Leonid Brezhnev Research Articles

Witness to history: the memoirs of Mauno Koivisto, president of Finland, 1982-1994

When Mauno Koivisto was elected president of Finland in 1982, Leonid Brezhnev was still in the Kremlin and Ronald Reagan had been the US president for a year. Relations between the superpowers were at a low ebb, and there seemed little prospect of improvement. A Treaty on Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union had been signed by a weakened Finland in 1948, and its military provisions led to talk of Finlandisation. The Soviets would not accept the concept of Finnish neutrality, to which the Finns adhered strongly. When Koivisto left office in 1994, the Soviet Union no longer existed, the 1948 treaty had been replaced, and Finland was about to become a member of the European Union, something unthinkable a few years earlier. Koivisto's account is partly a historical record. As events unfold, we follow his thinking as we become privy to his conversations and correspondence with his own ministers as well as with his foreign counterparts. As such, this book is a case history of statecraft in a small country involved in great events, but it is much more than that, for Koivisto does not miss the human element or overlook the ironies of power politics among nations.

Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, by James M. Goldgeier

How do world leaders make decisions in important foreign policy encounters? James Goldgeier argues that modern leaders come to power trained not as diplomats but as politicians, and their experiences as the most successful politicians at home provide the schooling for how to deal with friends and foes in the international arena. In Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy, Goldgeier explores this important and understudied connection between key domestic political experiences and foreign policy decisions in cases studies of four Soviet leaders of the Cold War era - Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Drawing connections between the domestic political experiences of these leaders and their behaviour towards the United States during key foreign policy events, Goldgeier offers fresh interpretations of the Berlin blockade crisis of 1948, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Middle East war of 1973, and German reunification in 1989-90. He argues that the defining moment in the development of a Soviet leader's style came during the period when that leader acted to consolidate power and neutralize adversaries in order to succeed a dead or deposed leader. Success in this period confirmed the effectiveness of the leader's first truly independent political action and shaped his distinctive political style - a style that reappeared in international bargaining. While the past may be a rational guide in helping leaders reach foreign policy decisions, Goldgeier concludes, it may also be a poor one: lessons from home can backfire in foreign policy, as they did at several key moments for these four important world leaders.

Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading

If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England. New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts. Sinfield is often provocative. He 'rewrites' Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.

The fall of Nikita Khrushchev

ON 14 OCTOBER 1964 Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev's 11-year period of dominance within the Soviet leadership came to an end. He was stripped of his party and state posts and sent into an obscure retirement by the very men who had been closest to him throughout his long career. Virtually overnight he became something of an 'un-person' in the Soviet Union: his name disappeared from the mass media and was scarcely mentioned even in such denunciations as followed his ouster. Nor were there even very many of these: there were no show trials, no ritual attacks at party congresses, no public confessions nor even any expulsions from the party. The circumstances surrounding his removal remained a mystery and the coup itself was euphemistically referred to as 'the October plenum'. The Khrushchev era had indeed ended not with a bang but a whimper and the long, debilitating reign of Leonid Brezhnev had begun. In terms of Soviet history 'the October plenum' is an event of tremendous importance. It represents one of the key turning points along the path which has led the Soviet Union from the upheavals of 1917 to the crisis of the present day. The 'Great October Palace Revolution' inaugurated two decades of political stagnation, the effects of which are still painfully in evidence in the USSR today. Moreover, an understanding of Khrushchev's ouster in 1964 would contribute greatly to our broader understanding of Soviet politics in the post-war period. It is therefore most fortunate that a number of interviews, memoirs and analyses of Khrushchev's fall-many of them by the very men involved-have recently appeared in the Soviet Union. Though often contradictory, when taken together they present enough information to allow a fairly confident reconstruction of what took place. The picture which emerges is in many ways sharply at odds with accounts of the coup advanced by Western observers since 1964. It also challenges certain Western images of Soviet high politics during the post-Stalin era. Much Western misunderstanding of the 1964 coup stems from the incorrect assumption that the plot to remove Khrushchev was hatched and executed with great speed, in October 1964. Michel Tatu, in what is arguably the best early reconstruction of Khrushchev's ouster, reckoned that the plot finally took shape

The Transfiguring of Context in the Work of Abram Terts

In particular, I am very interested in the problem of prose, prose as space.Andrei SiniavskiiIn 1974, soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, the literary scholar Andrei Siniavskii once again deferred to his created alter ego, the writer Abram Terts, to pass provocative judgment on the Soviet literary scene. The essay ascribed to Terts, “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii,” reviews unofficial Soviet literature to highlight its artistic (rather than moral) appeal. As Terts reads it, the punitive context of this literature—established by Stalin and enforced to a less rigorous extent through the Leonid Brezhnev era—inadvertently guaranteed art and the fate of the artist richness and power: At this moment the fate of the Russian writer has become the most intriguing, the most fruitful literary topic in the whole world; he is either being imprisoned, pilloried, internally exiled, or simply kicked out. The writer nowadays is walking a knife-edge; but unlike the old days, when writers were simply eliminated one after another, he now derives pleasure and moral satisfaction from this curious pastime. The writer is now someone to be reckoned with. And all the attempts to make him see reason, to terrorize or crush him, to corrupt or liquidate him, only raise his literary achievement to higher and higher levels.

