education 15–17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 34, 35, 36–40; family 13f, 16f–20, 22, 23–4, 27–8, 34, 35, 64–5, 113, 163, 353–6 (see also under individual family member names); friendships 50–1, 52–3, 78, 91–2, 107, 138, 250, 267, 354–5; health 9, 60, 91, 110, 115, 141–2, 147–8, 216, 278, 283, 312–22, 330–5, 333, 335–6, 342–50; hobbies xxf, 2, 13f–14, 18, 24–5, 28, 36, 41, 193, 194–8, 300, 306; holidays 191, 271; hunting 193, 194–7, 300; marriage 27–8, 39f; nickname 191; obituaries; physicality 300; politeness 95–6; reputation 2, 39–40, 49, 54. 84, 94, 356–7, 359–61; civil war 20, 22,

473 29; women 193, 194, 198–200, 309; social class 15–17, 18, 27, 39f; wealth 353–4 BIOGRAPHIES: Avtorkhanov, Abdurakhman Genazovich 4; Dornberg, John 4, 18, 66; Khinshteyn, Aleksandr Evseyevich 5; Medvedev, Roy Aleksandrovich 4; Mlechin, Leonid Mikhailovich 5, 25, 58; Murphy, Paul 4, 22, 30; Pikhoya, Rudol’f Germanovich 4; Volkogonov, Dmitriy Antonovich 4, 11, 58; CAREER: acting xxf, 24–5; Carpathian Military District, chief of political admin of 65–7, 69; CC secretary 112–15, 141–50, 163; CC secretary: armament, construction, heavy industry, space travel 150–3, 163; construction 36, 50, 76, 78, 81–3, 90, 109, 139, 156, 223, 241f–2, 263–5; CPSU first/general secretary 1, 174–7; defence positions 151–2; Dneprodzerzhinsk city party committee deputy chairman 46–7; Dneprodzerzhinsk city soviet deputy chairman 46; Dneprodzerzhinsk Technical College of Metallurgy, director 40–1, 46; Worker’s Faculty, Kamenskoye, director 37; Dneprodzerzhinsk, election to organizing bureau of city party committee 47–50; DneproGES power station 77–8, 81–2; Dnepropetrovsk, armament secretary 52; Dnepropetrovsk, first secretary 83–92; Dnepropetrovsk, head, department of trade 51, 52; Dnepropetrovsk, propaganda secretary 51–2; Dnepropetrovsk, third secretary 52; Eighteenth Army, chief of political admin 59–60; as engineer 35, 38f–9, 40, 231; factory work 23–4, 35, 40; Fourth Ukrainian Front, chief of political admin 59, 64; industry 35, 77–8, 81–3, 90, 109, 139, 144, 146, 220, 231–3; Kazakhstan, first secretary 135, 136, 138–42; Kazakhstan, second secretary 120–38; land manager 27, 28–34; Lenin Peace Prize 226, 303, 338; Lenin Prize for Literature 340, 341; Mandate

474

Index

Monitoring Commission member 112; marshal 201, 339; military service 40, 43f, 44, 45f, 54–71, 339; Ministry of Defence, deputy chief of political admin 115; Moldavia, first secretary 92–114; North Caucasian Front, deputy chief 59; ‘Order of Victory’ 333, 334f; Party Presidium secretary 75, 112, 114; Party Presidium, elected as candidate 112–15, 141–49; Party Presidium, elected as member 149; patronage 73–6, 89, 92, 118, 137, 142; Politburo, the 6; political commissar 56–8; Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Chairman 153–66, 188–9; Republic of Moldavia, first secretary; resignation/ retirement 348–50, 353–4; RSFSR, deputy chairman of bureau of 150; Southern Front, first deputy director 55–6; succession 351–3, 357–9, 360; Supreme Soviet, chairman 118, 120, 153–66, 188–9; Sverdlovsk land registry head 32–4; USSR, president 153–66, 188–9; Virgin Lands campaign 119–38; VKP(b), inspector of the CC of 92; Zaporozh’ye, first secretary 74, 76–84; Zaporozhstal’ steelworks 72f, 73, 76, 81–3 MEMOIRS: 8–10, 15, 20, 54, 58, 59–60, 340 PHOTOGRAPHS: xxf, 11, 13f–14, 16f, 17, 26f, 38f, 39f, 44f–4, 45f, 65f, 70f, 72f–3, 74f, 117f, 118, 155f, 171f–2, 190f, 195f, 196f, 201, 203f–4, 241f–2, 266f–7, 273f, 293f, 294–6f, 297f, 301f, 305f, 332f–3, 334f, 335f, 351f POLITICS: 14, 15, 35, 49, 75; achievement 236; agitation 75, 77, 79, 104–5, 125–9; agriculture 79–80, 83, 88–9, 101–7, 109, 211–20, 235 (see also Virgin Lands Campaign); Andropov, Yuri Vladimirovich 259, 260, 285; Beriya, Lavrentiy Pavlovich 115; Bolsheviks, the 26–7; Brandt, Willy 266f–7, 284, 288, 289, 290–2, 293f–4, 295f, 297–8, 303, 310, 311; cadres 176, 236–8, 239, 271–2, 274, 275, 281; Carter, Jimmy 317, 318–20, 325; ceremony 117f, 154–6; Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich 108, 154, 346, 352, 353; climate 216,

