Brezhnev and the Decline of the Soviet Union

Thomas Crump

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134669226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1964-1982, a longer period than any other Soviet leader apart from Stalin. During Brezhnev's time Soviet power seemed at its height and increasing. Living standards were rising, the Soviet Union was a nuclear power and successful in its space missions, and the Soviet Union's influence reached into all part of the world. Yet, as this book, which provides a comprehensive overview and reassessment of Brezhnev's life, early political career and career as leader, shows, the seeds of decline were sown in Brezhnev's time. There was a huge over-commitment of resources to the Soviet industrial-military complex and to massively expensive foreign policy overstretch. At the same time there was a failure to deliver on citizens' rising expectations, and an overconfident ignoring of dissidents and their demands. The book will be of great interest to Russian specialists, and also to scholars of international relations and world history.

Part I

Introduction

1 The Ukrainian crucible

The Brezhnev family at home

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’ – William Faulkner

Kamenskoye, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a growing industrial town on the right bank of the River Dnepr. Although its location, in the oblast of Yekaterinoslav, meant that it was part of Imperial Russia, the fact that the oblast was also part of Ukraine was critical in determining the character of the lives of those who lived there. For one thing, the majority were not Ukrainians, but Russians, recent arrivals who had come to the region to work in the new heavy industry born out of the Russian industrial revolution. One such Russian was Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev, who had arrived, with his newly married wife, Natalya, early in 1906. When they left home in the small Russian village of Brezhnevo, Natalya was already pregnant, and their first son, Leonid Ilyich, was born on 19 December 1906.¹

In their early years in Kamenskoye Ilya worked as an unskilled labourer in a local iron foundry, but, while Leonid, his brother and sister, were still children, Ilya was promoted to become a rolling-mill operator. Kamenskoye was an urban sprawl, where – beyond the industrial centre with its vast foundries – modest wooden houses, known as ‘izba’, spread out along unmade-up roads, both along the Dnepr, and inland. Typical houses had their own plot of land, with space for kitchen gardens, orchards, and small enclosures for domestic livestock. In summer the street scene was colourful and animated. The trees would first be in blossom before bearing fruit, sunflowers would be in bloom, geese and other domestic fowl, to say nothing of the odd pig, would wander across the roads, where otherwise almost all traffic would be horse-drawn. In season, berries and mushrooms could be harvested from local commons and woodlands – where it was also possible to trap hares and wild-fowl (Kravchenko 1946: 10) – while fish were abundant in the great river, half a mile wide, and never far away. Above all peasant markets supplied the food – wheat, potatoes, meat and dairy products – essential for an urban population.

In winter the land was deep in snow, and the river frozen. A house was kept warm by a tiled wood-burning stove (Matthews 2009: 26),² livestock were sheltered in an outhouse, and there was also a store for food preserved for the winter to ensure a diet of bread, potatoes, cabbage and apples, supplemented by cheese, salted fish and different types of pork-sausage.³ Drink, as also in the summer, was tea or beer according to the time of day, and this being Russia there was almost certain to be a bottle of homemade vodka (Brezhneva 1995: 5) kept in some dark corner of a house lit by oil lamps.

The foundry where Ilya worked – and where his sons would be employed – had to be built on a scale far larger than any house simply to contain the vast machinery needed for its operations: these, in turn, involved high levels of noise, heat, dust and fumes, for in Imperial Russia little was done to ensure the health and safety of the work-force.⁴ Even so, the Brezhnev family enjoyed health and prosperity at a level notably higher than that of the rural population. Ethnic Russians were literate, and their children went to school. There was little contact between them and the country Ukrainians, who had not only their own language, but their own deviant version of the orthodox faith. Their agriculture – based largely on the cultivation of wheat – remained primitive, with little use of machinery, or other inputs such as artificial fertilizers; although essential both to the economy of Imperial Russia, and its export trade, it came nowhere close to realizing the productive potential of ‘the breadbasket of Europe’.⁵