Gorbachev's Reforms and the Reversal of History

obdurate skeptics that the reforms initiated in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev represent no mere tinkering with the Soviet system, but an attempt at fundamentally redirecting what had manifestly become an obsolete political and economic structure. Whether the effort will succeed against the resistance of conservatives and amid conditions of economic crisis and nationality disintegration is another question, as is the question how and why Gorbachev managed to undertake such a radical reform to begin with. To find the answers we need to consider how the Gorbachev era fits into the whole perspective of the Soviet regime's historical development. Gorbachev's own record in office suggests that he did not conceive of his reform program all at once. Certainly its enunciation only unfolded step by step, probably in response to events and problems as they emerged. In its initial presentation at the April Central Committee Plenum in 1985, perestroika was indeed no more than tinkering, though it was based, as Gorbachev himself reported, on considerable discussion beforehand with intellectual critics of the old system under Leonid Brezhnev.' In this first phase, Gorbachev was doing little more than pick up the reform program of Brezhnev's immediate successor as General Secretary of the Commu-

BAM, BOOM, BUST: ANALYSIS OF A RAILWAY'S PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

The author analyzes, from an international perspective, reasons behind the boom and bust history of the Baykal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railway. BAM, a pet project of Leonid Brezhnev, was viewed by the former Soviet leader as both a lasting legacy to his memory and a means for “quick profit.” Ultimately, the decision to construct the railroad and develop its hinterland reflected a gross misunderstanding of the long-range cyclical nature of resource markets. The likely future of BAM is assessed in light of the fact that BAM will not be a paying proposition until after the year 2000.

Trifonov'sDom na naberezhnoiand the Fortunes of Aesopian Speech

In both the west and the Soviet Union the reputation of the late lurii Trifonov has come to rest principally on the candor with which his works, particularly those of his Moscow cycle, examine ethical themes. To non-Soviet scholars Trifonov offers the appealing biography of a writer who, having begun his career with a Stalinist novel (Studenty, 1950), nonetheless welcomed the Thaw (Utolenie zhazhdy, 1963) and then evolved into a chronicler of the moral decline into which Soviet society was sliding under Leonid Brezhnev.

Leadership and negotiation in the Middle East

Lebanon's Elias Sarkis, Bashir Gemayal, and Amin Gemayal Israel's Menachem Begin The PLO's Yasser Arafat Syria's Hafez Al-Assad Egypt's Hosni Mubarak Jordan's King Hussein Saudi Arabia's King Khaled and King Fahd The Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev The United States's Ronald Reagan Commentary: The Leader versus the Academic Analyst Commentary: On Negotiating the Non-Negotiable Bibliography Index