218; collective editing 178–80; collective rule 175–83; collective speech-writing 180–2; collectivization 29–32, 42, 104–7; communism 243; Communist Party 27, 36, 37; considerate transfers 183–7; constitutional reform 156–8, 188, 244–5; construction 36, 50, 76, 78, 81–3, 90, 109, 139, 156, 223, 241f–2, 263–5; corruption 238–9; criticism and self-criticism 86–8, 96–8, 109, 110–12, 136, 237; cult of personality 8, 181, 244, 261, 336–42 ; culture 140; Czechoslovakia 63–4, 271–83, 285–6; democracy 210, 211; developed socialism 243–6; diplomacy 291; discipline/ punishments 99–101, 106–7, 127, 134–5, 136–7, 230–1, 235–6, 238–9; dissidents 246, 249–60; Dneprodzerzhinsk 46–7, 49–51; Dnepropetrovsk 83–92; Doroshina, Galina 352; Dubček, Alexander 271, 272, 273f–83; economic management 234–6, 237; economy 205–12, 220–5, 226–30, 233–4, 243; efficiency 233–4; etiquette 304–10; famine 78–80, 83; fear 284–5; flight incident 159; food imports 219–20; Foreign Ministry succession 145; foreign policy (See foreign policy); France 287, 288; gifts 161, 192, 193, 197, 304, 305f, 306–7, 309, 341–2; Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 314–15; glasnost 294, 297; Great Patriotic War 54–71, 261–3, 284–5; Great Terror 45–8, 49–50, 140–1; honours 117f, 156, 159, 226, 303, 338–42; human rights 159–60, 252–3, 260; Hungary 145–6; industry 35, 77–8, 81–3, 90, 109, 139, 144, 146, 220, 231–3; informality 191–3; international pressures 235; Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 74, 89, 92, 118, 137, 142–53, 156, 163, 165–70, 173; Kissinger, Henry 300; kolkhozes 29–35, 78–80, 88–9, 101–7, 127–8; Komsomol, the 26, 27; Kosygin, Aleksei Nikolayevich 225–34, 290; kulaks 106–7; leadership style 75, 80, 94–101, 116, 124–5, 172, 176–87, 190–1; Lenin, Vladimir Il’yich, original name Ul’yanov 159,

Index 183, 242, 336, 339; liberalism 230; male bonding 193–8; masses, connection with 121, 125–9; Moldavia 92–114; Moscow 108–9; MTSs 101–2; networks 91–2; nicknames 191; Nixon, Richard 300–1, 305–6, 307f–8, 309, 310, 311–12; patronage 183–7; peace 68, 159, 268, 284–5, 287, 303, 338, 362; penal code 144–5; pensions 208, 209, 210; Politburo, the 6, 189–93; political commissar 56–8; Pompidou, Georges 288, 292, 296–7f, 304, 306, 310; power 175–8; power bases/networks 50–1, 52–3, 68–9, 91–2, 107–8, 116, 137–9, 172, 175, 183–93, 250, 285; power struggles 109–12; programme 204–8; propaganda 51–2, 67, 105, 114, 222, 237–8, 245–6 (see also cult of personality); prosperity 205–12, 220–5, 243, 361; quality 233–4; ration cards 91; removals 183–9; ridicule 8, 9, 54, 81–2, 86–8, 264–5, 336, 341, 342, 350, 355; ritual 177; Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 255–60; Schmidt, Helmut 284, 309, 313, 316, 318, 331; secret speech of 1969 227–9, 247; social hierarchies 191–3, 194–5; socialism 242–6; Soviet Union, representing abroad 158–62, 260, 287–8; space travel 150–3, 158–9; speeches 47–9, 51–2, 77, 80, 142, 144, 148–9, 180–3, 215, 227–9, 242, 247; stability 176, 238, 357, 361; stagnation 325–6, 34; Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, original name Dzhugashvili 81, 84, 112, 114, 157, 246–8; Stalinization 246–60; stress 312–14, 359; student activism 36; transport 224–5, 231, 232, 241f–2, 263–5; trust 287–90, 320–1; ‘trust and care’ 175, 176, 177–8, 189, 202; wages 208–11; war 54–71, 261–3, 268–9, 284–5; Warsaw Pact states 269–70; welfare 205–11; Westernness 303–5; Zaporozh’ye 74, 76–84 WORKS: ‘Cosmic October’ 8, 143, 152; ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism – a Proven Method of Educating Cadres’ 111–12; Design for Electrostatic Cleaning of Blast Furnace Gas in the Conditions at the Dzerzhinskiy Factory,