If a boy such as Leonid Brezhnev was to have anything like a wide historical perspective, he would have to take into account, on one side, the longue durée of a people who had been attached to the same land in Ukraine for centuries, and on the other, the relatively short history (lasting only a generation or two) of the urban Russian population. In the course of 1917, when Brezhnev was ten years old, the collapse of Imperial Russia in February – a result of continuous setbacks in the war against the so-called ‘Central Powers’ of Germany and Austria – and the success of Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in October,⁶ marked the beginning of a turbulent four-year period (1917–1921) in which the interests of the urban Russians were pitched against those of the much more numerous rural Ukrainians. Inevitably the events of these four years shaped the lives not only of the Brezhnev family, but of almost the whole population of Ukraine. Critically for the future of Russia, the Brezhnev family – and not least, Leonid, the older son – came out as winners at a time when losers were much more numerous. In these four years, Leonid, who, in 1915, aged eight, had passed into secondary school,⁷ began to find his direction in life. To understand how this happened, the historical background, first of Ukraine, and then of its urban Russian population, provides the key.

The long history of Ukraine

Ukraine is a vast area of land, very roughly rectangular, extending for 1316 km along its east-west axis (between 22° and 40° E.) and for nearly 893 km along its north-south axis (between 45° and 52° N.),⁸ so that its total area is 603,700 square kilometres.⁹ Situated between the much the same latitudes as France, in area Ukraine is some 9 per cent greater, while its population is some 16 per cent smaller:¹⁰ being at the other end of Europe, its climate is continental, with warmer summers and much colder winters – as the invading German army, in World War II, discovered to its own cost at the end of 1941.

The topography of Ukraine is remarkably uniform. The characteristic landscape is defined by apparently endless steppe, with occasional woodlands scattered across it. From almost any high point, such as the top of the highest buildings in cities such as Kiev, Kharkov or Dnepropetrovsk, the overwhelming impression on any viewer is of arable farmland, cultivated in cereals, such as wheat or barley, and in certain western regions, sugar beet. The long Dnepr river, as it flows south to the Black Sea, divides Ukraine, with its capital Kiev, located on the west bank. Down river, this is also the location of other large towns, such as Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye – and also Dneprodzerzhinsk (as Kamenskoye has been known since 1934), the home town of Leonid Brezhnev. The Dnepr is remarkably wide, with its rate of flow, and depth, varying considerably according to the season – with the peak occurring in the early summer as the winter snows melt in the vast catchment areas.

The great mass of the traditional population, consisting mainly of peasant cultivators, inhabiting hundreds of small, run-down villages, and speaking Ukrainian as their mother tongue, were subordinate, in one way or another, to other ethnic minorities: just which of these counted in any one village community depended largely on whether it was located on the left (East) or right (West) bank of the Dnepr. On the left bank, the landowners, with their countless serfs (only emancipated in 1861) tended to be Russian, on the right bank, Polish. Significantly also this division reflected the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement – which determined where Jews might live in Imperial Russia – so that most were to be found, on the right bank, where they were as numerous as in Poland itself.

For much of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the right bank of the Dnepr defined Poland’s eastern frontier, although Kiev, and the area immediately surrounding it, always belonged to Imperial Russia. This was agreed between Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Poland in January 1667 (Subtelny 1988: 146]. The southern parts of Ukraine, including the whole of the Black Sea coast, then belonged to Turkey. In the course of the eighteenth century, Turkey, after a succession of defeats in battle, lost to Imperial Russia all its land in Ukraine, a process that ended in 1783, with Catherine the Great formally declaring the incorporation of the Crimea. The result was that ‘the steppe, which for millennia had been a source of danger for the sedentary populations that ringed it, [was] at last … made accessible to the peasant’s plow’ (ibid.: 176). For Russia and the Ukraine, that was only half the story: with Turkey no longer an obstacle to settling southern Ukraine, Russia was free to develop the northern coast of the Black Sea: in 1789, only seven years after the Turks had ceded their small fortress of Khadzhibei, the Empress Catherine the Great decreed that the city of Odessa be founded on the same site. This was sound policy, and within some 80 years proved to be even more so, when, with steamships already plying the Black Sea, the Russian railways (in 1866) reached Odessa: before the end of the nineteenth century it became the fourth largest city in Imperial Russia.