Soviet Trade with the Industrialized West

SOVIET TRADE WITH THE. INDUSTRIALIZED WEST Daniel Franklin Wh hile Leonid Brezhnev was still alive a Soviet planner contemplating the strength of his country's foreign trade position could have been forgiven for reaching some rather complacent conclusions. My country, he might have said, is big and self-sufficient in most natural resources, so its dependence on foreign trade is relatively small. Its imports are equivalent to roughly a tenth of national income, a percentage in line with the United States. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union conducts more than half of its trade within the shelter of the guaranteed markets and comparatively stable prices of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon). In trade with the West, the Soviet Union had a great piece of luck in the 1970s, thanks to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The oil on which the Soviet Union has relied for some two-thirds of its hard currency exports soared in value in those years, and so the country could buy more from the West without running up the sort of hard currency debt that crippled Poland. There seemed every chance that this luck would last. Stalin had created a system for conducting foreign trade that provided shelter from potentially devastating Western competition without noticeably harming Soviet exports to the West. Soviet protectionism against the West provoked no "retaliatory" restrictions on Soviet oil deliveries to Western markets. On the contrary, the West seemed prepared Daniel Franklin is Europe editor for The Economist, which he joined in 1983 to write about Soviet and East European affairs. This article is based on a paper he presented at the 1987 NATO Economics Colloquium, April 1-3, 1987, which will be included in the forthcoming collection: The Soviet Economy: A New Course. 75 76 SAIS REVIEW to buy as much oil as the Russians could supply. The main barrier to selling more Soviet manufactured goods was the self-inflicted one ofpoor quality. On the whole, the hypothetical planner might have concluded, the Soviet Union's protectionist foreign trade system was working well. Two events shattered this comfortable picture: the price of oil came crashing down, and Mikhail Gorbachev came crashing in. The collapse of the oil price not only knocked a big hole in the Soviet Union's main source of hard currency, forcing the Russians to look for other hard currency exports as a replacement for oil, but it also laid bare an embarrassing weakness that Soviet policymakers had preferred to ignore for years: the Soviet Union was a superpower with a "one-crop" export structure more commonly associated with Third World economies. Declining oil revenues reinforced the sense of urgency in Gorbachev's drive to turn his country into an economic as well as a military superpower. Part of Gorbachev's drive involves acknowledging the damaging effects of long-term efforts to cushion Soviet industry from international competition. Despite the stability Comecon offers, it has been aptly dubbed the "Council for Mutual Economic Inefficiency." If Soviet industry is to compete with the West, Soviet foreign trade has to become more flexible and more open. Gorbachev knows this, and he has responded by introducing the most far-reaching reform of the Soviet foreign trade system since Lenin's day. The sudden change in the oil price, together with Gorbachev's reform of the trading system, makes this a time of exceptional upheaval in Soviet trade with the industrialized West; a time for uncomfortable questions to replace the comfortable old assumptions. How damaging is the fall in the oil price for the Soviet Union? How far will the foreign trade reform go? Will it work? Above all, does Gorbachev intend a fundamental change or merely a tactical shift in Soviet trade policy with the West? The Reverse Oil Shock The Soviet Union has come to rely increasingly on energy exports, especially oil, in its trade with the West. This reliance occurred in part due to the enormous windfall gains from the OPEC price rises of the 1970s. As tables 1 and 2 show, the volume of Soviet oil deliveries to the West rose by about a quarter between 1975 and 1980, but the...

Regionalism in soviet politics: Continuity as a source of change, 1953–1982

WITH the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 Western Sovietologists once more are provided with one of those all too rare transitions in central power since 1953 when the ability of a new central leader to emerge and initiate policy changes tells us much about the underlying institutional forces of the Soviet political system. Much speculation already has surfaced among Western Sovietologists since November 1982 about the alleged institutional forces which an Andropov or Chernenko must placate in the course of establishing his legitimacy, lest, in reforming the Soviet economy or altering policies in place since 1964, he move too precipitately and arouse the institutional forces to coalesce defensively against him or move too slowly and allow them to mount a political offensive against his initiatives.1 Heading the list by Western Sovietologists of the institutional forces whose interests limit the degree of change are the vertical ministerial bureaucracies and lobbies of power at the centre of the system, like the Soviet military establishment, the security police establishment, and a neo-Stalinist corps of central Party officials and heads of heavy industrial ministries.

The Shipping Crisis in the Soviet Eastern Arctic at the Close of the 1983 Navigation Season

During September 1983 an unusually early freeze-up and persistent northwesterly winds that drove heavy multi-year ice into Proliv Longa and against the north coast of Chukotka resulted in a critical situation with regard to shipping in the Soviet eastern Arctic. Ports such as Zelenyy Mys and Mys Shmidta were prematurely closed by ice, leaving Pevek as the only functioning port in this part of the Arctic. Worse still, dozens of ships were beset in the ice at various points from the mouth of the Indigirka east to Bering Strait. One freighter, Nina Sagaydak, was crushed and sank near Kosa Dvukh Pilotov on 8 October; a sister ship, Kolya Myagotin, was badly holed and barely managed to limp out of the Arctic. Practically all available ice breakers, including the nuclear-powered icebreakers Lenin, Leonid Brezhnev and Siber', were transferred from the western to the eastern Arctic to free the jammed ships. Ultimately all were rescued, but it was late November before the last ship sailed from Pevek. Many ships were forced to head west from Pevek to the Atlantic, rather than attempt to battle their way through the heavy ice in Proliv Longa in order to return to their Pacific home ports. Singled out for particular praise in Soviet post-mortems of the crisis were the nuclear-powered icebreakers and the new Noril'sk class (SA-15) icebreaking freighters, several of which came straight from the Finnish shipyards to help rectify the situation in the eastern Arctic.Key words: Soviet eastern Arctic, Soviet Union, navigation, icebreaker

Growth and Fluctuations of Production in O.E.C.D. and East European Countries

Our knowledge of the operations of the centrally planned East European economies has become increasingly detailed; unfortunately, this accumulating scholarship has led to a certain disregard for some of the larger issues, especially concerning long-term developmental trends. The adverse results of this loss of focus have become quite apparent from the discussions about Soviet and East European economic problems—occasioned by the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov—in the popular and semi-popular press. Most of the sweeping generalizations presented to the public were at considerable variance with scholarly assessments tucked away in publications for specialists. Further, many of the important empirical lessons in earlier comparative studies of long-term growth in East and West (for example, the remarkable survey by Bergson)1 appear to have been forgotten; and U.S. governmental policy statements often appear to be based on false assumptions about what actually happened.