475

A 37–8; Dnevniki 10–11; ‘Life by the Factory Whistle’ 8, 10, 15; ‘Little Land’ 8, 9, 10, 54, 60, 239; ‘Love for One’s Country’ 8, 25; ‘Memoirs’ 8; ‘Moldavian Spring’ 8; ‘Party’s Pending Tasks in the Agriculture Sector, The’ 215; poetry 25; ‘Rebirth’ 8, 10; ‘Virgin Lands, The’ 8, 10; Virgin Lands, The 8–10, 120; Word on a Communist, A’ 8 Brezhnev, Yakov Il’yich (brother) 13f, 16f, 17, 18 Brezhnev, Yuriy Leonidovich (son) 27, 35, 113, 354, 356 Brezhnev doctrine 2, 283 Brezhnev TV series 354 Brezhneva, Feoktista Il’yevna (sister) 18 Brezhneva, Galina Leonidovna, (“Galya”) (daughter) 27, 34, 113–14, 163, 354, 356 Brezhneva, Natal’ya Denisovna (mother) 17, 18–19, 22 Brezhneva, Vera Il’yevna (sister) 13f, 16f, 17, 18 Brezhneva, Viktoriya Petrovna (wife) 27–8, 34, 39f, 65, 200 health 354, 356 Levchenko, Tamara Nikolayevna 70–1 Moldavia 113 retirement 356 trips abroad 309 Brutents, Karen Nersesovich 181, 182–3, 192 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 319 Bulanova, Natal’ya Mikolayevna 7, 15 Bulganin, Nikolay Aleksandrovich 115, 144, 147, 150 Burlatskiy, Fëdor Mikhaylovich 167–8, 180 Buryatse, Boris Ivanovich 356 cadres 176, 236–8, 239, 271–2, 274, 275, 281, 357 Carpathian Military District 65–6 Carpathian Offensives 61–4, 68 cars 197–8, 224–5, 231, 232 diplomacy 305f, 306–7f Carter, Jimmy 286, 316–17, 318–20, 324, 325 Castro, Fidel 195 Castro, Raúl 195 CC (Central Committee) 6, 79, 169 see also Politburo collective rule 175–83 corruption 238–9

476

Index

familiarity 189–93 foreign policy 269 Kazakhstan 123–4, 126, 134, 141 Moldavia 95, 111 Moscow 120, 123, 135 reforms 222 rituals 177 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 271, 328 Central Committee (CC). See CC Černik, Oldřich 275 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques 260 Chazov, Evgeniy Ivanovich 9, 304, 336, 342, 343–4 succession 357 Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich 351f Brezhnev, relationship with 108, 154, 346, 352, 353 Brezhnev’s memoirs 8–9 health 351, 353, 357 holidays 191 nickname 191 Politburo 345 propaganda 107, 108, 150 succession 357 Chernyayev, Anatoliy Sergeyevich 172, 249, 341 Chertok, Boris Evseyevich 151–2 China 270–1 Chronicle of Current Events magazine 253 Churbanov, Yuriy Mikhailovich (son in law) 201, 342, 354, 356 Čierna agreement 276–8, 279–80 citizenship, annulment 254 civil war 20, 22, 29 Kamenskoye 19–22 climate 216, 218 Cold War, the 259, 268–9, 317, 321 collective rule 175–83 collectivization 28–34, 36–7 see also agriculture and kolkhozes Kazakhstan 122 see also Virgin Lands campaign Moldavia 93, 101–7 sovkhozes 124, 125, 128–9, 131, 212, 215 communism 243 Communist Party (CP) 176, 304 see also Bolshevik Party Central Committee (CC). See CC company directors 221 ‘Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’ (CSCE) 286–7 constitutional reform 156–8, 188, 244–5

construction 90, 156, 223, 264, 242 n. 180 BAM 241f–2, 263–5 Brezhnev 36, 50, 76, 78, 81–3, 90, 109, 139, 156, 223, 241f–2, 263–5 Kazakhstan 130, 131, 139 Moldavia 109 consumer goods 222–5 consumption 220–5 corruption 238–9 ‘Cosmic October’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8, 143, 152 ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism – a Proven Method of Educating Cadres’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 111–12 CSCE (‘Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’) 286–7 cult of personality 336–42 Brezhnev 8, 181, 244, 261, 336–42 Khrushchev 11, 142–3, 147, 167, 172, 336 Stalin 156, 157 Zhukov 149 cult of the war 261–3 culture 140, 251, 254, 262 Czechoslovakia 63–4, 162, 270, 271–83, 285–6, 362 Daniel’, Yuliy Markovich 251–2, 253 de Gaulle, Charles 287, 288, 293 dekulakization 32–3, 37, 93 Delvin, Pavel Illarionovich 141 Demichev, Pëtr Nilovich 172, 174 democracy 157, 176, 210, 211, 244 Denikin, Anton Ivanovich 21 deportations 32–3, 93 culture 140 kulaks 106–7 Design for Electrostatic Cleaning of Blast Furnace Gas in the Conditions at the Dzerzhinskiy Factory, A (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 37–8 developed socialism 243–6 dioramas 262 diplomacy 267–8, 291 dissidents 106, 246, 249–55 see also Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich ‘Dizzy with Success’ (Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, original name Dzhugashvili) 33 Dneprodzerzhinsk 7 see also Kamenskoye/ Kam’yans’ke Great Terror 45, 46–8, 49–50 Technical College of Metallurgy 40–1

