refrigerator, and the Ministry of Aviation manu-
factured an excellent vacuum cleaner.
The army had backed the overthrow of
Khrushchev and had benefited from the increas-
ing defence expenditure necessary to achieve
parity with the US in nuclear and missile
weaponry and to remedy Russia’s inferiority on
the high seas. The strengthening of the armed
forces from 1964 to 1974 was dramatic and
absorbed a disproportionate part of the Soviet
budget. But Brezhnev also wanted to preside over
a consumer boom, and the armed forces and their
ministries saw a chance for profit. They began by
providing goods for their own military and civil-
ian personnel – vegetables, prams and so on –
then their products became more widely available.
The problem of how to relate consumers and pro-
ducers in a centrally directed economy without a
market mechanism, in a system where prices and
costs are arbitrarily fixed, was neither tackled
nor solved. Could such an economy be reformed
and adjusted to meet Soviet requirements, and yet
retain its socialist character? That was the basic
question that confronted reformers from the
1960s to the 1980s.
With the relaxation of repression and increas-
ing contact with the West, the Soviet citizen,
especially in the major cities, became more sophis-
ticated. Complaints and criticisms were articu-
lated. One of the few success stories of the
Soviet Union is the spread of education. Though
loyalty to the Soviet state remained a basic
requirement, education was provided on merit.
This created a large educated class. Critical discus-
sion began in the 1960s and 1970s among enquir-
ing groups of university students, one of which
included Mikhail Gorbachev; it encompassed pro-
fessional circles of a whole new post-war genera-
tion but had to be conducted discreetly and
privately. The thaw that had begun with
Khrushchev could no longer be reversed in the
Brezhnev era. But strict limits were set and exem-
plary punishment imposed on the most prominent
dissidents, who courageously continued to speak
out publicly – outstanding men such as Andrei
Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei
Sinyavsky and Yali Daniel. Some of the most
prominent dissidents were Jewish. Anti-Semitism
increased, and Zionism was equated with treach-
ery. Jews who applied to leave the Soviet Union
would lose their jobs, though some were eventu-
ally permitted to emigrate. But the restrained
repression of a ‘reformed’ KGB, placed under the
control of Yuri Andropov, could only contain, not
eradicate, the by now widespread dissident move-
ment. Duplicating machines acted as an under-
ground press, whose samizdateditions passed
through hundreds of hands. That dissent flour-
ished is evidence of the courage of a section of the
intelligentsia; years of communist propaganda
could not obliterate independent thought.
Now that world opinion was concerning itself
with the fate of the dissidents, the Soviet author-
ities could no longer behave as they had in
Stalin’s time. Moreover, the Soviet Union had
officially adhered to the Helsinki Agreement of
1975, promising to respect basic human rights;
this provided the protesters with some legal
standing, at least internationally. The denial to
Soviet Jews of permission to emigrate was coun-
tered by American congressional pressure which
linked credit and trade concessions to the USSR
to Soviet liberality in allowing Jews to leave
(Senator Jackson’s amendment) at a time when
American imports were of particular value to the
Russians. Moscow reacted angrily to what it
regarded as unwarranted Western interference in
Soviet affairs. Over the longer term, however, the
growing links with the West made mass repres-
sion of dissenting opinion impossible. In the
1970s the ‘prisoners of conscience’ in the Soviet
Union, suffering hardship from house arrest to
exile, from hard labour to forced detention in psy-
chiatric institutions, were numbered in thousands,
rather than the millions of Stalin’s day, and exe-
cutions ceased.
For the mass of Soviet peoples the awareness of
poor living conditions coincided with the improve-
ments made during the Brezhnev years. Grain pro-
duction from 1964 to 1969 averaged 156 million
tonnes a year, but varied in a particular year from a
low of 121 million (1965) to a high of 171 million
(1966). The average only just covered basic Soviet
needs – there were no longer any famines or short-
ages of bread. But the people wanted more variety,
more milk, more meat and more vegetables.
1
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