Soviet Historiography of the Great Patriotic War 1970-1985: A Review

Leonid Brezhnev's consolidation of power in the 1970s had a significant impact on Soviet military historiography. The accent was now on the positive, and criticism of Stalin and his military leadership was muted. There was no longer any room for such authors as A. M. Nekrich, whose 1941: 22 iiunia (published in 1965 by Nauka) had proved to be so controversial, nor for frank memoirs such as General N. K. Popel's Vtiazhkuiu poru (1959) or Marshal A. A. Biriuzov's Surovye gody (1966) where the Soviet Man was shown to exhibit less than perfection on occasion.

Major safety provisions in nuclear-powered ships

Considerable experience has been accumulated in the Soviet Union on the design, construction and operation of nuclear-powered civilian ships: the icebreakers Lenin, Leonid Brezhnev and Sibir. The nuclear steam plants (NSP) used on these as the main energy source have been found to be highly reliable and safe, and it is desirable to use them in the future not only in icebreakers but also in transport ships for use in ice fields. The Soviet program for building and developing nuclear-powered ships has involved careful attention to safety in ships containing NSP. The experience with the design and operation of nuclear icebreakers in recent years has led to the revision of safety standards for the nuclear ships and correspondingly ship NSP and international guidelines have been developed. If one meets the requirements as set forth in these documents, one has a safe basis for future Soviet nuclear-powered ships. The primary safety provisions for NSP are presented in this paper.

Soviet health problems

At the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held in February-March 1981, the general secretary of the party, Leonid Brezhnev, addressed the issue of health conditions and delivery in the country. Brezhnev indicated that improving the health of Soviet citizens was among the most important social tasks. He noted that a major decree was issued 22 September 1977 on measures to improve health in the country and that the capacity of polyclinics had increased by 500,000 since the Party Congress held five years earlier. He then confronted the negative side of the health-delivery issue:

Soviet Health Problems

At the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held in February-March 1981, the general secretary of the party, Leonid Brezhnev, addressed the issue of health conditions and delivery in the country. Brezhnev indicated that improving the health of Soviet citizens was among the most important social tasks. He noted that a major decree was issued 22 September 1977 on measures to improve health in the country and that the capacity of polyclinics had increased by 500,000 since the Party Congress held five years earlier. He then confronted the negative side of the health-delivery issue:

The USSR's External Economic Relations and Japan

In 1979-1982 — the last years of the late Leonid Brezhnev — the Soviet economic environment at home and abroad was taking a turn for the worse. At home, agriculture was in poor shape for four years in a row, and industrial growth slowed markedly. As for external relations, the slump of the East European economies, as was clear from the confusion in Poland, brought a heavy burden to the Soviet economy, and the Western camp led by the United States embarked on relentless anti-Soviet economic sanctions.

The Political Economy of the Brezhnev Era: The Rise and Fall of Corporatism

When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, the Soviet empire consisted of Cuba and six reliable satellites in Eastern Europe, the bloc was dominated politically and economically by the Soviet Union, and East–West interactions were kept to a minimum. Soviet military capabilities at this time, moreover, were clearly inferior to the military power of the West. And while East–West relations were testy, they had improved in the aftermath of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

The USSR and Asia in 1982: The End of the Brezhnev Era

THROUGHOUT HIS PERIOD of leadership, Leonid Brezhnev was closely associated with the Soviet role in Asia-aspirations (his Asian Security Proposal), successes (relations with Vietnam and India), failures (Afghanistan and the disastrous relationship with China), and rise to regional military importance. In the last year of his life, Brezhnev remained active in Asian policy, even as significant trends emerged that could alter-for better or worse-some of the Soviets' principal Asian relationships. His passing from the scene on November 10 could itself contribute to the further evolution of these trends. For most of 1982, Soviet attention was focused away from Asia, and there were few events that forced a Soviet response. Brezhnev himself made policy statements on Asia-in Tashkent in March and Baku in September-that broke no new ground and continued to reflect his hyper-conservative policy of waiting for the chance to profit from the mistakes of others. By late in the year, however, an important opening was made on the most critical of all the Soviets' relationships-the long-standing quarrel with China.