Index DneproGES power station 77–8, 81–2 Dnepropetrovsk 7 deportations 37 famine 37 Great Patriotic War 55–6 military production 52 Dnepropetrovsk mafia 51 Dnevniki (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 10–11 Dnipro. See Dnepropetrovsk Dobrynin, Anatoliy Fëdorovich 299 Dornberg, John 4, 18, 66 Doroshina, Galina 352 Dubček, Alexander 271, 272, 273f–83 Dymshits, Benjamin Emmanuilovich 82, 83 Dzerzhinskiy Factory 37–8, 40, 46 Dzhaparov, Boris Alikenovich 7 East Germany 311 economy 205–12, 220–5, 226–30; editorial commissions 178–9, 279, 282 Egorychev, Nikolay Egor’yevich 184–5, 262 ethnic conflict 131 exports 232 Falin, Valentin Mikhailovich 289, 306, 353 familiarity 189 famine 22, 24, 37, 78–80, 83 see also food and ration cards Moldavia 93 Faynberg, Viktor Isaakovich 255 Federal Republic of Germany. See West Germany Fëdorov, Viktor Stepanovich 231 Fedoseyev, Pëtr Nikolayevich 172 Finland 160–1 five-day week 209 food 218–20, 235, 361 see also agriculture and famine Ford, Gerald 285, 312, 313–14, 316 Foreign Ministry 145 foreign policy 158–62, 213–14, 255, 267–9, 303, 331 Afghanistan 161, 321–4, 325–6, 362 Africa 158–60, 161 aggression 321, 322 ‘Big Four’ 292–4, 312 China 270–1 Cold War, the 259, 268–9, 317, 321 confidential channels 288–90, 292, 299 Czechoslovakia 63–4, 162, 270, 271–83, 285–6, 362 détente 268, 283, 312, 321, 322, 323

477

East Germany 311 etiquette 304–10 Europe, pacts with 286–7 France. See France Ghana 158, 160 Guinea 159–60 Helsinki Accords 287, 316 Hungary 145–6, 272 India 161 Indonesia 161 Iran 161–2 Moldavia 93–109, 113 Morocco 159 Moscow Treaties 290–1, 294, 297–8 NATO 286, 324–5 Pershing strategy 324–5 Poland 145, 270, 326–30 Romania 271 SALT 286, 313–14, 316, 319, 320, 321, 324 Sudan 161 think tank 285–7 troika take-over 321–2 trust 287–90 USA. See USA Vietnam 299, 302 Warsaw Pact states 269–70, 271 West Germany. See West Germany Yugoslavia 162, 271 France 287, 288, 294–7, 304, 310, 312, 314–15 ‘Big Four’ 292–3 cars 306 CSCE process 294, 303 Furtseva, Ekaterina Alekseyevna 146, 155f, 156, 193 Khrushchev, plot against 147, 149 Gabay, Il’ya Yankelevich 253, 254 Gagarin, Yuriy Alekseyevich 152, 156 Gandhi, Indira 330 Garbuzov, Vasiliy Fëdorovich 226 Gavrilenko, Nikolay Estaf ’yevich 85 Georgadze, Mikhail Porfir’yevich 154–6 German Democratic Republic. See East Germany Ghana 158, 160 Gierek, Edward 271, 326–7 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 312, 314–15, 324 glasnost 294, 297 Golikov, Viktor Andreyevich 68, 137, 150, 181, 248–9 agriculture 216

478 developed socialism 243 dissidents 254 Novorossiysk 263 Golyavkin, Viktor Vladimirovich 341 Gomułka, Władysław 269, 271, 272, 283 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich 217–18, 357–8 Gorban, Boris Arkhipovich 94, 95, 96, 111 Gorbanevskaya, Natal’ya Evgen’yevna 253 Gosplan 214, 221–2, 226, 227, 228, 230, 232, 235 Gostev, Boris Ivanovich 216 grain quotas 36 Granin, Daniil Aleksandrovich ‘Personal Opinion, A’ 205 Great Patriotic War 53–71, 261–3, 268, 284–5 Great Terror 44–53, 69, 140–1, 145 Grechko, Andrey Antonovich 60, 68, 303, 321 Grigorenko, Pëtr Grigor’yevich 57–8 Grigor’yev, Nikifor Aleksandrovich 21 Gromyko, Andrey Andreyevich 196f Afghanistan 322 character 302, 317 collective rule 180, 182 editorial commissions 180 as foreign minister 269, 271, 285, 289, 293, 316, 321, 325 health/infirmity 351 holidays 191 NATO Double Track Decision 325 nickname 191 Politburo 303 Grushevoy, Konstantin Stepanovich 51, 53, 55–6, 262 Guillaume, Günter 310 Guinea 159–60 habit 177 Handler, Philip 258 Heikal, Mohammed 182 Helsinki Accords 287, 316 ‘Hero Cities’ 54, 61, 262, 263 history, assessment of 248 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course 52 Honecker, Erich 194, 271, 289, 311 housing 90, 128, 139, 223 How the Steel was Tempered (Ostrovskiy, Nikolay) 69

