vydvizhentsy survived the Stalin period to dominate the three
decades after his death. This became even more pronounced fol-
lowing the removal of Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Central
Committee in October 1964: his successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev,
born in 1906, adopted what was known as the ‘stability of cadres’
policy, in order to allay the concerns of those party officials whose
positions had been destabilised by radical reorganisations under
Khrushchev. The effects of this policy on the Soviet elite were dra-
matic. By 1980, the average age of full members of the Politburo
of the Communist Party was 70.1, compared with 55.4 in 1952; the
average age of Central Committee Secretaries was 67.0, compared
with 52.0 in 1952 (Bialer, 1980: 83).
At the upper echelons of the party elite in particular, the bulk of
important positions were held by individuals whose formative
experiences were anything but liberal. Brezhnev’s key associates in
the foreign policy sphere were very much of this ilk. The Soviet
Foreign Minister, Andrei A. Gromyko, born in 1909, had held the
position since 1957, but had earlier come to prominence as Stalin’s
Ambassador to the USA from 1943. The Soviet Defence Minister,
Dmitri F. Ustinov, born in 1908, had served as Stalin’s Minister for
Armaments during the Second World War, although the bulk of his
career, before his appointment as Defence Minister in 1976, had
been as a party official. The Head of the International Department
of the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee, Boris N.
Ponomarev, was born in 1905, and had been a Comintern activist
in his youth. The Chairman of the Committee of State Security
(KGB), Iurii V. Andropov, was a little younger than the others,
having been born in 1914, but as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary in
1956 had played a major role during the Soviet crushing of the
Hungarian revolution against communist rule (Meray, 1959: 189).
In addition, the Soviet systemwas singularly free of mechanisms
of accountability to ensure that policy failures would be punished.
To Juvenal’s famous question quis custodiet ipsos custodes? –
‘Who will guard the guardians themselves?’ – the Soviet model
had no answer. Here lay one of its greatest contrasts with even a
poorly functioning democracy. One observer accurately described
24 The Afghanistan Wars