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Were Brezhnev's Years the 'Era of Stagnation'?
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Russia – The Rule of Leonid Brezhnev, 1964-1982
In this course, Professor Peter Rutland (Wesleyan University) discusses Leonid Brezhnev’s years as leader of the Soviet Union, from his coup against former leader Nikita Khrushchev until his death in 1982. In the first lecture we introduce the key figures of the Brezhnev era and question Mikhail Gorbachev’s characterisation of the Brezhnev years as an ‘Era of Stagnation’. In the second lecture we examine the changes in the leadership structure through Brezhnev’s leadership, from the more singular rules of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, to the Collective Leadership practised under Brezhnev. In the third lecture we inquire into the political ideology behind Brezhnev’s leadership. Fourth, we highlight the corruption of the Brezhnev years, looking at the Nomenklatura system and cronyism that marked his time as leader of the USSR. In the fifth lecture, we identify the key features of Brezhenv’s domestic policy, including growth in consumer goods, lack of agricultural reform and focus on nuclear energy. Finally, in the sixth lecture, we conclude with an overview of Brezhnev’s foreign policy, from the height of Cold War tension to a period of Détente with the west, and the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.
Were Brezhnev's Years the 'Era of Stagnation'?
In this lecture we think about an overview of the Brezhnev era and question to what extent it was the ‘Era of Stagnation’, focussing on: (i) Brezhnev’s years were contemporarily understood as stable and successful, but later criticised by Mikhail Gorbachev as an era of stagnation; (ii) in recent years, Russians have shown nostalgia for this period, contrasting it with the chaos of the Boris Yeltsin’s years in 1990s and Gorbachev's reforms; (iii) the importance of understanding Brezhnev's era for making sense of current Russian society and the mindset of leaders like Vladimir Putin.
My name is Peter Rutland.
00:00:06I'm a professor of government at Wesleyan University in
00:00:07Middletown, Connecticut,
00:00:10and I'm here today to talk about the Brezhnev era,
00:00:12the period from nineteen sixty four to nineteen eighty two
00:00:15when Leonid Brezhnev was the ruler of the Soviet Union.
00:00:19And it's important to maintain historical perspective on this.
00:00:24The Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety one,
00:00:31but at the time, that was a great shock to everybody.
00:00:34People thought the Soviet Union would last forever
00:00:37and it was assumed that it was a stable,
00:00:41successful political system that was a mortal rival
00:00:43of the United States.
00:00:47And the Brezhnev period symbolized the achievements of
00:00:49the Soviet Union.
00:00:53It put the first man in space,
00:00:54it rivaled the US as a global superpower,
00:00:56and its economy seemed to be growing.
00:01:00So, the Soviet Union collapse was very unexpected.
00:01:02At the time, the Brezhnev era was seen as
00:01:09one of stability
00:01:12and the collapse really began after he died in nineteen
00:01:15eighty two when Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of
00:01:19the Soviet Union,
00:01:23and Gorbachev called the Brezhnev period the period of stagnation.
00:01:24Brezhnev's, had not done many reforms,
00:01:29and Gorbachev blamed Brezhnev for the economic
00:01:32flat line which kicked in in the nineteen eighties.
00:01:37And that label of era of stagnation stuck
00:01:40and the collapse of the Soviet
00:01:45Union which followed was seen as proof that the Brezhnev
00:01:47system was kind of rotten to the core.
00:01:50So that was the general impression of the Brezhnev
00:01:54period in the 1990s was that kind of the problems
00:01:57of the Soviet Union had been covered up by Brezhnev,
00:02:01that conservative bureaucrats had stopped much needed reforms,
00:02:05and that kind of laid the seeds of the destruction of the
00:02:09Soviet system.
00:02:12So that was that was twenty, twenty five years ago.
00:02:13After Vladimir Putin came to power in the year two thousand,
00:02:17things started to change, and the Russian people started
00:02:21to have some nostalgia for the Brezhnev period,
00:02:26looking back on it as a period of stability and predictability
00:02:29and when the Soviet Union was a force to be reckoned with in the world.
00:02:33And they contrasted the Brezhnev period with the the
00:02:37chaotic years of Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika
00:02:41policies, then the even more chaotic years of the wild
00:02:44nineteen nineties under Boris Yeltsin when there was a
00:02:49ramshackle democracy, there were military coups,
00:02:53there was a war in Chechnya,
00:02:56and there was a massive collapse of the Russian economy.
00:02:58So
00:03:01Russians in the two thousands and Russians today see the
00:03:03nineteen nineties as the worst period of recent Russian
00:03:07history and the Gorbachev period is almost as bad,
00:03:10and they look back to the Brezhnev period, very positive.
00:03:14And that's that's kind of quite surprising
00:03:17because it it it it it didn't feel that it was gonna head
00:03:20that way in the nineteen nineties.