Index human rights 251, 252–3, 255, 317 see also Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich Hungary 145–6, 272 hunting 194–7 Husák, Gustáv 271, 283 hydrogen bomb 152 Igmand, Aleksandr Danilovich 200–1 Ignatov, Nikolay Grigor’yevich 169 imports 219–20, 224 India 161 Indonesia 161 industry 34–5, 77–8, 81–3, 90, 144, 146, 220 consumer goods 222–5 Kazakhstan 139 Moldavia 109 Novolipetsk foundry 231 problems 221, 223 Salavat mirrored glass factory 232–3 transport 224–5, 231, 232 Inozemtsev, Nikolay Nikolayevich 285 International Year of Human Rights 252–3 Iran 161–2 Islam 122 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 270, 327, 329, 330 Jobert, Michel 288 Johnson, Lyndon B. 298–9 Kachura, Boris Vasil’yevich 188 Kádár, János 146, 270, 271, 272 Kaganovich, Lazar’ Moiseyevich 81, 83, 144, 145 Khrushchev, plot against 147, 148 Kamenskoye/Kam’yans’ke 17–22, 35 see also Dneprodzerzhinsk Worker’s Faculty 37 Kania, Stanisław 327–9 Kapitonov, Ivan Vasil’yevich 175, 351 Karibzhanov, Fazil’ Karimovich 123, 135, 138 Kazakhstan 121–5 accommodation 128, 130, 131 agriculture 119–38 construction 130, 131, 139 culture 140 ethnic conflict 131 hunting 194 Islam 122 livestock 133–5 maize policy 132–3 settlement 129–32 sovkhozes 124, 125, 128–9

Index state visits to 140 Virgin Lands campaign 119–38 ‘year of desperation’ 135–7 Kekkonen, Silvi 160 Kekkonen, Urho 160, 194–5 Keldysh, Mstislav Vsevolodovich 117f, 156, 257 Kevorkov, Vyacheslav Ervandovich 288, 289, 346 KGB 246, 250, 252, 255 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 255–6 Khinshteyn, Aleksandr Evseyevich 4 ‘khozrazchët’ (self-financing) 220 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 43f, 44, 51, 81, 97, 117f, 118 art 251 Beriya, Lavrentiy Pavlovich 115 Brezhnev 74, 89, 92, 118, 137, 142–53, 156, 163, 165–70, 173 character 1 cult of personality 11, 142–3, 147, 167, 172, 336 economic policy 119 entertaining 163 Foreign Ministry 145 foreign policy 267, 268 Great Patriotic War 61 Hungary 145–6 Kazakhstan 119–22, 129, 132–3, 137 leadership style 125, 164–7 maize policy 132–3 Moldavia 92 ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’ 142–3 as patron 73–6, 89, 92, 118, 137, 156, 164 penal code 144–5 pensions/wages 208 plots against 147–9, 167–70, 172 Poland 145 power 176 removal 1, 163–70, 172–4 restructuring 163–4, 244 ‘Secret Speech’ 143, 145, 261 slogans 125 verbal excesses 165–7 Virgin Lands campaign 119–22, 129, 132–3 Khrushchev, Sergey Nikitich 147, 168, 169 Khrushcheva, Nina Petrovna 163, 309 Kim, Yuliy Chersanovich 253 Kio, Igor’ Emil’yevich (son in law) 163

479

Kirilenko, Andrey Pavlovich 53, 78, 83, 92, 175, 341–2 health 351 holidays 191 nickname 191 Kissinger, Henry 299–300, 302, 303, 309, 313–14, 316 Klimov, A.P. 238 kolkhozes 28, 29–35, 211–12 see also collectivization and peasantry Dnepropetrovsk 88–9 famine 78–80, 83 Kazakhstan 126, 127–8 Moldavia 93, 101–7 pensions/wages 208–9, 214–15 performance 215 Konev, Ivan Stepanovich 145 Kopelev, Lev Zinov’yevich 250, 254 Korolëv, Sergey Pavlovich 152 Korovyakova, Nina Aleksandrovna 343, 344 Kosarev, Mikhail 343, 344, 345 Kosygin, Aleksei Nikolayevich 93, 168, 184, 200, 250, 401 n. 450 agriculture 214 Brezhnev, relationship with 225–34, 290 cars 198, 224–5 character 302 collective rule 180, 182 as Council of Ministers chairman 174 Czechoslovakia 275 economy 220–2, 224 editorial commissions 180 foreign policy 269, 270, 275, 285, 286, 288, 293 health 351 hunting 196, 197 removal 187–8, 229, 303 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 260 Koval, Nikolay Grigor’yevich 92, 93, 95 Kovalëv, Anatoliy Gavrilovich 210, 258 Kozlov, Frol Romanovich 117f, 163, 178 Kruglyak, Natan 19, 23, 24 Kulakov, Fëdor Davydovich 175, 191, 208, 217, 219 kulaks 106–7 Kunayev, Dinmukhamed Akhmedovich 125, 138, 164, 339 Kursk 29 Lathe, Heinz 289 Lazarev, Artëm Markovich 110, 111 leadership 348–53

480

Index

Lednëv, Valeriy Vadimovich 288–9, 290, 325 Lenin, Vladimir Il’yich, original name Ul’yanov 73, 176, 183, 243, 337 Lesechko, Mikhail Avksent’yevich 174 Let History Judge (Medvedev, Roy Aleksandrovich) 254 Levchenko, Tamara Nikolayevna 70f–1 ‘Life by the Factory Whistle’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8, 10, 15 ‘Little Land’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8, 9, 10, 54, 60, 239 ‘Little Land’ monument 263 Litvinov, Pavel Mikhailovich 246, 253 Liventsov, Vasiliy Andreyevich 124, 125, 134, 138 ‘Love for One’s Country’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8, 25 Lukich, Leonid Efimovich 88 Lumumba, Patrice 160 Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich 88, 132, 212 Lysov, Semën Semënovich 46, 47 Machine tractor stations (MTSs) 101–2 maize policy 132–3 Makeyev, Efim Grigor’yevich 47, 48 Makhno, Nestor 21 Maksimov, Vladimir Emel’yanovich 246, 254 male bonding 193–8 Malenkov, Georgiy Maksimilianovich 111, 115 economic policy 119 Kazakhstan 122–3 Khrushchev, plot against 147, 148 Malinovskiy, Rodion Yakovlevich 56, 169, 270 Manayenkov, Iosif Petrovich 46, 47 Mao Zedong 270–1 Matskevich, Vladimir Vladimirovich 141, 213 Matyushchin, Fëdor Semënovich 77 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich 156 Mazurov, Kirill Trofimovich 156, 187–8, 229, 351 meat consumption 218–19 media, the 140 Medunov, Sergey Fëdorovich 239 Medvedev, Roy Aleksandrovich 4, 125, 192–3, 198, 344–5 Brezhnev’s programme 205 Brezhnev’s secret speech 229 Let History Judge 254 Medvedev, Zhores Aleksandrovich 254