Poland

Imperial Russia, in the course of the eighteenth century combined with Austria and Prussia to eliminate the kingdom of Poland as an independent state. The process started in 1709 when the Russian emperor, Peter the Great, having won a decisive battle with Poland, incorporated all Ukraine into the Russian empire, taking ‘the English subjugation of Ireland to be a fitting model’ (Subtelny 1988: 165) for his rule. Two hundred years later, in 1914, Lenin, still in exile in Switzerland, noted that ‘[Ukraine] has become for Russia what Ireland was for England: exploited in the extreme and receiving nothing in return’ (ibid: 269]. This is more or less true. Peter the Great forced Ukraine to export wheat via Russian ports such as Riga and St Petersburg,¹¹ at the same time not only forbidding export to Poland, but also – with a view to encouraging industry in Russia – subjecting imports from Poland to high excise duties (ibid.: 180). Although, in 1785, Catherine the Great granted a Charter of Nobility, providing for the Ukrainian starshyna to be incorporated in to the Russian dvorianstvo,¹² this only helped a small privileged minority. The broad mass of Ukrainian peasants were looked down upon by Russians in much the same way as the indigenous population of Ireland was looked down upon by the English: in both cases, the men of the soil were seen as too helpless to look after their own interests – while at the same time their unskilled labour could be exploited by the gentry and nobility.

Gaining the whole of Ukraine was not enough to satisfy imperial Russia under Catherine the Great. Poland, subject to a succession of weak governments was also up for grabs: as Catherine’s contemporary, the Prussian Emperor, Frederick the Great, had observed, Poland should be ‘eaten like an artichoke, leaf by leaf’ (Lukowski 1999: 17).¹³ While, Catherine and Frederick had no difficulty in agreeing to the piecemeal annexation of Poland, they considered it prudent to allow Austria to participate, so reassuring the Empress Marie Theresien that Russia had no plans to expand into the Balkans – which Vienna saw as a backyard won from the Turks in the 1680s. In the event Austria jumped the gun, early in 1772, by annexing a small strip of Poland in the Carpathian mountains. As a result, neither Russia nor Prussia had any inhibitions about proceeding with their own plans, and in 1772, three bilateral treaties, signed by the representatives of Russia, Prussia and Austria, provided for the partition of a substantial part of Poland:¹⁴ Russia advanced its frontiers to include almost the whole of the headwaters of the Dnepr, Prussia acquired the western part of Polish Prussia, and Austria, Galicia (which geographically was part of Ukraine).

Poland survived this first partition, but only at the cost of losing much of its population – which did, however, become more homogeneous, with a mainly Polish-speaking population adhering to the Roman Catholic Church. King Stanislaw Augustus tried hard to come to terms with the new line-up, a task made more difficult by the tide of events in the world at large, with first the American victory over Britain in the war of independence (1776–1781), and second, the fall of the ancien régime in France (1789–1792). The prospect of Warsaw becoming a centre for revolutionary thought, if not action, was not a welcome one for the autocratic governments that were still intent on eating up Poland ‘leaf by leaf’. Defiantly, the ‘Great Sejm’ (1788–1792) (as the Polish parliament was known) produced a new written constitution,¹⁵ while at the same time approving the creation of a new 100,000-man army. True to form, conservative opponents among the nobility joined together to ask Catherine the Great to help overthrow the new constitution. Although the Poles, with a brilliant general, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, commanding its army, fought hard for their independence, a decisive defeat by the Russians at Maciejowice in 1795, meant the end of independent Poland; a third and final partition divided what was left of the country between Russia and Prussia – and also Austria. Ukraine was indisputably part of Imperial Russia, with its territory extending further to the west than ever before. Prussia had become a significant European power, and Austria had added yet two more provinces to its empire.

The nineteenth century saw the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Ukrainians to the United States and Canada. In particular, Kosciuszko’s service in the War of American Independence meant that his cause, at home in Poland, was not forgotten, nor the injustices suffered by his people forgiven. This helped ensure that by the end of World War I, with the United States as one of the Allied Powers, the cause of Polish independence would be on their agenda for post-war Europe; after all, the three great powers which had partitioned the country in 1795 had all been defeated in the war.