00:03:24The other point of historical context is that with Vladimir
00:03:28Putin launching wars of aggression
00:03:31against Georgia and Ukraine and threatening nuclear
00:03:34destruction on the West and with a remilitarization
00:03:38of the Russian economy,
00:03:42an increased centralization of control of Russian industry by the state.
00:03:45It really looks like as speaking
00:03:51today in twenty twenty four,
00:03:53it looks like we're heading back into the USSR.
00:03:55So that's another reason why it's important to not overlook
00:03:58the Brezhnev period and try to understand what were the
00:04:02dynamics of Russian society under Leonid Brezhnev.
00:04:05So Vladimir Putin himself was born in nineteen fifty two
00:04:10and grew up, therefore, through the the the peak years
00:04:15of the Soviet Union, as a as a child in school,
00:04:19as a student in college,
00:04:24and then as a seventeen year veteran of the KGB.
00:04:26He was schooled in the basic values and principles of the
00:04:29Soviet society.
00:04:33So if we understand how Brezhnev's Soviet Union
00:04:34worked, we'll understand much better,
00:04:37Vladimir Putin's outlook on the world because he
00:04:40is he is a child of that era.
00:04:43And, famously,
00:04:47after he came to power,
00:04:49Vladimir Putin was asked about the Soviet Union,
00:04:51and he said those who don't regret its collapse have no heart,
00:04:54but those who think it can be brought back into life have no head.
00:04:59And that pretty much accurately characterizes these attitudes
00:05:04of ordinary Russians as well.
00:05:07Surveys by the Levada Center show that about seventy eight
00:05:10percent of Russians today have positive feelings
00:05:13about the Brezhnev period,
00:05:18but only twenty eight percent of them think that they would
00:05:20want to go back and try and live through it again.
00:05:23So Putin, I think, in this respect, at least, is,
00:05:26expressing the views of most ordinary Russians.
00:05:30There's also an element of of personal nostalgia that the the
00:05:35generation that grew up under Leonid Brezhnev,
00:05:39who experienced the chaos of the nineteen nineties
00:05:43as as twenty year olds and thirty year olds and the
00:05:46struggles of raising a family,
00:05:49then are looking back to their childhood and their youth in
00:05:51the nineteen sixties and seventies with nostalgia.
00:05:54So this is also a kind of generational thing that the
00:05:57younger generations,
00:06:02who are born and brought up after the collapse of the
00:06:03Soviet Union, they know very little about the Brezhnev period.
00:06:06What they know about it, they learn from, TV shows,
00:06:10and there's been quite a lot of movies and TV serials which
00:06:13have contributed to this nostalgia
00:06:17for the for the Brezhnev period.
00:06:19It's a bit like the way that the nineteen fifties are kind
00:06:21of treated in in the United States.
00:06:23It doesn't reflect the reality that life was much,
00:06:26tougher and and, harsher than the memory.
00:06:30Memory plays tricks on people,
00:06:34but that's that's the kind of impressions of the Brezhnev era
00:06:35in in Russian society today.
00:06:40For intellectuals,
00:06:44it's particularly interesting to to look at the complexity of
00:06:45the Brezhnev period because, well,
00:06:48it's it's characterized as as stagnation.
00:06:51In fact, there was quite a lot of dynamism in Russian society,
00:06:54economic development, social developments,
00:06:58and also in the cultural sphere.
00:07:01While there was strict censorship,
00:07:03there was a flourishing of the arts, of cinema, theater,
00:07:05literature, there was a degree of freedom.
00:07:11Writer,
00:07:14Dmitry Bykov,
00:07:16author and novelist described it as a silver age,
00:07:18for Russian culture somewhat controversially,
00:07:22But he pointed to figures like filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky,
00:07:25folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, and,
00:07:29authors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn
00:07:33to show that there was this creativity beneath the surface
00:07:37and in the corners that was possible during the Brezhnev period.
00:07:41And we we don't see that kind of intellectual
00:07:46creativity in the nineteen nineties or in Putin's Russia for that matter.
00:07:50So these are all reasons why understanding the complexities
00:07:55of the Brezhnev period are are very relevant to understanding
00:07:59the complexities of,
00:08:03Russian society today and the big question of where is Russia
00:08:04going and what will happen after Putin leaves power.
00:08:08
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Rutland, P. (2024, October 18). Russia – The Rule of Leonid Brezhnev, 1964-1982 - Were Brezhnev's Years the 'Era of Stagnation'? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/russia-the-rule-of-leonid-brezhnev-1964-1982
MLA style
Rutland, P. "Russia – The Rule of Leonid Brezhnev, 1964-1982 – Were Brezhnev's Years the 'Era of Stagnation'?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 18 Oct 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/russia-the-rule-of-leonid-brezhnev-1964-1982