Mekhlis, Lev Zakharovich 56, 61, 63, 68 Mel’nik, Grigoriy Andreyevich 136, 138 Mel’nikov, Leonid Georgiyevich 85 ‘Memoirs’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8 Mikhaylovsk 29 Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich 145, 165–6 foreign policy 270 Khrushchev, plots against 147, 169, 170 removal 174–5 Milayev, Evgeniy Timofeyevich (son in law) 113–14 Milayeva, Viktoriya Evgen’yevna (granddaughter) 254 military production 52 Mishuk, Sënka 22 missile systems. See weapon systems Misztal, Barbara 177 Mlechin, Leonid Mikhailovich 4, 25, 58, 204 Mokhova, Alla Vasil’yevna 199 Moldavia 93–101, 113 administrative structure 108–9 agriculture 101–7 collectivization 104–7 ‘Moldavian Spring’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich 28, 32, 45, 144, 145 foreign policy 286 Khrushchev, plots against 147, 148 Morocco 159 Moscow 34 Alexander Gardens 262 power 108–9 Moscow Treaties 290–1, 294, 297–8 Motherland Calls, The statue 262 Motherland monument 263 Moyseyenko, Nikolay Petrovich 78, 83 Mukhitdinov, Nuritdin Akramovich Khrushchev, plots against 147 Müller, Michael 1 Murphy, Paul 4, 22, 30 Murzin, Aleksandr Pavlovich 8, 9–10 Musael’yan, Vladimir Gurgenovich 12, 201 Mzhavanadze, Vasiliy Pavlovich 155f, 156, 163 Nagy, Imre 146 Naidënov, Pavel Andreyevich 85 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 182 NATO 286 Double Track Decision 324–5 Nedelin, Mitrofan Ivanovich 152

Index Nehru, Jawaharial 140 Nemec, František 63 NEP (New Economic Policy) 24 Nesterenko, Daniil Potapovich 9–10 New Economic Policy (NEP) 24 ‘New Man’, the 39f–40 nicknames 191 night letter 274 Nixon, Richard 204, 300–6, 307f–9, 310, 311–12, 331 cars 306–7f confidential channel 288, 299 peace process 286, 298, 299, 301–2, 310, 313–14, 316 Watergate and resignation 311–12 Nkrumah, Kwame 160 Novikov, Ignatiy Trofimovich 52–3 Novolipetsk foundry 231 Novorossiysk 60, 61, 263 Novotný, Antonín 146, 271, 272 nuclear weapons 151, 256, 269, 286, 324 see also SALT ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’ (Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich) 142–3 Operation South 93 Ortenberg, David 54, 60 Osing, Wilhelm 195, 451 n. 114 Ostrovskiy, Nikolay How the Steel was Tempered 69 Ozernoy, Mark Evstaf ’yevich 89 Party Presidium 5–6, 75–6, 167 see also Politburo ‘Party’s Pending Tasks in the Agriculture Sector, The’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 215 Patolichev, Nikolay Semënovich 219 patronage 73, 183–4 Pavlov, Georgiy Sergeyevich 53 peace process 286, 298, 299, 301–2, 310, 313–14, 316 see also SALT peasantry 28–9, 36, 211–12 see also kolkhozes collectivization 31, 32–3, 36–7, 100–7 dekulakization 32–3, 37, 93 Kazakhstan 127–9 Moldavia 100–4 payments 102 pensions/wages 208–9

481

Pel’she, Arvid Yanovich 185, 290 penal code 144–5 pensions 208, 209, 210, 261 ‘Personal Opinion, A’ (Granin, Daniil Aleksandrovich) 205 Petrovna Denisova, Viktoriya. See Denisova, Viktoriya Petrovna Petrovna Khrushcheva, Nina . See Khrushcheva, Nina Petrovna 163, 309 Pigalëv, Pëtr Filippovich 120, 121 Pikhoya, Rudol’f Germanovich 4 Plisetskaya, Mayya Мikhailovna 199 Podgorny, Nikolai Viktorovich 163, 167, 250, 290, 341, 344, 401 n. 450 character 302 collective rule 180, 182 dissidents 254, 256 editorial commissions 180 foreign policy 269, 270, 293 health 351 removal 187, 188–9, 229, 303 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 256 Semichastnyy, Vladimir Efimvoch 185–6 as state president 168, 174–5 Pokryshkin, Alexsandr Ivanovich 65 Pol’, German Germanovich 47 Poland 145, 270, 326–30 Polimbetov, Seytzhan 141 Politburo, the 5–6, 75–6, 177–8, 189–93, 346, 348–51 see also CC and Party Presidium collective editing 178–80 collective rule 175–83 collective speech-writing 180–2 familiarity 189–93 health 351 insights into 290 International Year of Human Rights 252–3 Polyanskiy, Dmitriy Stepanovich 168, 169 Pompidou, Georges 285, 287, 288, 303 Brezhnev, relationship with 288, 292, 296–7f, 304, 306, 310 death 310 Ponomarenko, Panteleymon Kondrat’yevich 120–1, 122–5, 126, 127, 135 demotion 137 Ponomarëv, Boris Nikolayevich 172, 179, 282, 285, 325 Postyshev, Pavel Petrovich 45