Jews and the Pale of Settlement

This, however, is running ahead. It is time to look at one particular aspect of Poland and Ukraine, as they were during the centuries that preceded World War I: this was the presence of Europe’s, if not the world’s, largest Jewish population.¹⁶ As early as the fourteenth century, King Casimir of Poland, with a view to strengthening his own hand against the nobility, encouraged Jewish immigration from the Holy Roman Empire, particularly to his capital, Kraków (Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001: 28). From the beginning Jews were only welcome, if at all, in towns, where by the seventeenth century – numbering more than 200,000 – they were the fastest expanding group (ibid.: 54). They were also more secure than anywhere else in Europe (Löwe 1993: 14).

As, in the course of time, Poland came to incorporate the whole of Ukraine west of the Dnepr, Jews became increasingly dominant in Ukrainian commerce. Allowed only to live in towns, they began to establish their own self-contained communities, known as ‘shtetls’. Even in the towns which also had an indigenous Polish or Ukrainian population Jews had in the ‘kahal’ their own institution of local self-government (ibid.: 15). In any case Jews, among themselves, spoke their own language, Yiddish, and maintained their own religious institutions, such as notably the yeshiva, a college devoted to the study of their sacred texts.

At the same time the great landowners in the countryside blocked the growth of towns (Levine 1991: 253), regarding them as potential havens for fugitive serfs or as sites for markets beyond their control (ibid.: 259). Worse still, it was Jewish merchants and pedlars, who provided the vast army of serfs with access to a market economy – essential for earning the money for meeting fixed costs, such as rent and tithes, and buying such commodities as salt, wax, nails and cloth, and most critically, for the role of the Jews, beer and vodka (ibid.: 255). The leading gentry, intent on strengthening their own economic position, if necessary at the cost of the serfs, encouraged the growth of ‘private’ towns on their estates, and by ruling to ban Jews from the crafts of the ‘old’ towns outside the feudal domain, left many of them with little alternative but to seek their living in these ‘new’ towns; ‘shtetls’ were often the only alternative and there was a limit, both social and economic, to the number that could be founded (Löwe 1993: 86).

That Jews had to come to terms with the need to find a niche in a feudal society, also meant that the landowning nobility had to find a way of accommodating them. Their solution was to grant the Jews a monopoly of the local sale of alcohol – an institution known as the ‘propinacja’ (Levine 1991: 251) combined with the right to collect, on a commission basis, rents, tolls and taxes. Although for Jews there was often little alternative to accepting this role – particularly in the ‘new’ towns – they were also at the same time traders and craftsmen, if on a very modest scale. Although, from the seventeenth century onward Poland, having been marginal in wars of religion, flourished as the ‘breadbasket’ of Europe (ibid.: 254), steadily deteriorating terms of trade for wheat in Poland’s export market (ibid.: 257) meant that the propinacja had an additional advantage for large estates: distilling grain for local consumption became an increasingly profitable alternative – ¹⁷ so much so that on one of the largest noble estates, that of the powerful Czartoryski family, it accounted for some 40 per cent of the harvest (Löwe 1993: 16).¹⁸

The results of the propinacja were disastrous for every class involved in it – which in the predominately agricultural economy of Poland meant substantially the whole population. Inevitably the peasants, particularly in Ukraine, who had been degraded into becoming a servile labour force blamed the Jews. If the Chmielnicki massacres of the mid-seventeenth century (Levine 1991:159) were the first major uprising directed against the Jews, they were by no means the last: pogroms occurred intermittently until the early twentieth century, with that in Odessa in 1905 attracting worldwide attention and condemnation. The lower levels of the landowning classes also resented the perceived economic advantage bestowed upon Jews by their role in the propinacja. At the end of the day, however, the biggest losers were the noble families that had originated the institution. The whole system was designed to ensure the most inefficient and unproductive use of a vast extent of Europe’s richest agricultural land; it is no wonder that Hitler coveted it, nor that, finally, he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 to acquire it as lebensraum for German settlers. Critically, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the great lando...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Brezhnev's domestic politics
• Part III International politics Peacemaker under pressure
• Part IV Brezhnev and the fall of the Soviet state
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index