Their Dear Leonid Ilich
From the sublime (genuine or simply imagined) to the ridiculous is but one step. The outstanding leader of the Leninist type, four-times (!) Hero of the Soviet Union, the 18 years of whose rule (1964-1982) can be surely called the “golden age” of Soviet apparat prosperity, soon became the favorite butt of jokes and parodies which called forth nothing but contempt. On December 19 Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, the father of stagnation, CPSU CC General Secretary and also formal head of the Soviet state during the last five years of his life, would have turned 95.
The more you learn about the so-called period of stagnation that still lingers in the memory of everyone over thirty, the more less than simple questions arise. This equally applies to “our dear Leonid Ilich” (in reality, “their” Leonid Ilich, who exclusively expressed the interests of Party functionaries closely intertwined with the army and KGB elite. It is these three foundations on which his regime rested so firmly). The image of him as a feeble, almost weak-minded, and easily-manipulated old man has in fact become an integral part of mass consciousness. But to what extent does this correspond to the facts? When exactly and why did Brezhnev begin to project such an image?
No doubt, the then General Secretary was not exactly of an illustrious intellect. But this raises the question why he, whom many top Party and state functionaries considered just a temporary and caretaker figure, managed not only to hold power for 18 years but also to gradually eliminate his most dangerous rivals? Does this mean Brezhnev had some qualities that positively distinguished him from, say, Shelepin (who had quite good liberal arts education), Suslov (the universally recognized theoretician of Marxism-Leninism), and others? Let us try to find the truth.
Brezhnev can be rightly called a past master of Party apparat compromises. In the beginning, when he himself was also a figure of compromise, who suited the various factions of the ruling Party-Soviet-KGB bureaucratic elite, he would live and let live, guaranteeing a trouble-free existence to bureaucrats tired of the totalitarian stresses of Stalinism. Yet, this innately kind-hearted and even mawkish person (word has it he wept reading the letters of Stalinist victims the hundreds of thousands of whom returned from prison camps in 1955-1957), was an exceptionally gripping, crafty, and, if you like, wicked politician. He was very well aware of the following fundamental maxim: it is more important to retain, rather than wield, power for oneself, one’s clan, and the apparat. So he knew how to transfer or dismiss, quietly and without much scandal, his rivals, removing them from the Politburo (this destiny befell Ukraine’s party leader Shelest, Podhorny, Voronov, Mazurov, Shelepin, Poliansky). Such decisions were usually made as like this: as a Politburo meeting was drawing to a close, Brezhnev would take out a slip of paper and casually say, “I’ve just discussed an organizational point with some comrades, so we’re of the opinion that...”
But not only did Brezhnev depend on apparat support (especially of the first secretaries of oblast and republic Party organizations): paradoxical as it is, the apparat was also increasingly dependent on the General Secretary because he always guaranteed their remaining in office without undue trouble. From 1974-1975 on, the increasingly decrepit Brezhnev began to lose ground, more and more relying on his quite good aides even when it came to cadre problems which he, a loyal pupil of Stalin and member of the last Stalinist CC Secretariat, had usually solved on his own (among his miscalculations was the appointment of Boris Yeltsin as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Party Committee in 1976, and of Mikhail Gorbachev as a CC secretary in 1978... But who could then foresee the future?) The surprising thing is that functionaries more and more eulogized him in the press and onscreen, without realizing that this was a sure sign of the whole system’s death agony.
We find it easy now to laugh at the man remembered as the father of stagnation. But we thus bypass some important questions. For example, how many of Brezhnev’s trademark methods, by means of which he could so brilliantly achieve a balance of interests in the apparat, have been inherited by his political successors of various generations? What has caused the increasing popularity of this four time Hero in the past few years? Only nostalgia? Things have gone so far that even his grandson, Andrei Brezhnev, touching “the chords of people’s memory,” is running for parliament.
And, finally, perhaps the main question arises. Have we learned the tragic lesson of the stagnation period: the absence of a humane idea that could unite, not only meet the personal needs of some of its members, inevitably leads to inner moral decay and crime (at that time represented by Shchelokov, Churbanov, Rashidov, and others), intellectual senility, and, more likely, economic degradation, when officials rule society on automatic pilot without making any fundamental changes, in the brilliant style of Brezhnev-period bureaucrats?