482 poverty 116, 119, 122, 211 see also famine power networks 183–4 Prague spring 270, 274, 281 Pravda newspaper 78, 81, 109, 110 Presidential Archive 5 prosperity 205–12, 220–5 Radio Liberty 253, 255 Rafailov, Mikhail Markovich 46, 47, 48 railways 264–5 see also BAM ration cards 91 re-Stalinization 246–60 ‘Rebirth’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8, 10 resistance 66–7 revolution. See unrest RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History) 5, 143 rituals 177 rocket science 150–3 Rodionov, Nikolay Nikolayevich 343 Roginets, Mikhail Georgiyevich 138 Romania 271 Romanov, Grigoriy Vasil’yevich 351 Rosovskiy, M. 130 Rud’, Gerasim Yakovlevich 93, 95, 96–7 Rusakov, Konstantin Viktorovich 172, 330 Russian history 184 Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) 5, 143 Russian state security service archive 7 Ryabenko, Aleksandr Yakovlevich 53 Sahm, Ulrich 289 Sakenov, Bazulda Sakenovich 140 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 151, 166, 255–60 ‘Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’ 257 Sakharov Archive 7 Salavat mirrored glass factory 232–3 SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) 286, 313–14, 316, 319, 320, 321, 324 Samoteykin, Evgeniy Matveyevich 225 Scheel, Walter 289 Schmelzer, Robert 289 Schmidt, Helmut 312, 313, 317–18, 320 Brezhnev, relationship with 284, 309, 313, 316, 318, 331 Pershing strategy 324 Second World War. See Great Patriotic War

Index ‘Secret Speech’ 143, 145 Semichastnyy, Vladimir Efimovich 150–1, 164, 168–70, 173, 199 CC candidate 174 dissidents 249, 251, 252 Kazakhstan tour 129 KGB chief, removal 184–5 Kiev Komsomol head 91 Sergeyeva, S.N. 130 Seydoux, Roger 196 Shakhnazarov, Georgiy Khozroyevich 190–1, 245, 329 Shalfeyeva, Anna Vasil’yevna 199 Shatalin, Nikolay Nikolayevich 94 Shayakhmetov, Zhumabay Shayakhmetovich 120, 121 Shchëlokov, Nikolay Anisimovich 53, 84, 107–8, 164 appearance 201 corruption 238 as minister of the interior 185, 196, 199 removal 357 Shcherbitskiy, Vladimir Vasil’yevich 91–2, 164, 196f, 353 Shelepin, Aleksandr Nikolayevich 129, 168, 169, 174, 185, 290 Brezhnev, criticism of 229 removal 186, 229 Shelest, Petro Efimovich 166, 168–9, 174, 178, 341 agriculture 214 Czechoslovakia 275, 278 informality 193 removal 187, 303 Shepilov, Dmitriy Trofimovich 145, 147 Shishlin, Nikolay Vladimirovich 285 shock work 40 shops 223–4 show trials 40, 45, 251, 253 Shtokalo, Iosif Zakharovich 19 Siad Barre, Mohamed 182 Simonov, Konstantin Mikhailovich 248 Sinyavskiy, Andrey Donatovich 251–2, 253 Sirotina, Tatyana 154 Slavskiy, Efim Pavlovich 257 Smrkovský, Josef 275 Sobolev, I.I. 86, 90 social hierarchy 17–18 collectivization 30, 31, 33 socialism 242–6 socialist democracy 157, 164, 176, 244

Index Solomentsev, Mikhail Sergeyevich 175, 351 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich 246, 249, 250, 254 South Russia Company 17–18 sovietization 63, 66, 67, 69 sovkhozes 124, 125, 128–9, 131, 212, 215 see also collectivization space travel 150–3, 158–9 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich, original name Dzhugashvili 28–9, 75, 81 assassination attempt 337 Brezhnev 81, 84, 112, 114, 157, 246–8 cadres 236 condemnation 143, 157 cult of personality 156, 157 Czechoslovakia 63 death 114 diplomacy 268 ‘Dizzy with Success’ 33 Great Patriotic War 261 Great Terror 44–53, 140–1, 145 judging 247–8 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 143 Moldavia 92–4 as patron 74–5, 94 power 175–6 show trials 40, 45 strategy 118 Stalinism 75, 77, 85–6 Kazakhstan 133–4 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 143 Moldavia 95 Stalinization 246–60 State Archive for Contemporary History (RGANI) 5, 143 Stoph, Willi 290 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). See SALT Strauss, Franz Josef 298, 304 Struyev, Aleksandr 224 succession 351–3 Sudan 161 Sukarno, president of Indonesia 161 Sukhodrev, Viktor Mikhaylovich 154, 300, 319 Suslov, Mikhail Andreyevich 8, 9, 145, 250, 290, 344, 351f Brezhnev, criticism of 229 Brezhnev, relationship with 69, 200 collective rule 180, 181 editorial commissions 180 foreign policy 270 health 352

