superpower with economic feet of clay, an empire
of nationalities held together by force. Not until
well after Brezhnev’s death in 1982 did the West,
to its own astonishment, recognise how weak-
ened the Soviet Union had become. It has been
another example of how the undercurrents of
change in history accumulate slowly, until there
is a sudden disintegration of stability evident to
everyone.
The Soviet Union was losing the race with the
West, unable to present a viable and attractive
alternative to market capitalism and democracy.
These were the years when the communist lead-
ership tried to reform and to make their system
work better. The results in the early years were
mixed; the exploitation of Russia’s rich oil and
mining resources at a time of high energy prices
in the 1970s provided a boost. But the lack of
investment had dire consequences as factories
were not renewed and the infrastructure, roads
and means of communication, was neglected.
Vast sums were diverted to the military. Maxi-
mum exploitation without thought for pollution
prepared the way for ecological disasters. A vast
bureaucratic machine, which could only stifle
initiative, had to be paid for. With increasingly
outdated technology and lacking incentives, the
Soviet worker became hopelessly unproductive.
In the end, though ‘reform communism’ did
produce changes and some improvements, they
were not enough to save the system.
Twenty years earlier, the first attempt to give
the communist state a new face had ended with
the fall of Khrushchev. The Politburo for a time
preferred not to trust any one successor after that.
In 1964, three leading members were assigned
the principal offices of state: Nicolai Podgorny
became president, Leonid Brezhnev party leader
and Alexei Kosygin chairman of the Council of
Ministers. Kosygin was an able technocrat who
was well aware of the shortcomings of the Soviet
economic performance. In place of Khrushchev’s
sudden changes, Kosygin, very much in harmony
with the thinking of his two colleagues, attempted
a more consistent and gradual approach.
The task the Soviet leaders set themselves was
to improve standards of living, to keep the KGB
under control, to catch up technologically and
quantitatively in the military sector, whose back-
wardness America’s missile superiority had so
cruelly exposed during the Cuban crisis, and
to do all this without creating new tensions in
Soviet–American relations. The course set was
one of reform and ambitious development, but
the political system and central control were not
to be weakened, let alone endangered. Brezhnev
was to become the leading exponent of this policy
of trying to please everyone, particularly the three
main pillars of the communist system, the party
hierarchy, the bureaucrats and the army. The anti-
religious course followed by Khrushchev was also
dampened down. Given these priorities, the room
for change and development was severely circum-
scribed. Progress between 1964 and 1984 was
very uneven. After a spurt from 1961 to 1975,
which owed something to the economic reforms
introduced by Kosygin, there was stagnation.
But the changes achieved in the Soviet Union
were not fundamental: prices of input materials
and output product were still fixed by the central
planners; the ‘profit’ incentive introduced into
the pricing structure could therefore be arbitrar-
ily adjusted. Nevertheless the new incentive pro-
vided a stimulus to industrial managers and to
workers, who welcomed bonus payments for
higher productivity. During the decade from
1970 to 1980, 1 million workers were redeployed
in the more efficient sectors of industry, thus
reducing chronic overmanning and increasing
productivity. But the central planners, Gosplan
and the ministries continued to set prices, fix pro-
duction targets and control supplies.
The approach to economic reform was piece-
meal, and good results were achieved in only a few
sectors of the economy, which were held back
from making faster progress by the backward sec-
tors, the lack of communications, poor roads,
widespread corruption, mismanagement and an
overall lack of coordination, each ministry seeking
to achieve the best results statistically in its own
sphere without regard to the whole. This ‘sec-
tional’ approach rarely brought any benefits to the
consumer, unless a particularly efficient section
actually produced what consumers required.
Sometimes this had bizarre consequences. The
strategic rocket forces began to produce the best