483

Hungary 146 hunting 197 Khrushchev, plots against 147, 168, 173, 401 n. 450 Poland 330 removal 229 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 258 Semichastnyy, Vladimir Efimvoch 186 Sverdlovsk 32–4 Svoboda, Ludvik 64, 281 Sych, A. 106 Tale of a Communist, The TV show 340 Taraki, Nur Mohammed 323 Tashenev, Zhumabek Akhmetovich 138 Taybekov, Elubay Basilovich 138 ‘Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’ (Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich) 257 Tikhonov, Nikolay Aleksandrovich 53, 91, 187, 188, 235, 339, 345, 346 health/infirmity 351 Tito, Josip Broz 162, 194, 195, 196f Touré, Sékou 159, 160 Tractorists film 199 transport 224–5, 231 BAM 241f–2, 263–5 Turkestan–Siberian railway (Turksib) 264 Trapeznikov, Sergey Pavlovich 107, 108, 150, 181, 248–9 Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich 257 Trial of the Four 253, 256 Trotsky, Leon Davidovich 268 trust 177–8, 189–90 tsarism 175 Tsinëv, Georgiy Karpovich 53, 250 Tsukanov, Georgiy Emanuilovich 53, 91, 154 Tsvigun, Semën Kuz’mich 107, 108, 111, 199, 250 Turkestan–Siberian railway (Turksib) 264 Turyanitsa, Ivan Ivanovich 63 25,000ers 33 Two-Thousand Word Manifesto 273 Ukraine 20–2 see also Kamenskoye Carpathian Military District 65–6 Great Patriotic War 54–61 Great Terror 44–5 Kaganovich, Lazar’ Moiseyevich 148–9 nationalists 66 Zaporozh’ye/Zaporizhzhya 9, 76–84

484

Index

Ulbricht, Walter 146, 270, 271, 272, 283, 289–90 Undasynov, Nurtas Dandibayevich 123, 138 unrest 18–23, 46, 106, 206, 253, 261, 265, 326, 361 Afghanistan 321–4, 325–6, 362 Czechoslovakia 270, 271–83, 285–6, 362 dekulakization 32–3, 37, 93 dissidents 106, 246, 249–55 see also Sakharov, Andrey Dmitriyevich Hungary 145–6 Novocherkassk 172 Poland 145, 270, 326–30 USA 286, 298–310, 311–12, 313–14, 316–17, 318–21 Afghanistan 324, 325 confidential channel 288, 316 Kissinger, Henry 299–300, 302, 303, 309, 313–14, 316 peace process 286, 298, 299, 301–2, 310, 313–14, 316 Pershing strategy 324 Ustinov, Dmitriy Fëdorovich 175, 321, 325, 339, 351f Afghanistan 322 Poland 327

wages 208–11, 214–15 Warsaw Letter 275 Warsaw Pact states 269–71 weapon systems 150–1, 286, 318, 321, 324 nuclear weapons 151, 256, 269, 286, 324 see also SALT welfare 205–11 West Germany 288–91, 297–8, 303–4, 308, 312, 317–18 cars 306 Stasi spy 310–11 Western influences, threat of 75 White Book report 251, 253 White Russian Station film 68 Wilson, Harold 287 ‘Word on a Communist, A’ (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8 Worker’s Faculty, Kamenskoye 37 Wortman, Richard S. 175, 178 Wowereit, Klaus 1

Vietnam 299, 302 Viktorov, Alexey Ivanovich 46, 48 Vinogradov, Vladimir Mikhailovich 182 Virgin Lands, The (Brezhnev, Leonid Il’yich) 8–10, 120 Virgin Lands campaign 119–38 Vishnevskaya, Galina Pavlovna 199 Vladimirov, Vladislav 8 Vlasenko, Mikhail Dmitriyevich 136, 138 Volkogonov, Dmitriy Antonovich 4, 11, 58 Voronov, Gennadiy Ivanovich 186, 303 Voroshilov, Kliment Efremovich 144, 150, 153, 164 honours 156 Khrushchev, plots against 147

Zagladin, Vadim Valentinovich 196, 260, 285, 325 Zamyatin, Leonid Mitrofanovich 8, 9

Yakir, Pëtr Ionovich 253 Yakovlev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich 172, 184 Yakovlev, Ivan Dmitriyevich 138 ‘Year of Industry’ 139 Yugoslavia 162, 271

Zaporozhstal’ steelworks 72f, 73, 76, 81–3 Zaporozh’ye/Zaporizhzhya 9, 76–84 Zhivkov, Todor 146, 271, 272 Zhou, Enlai 270 Zhukov, Andrey 207–8 Zhukov, Georgiy Konstantinovich 54, 115, 145, 149–50, 164 Khrushchev, plots against 147, 148, 149 Zhukov, Leonid Georgiyevich 124 Zorin, Valerian Aleksandrovich 288