How we “drank away” Brezhnev’s legacy: the secretary general, who was underestimated

I remember very well November 11, 1982, the day when the Soviet people were officially informed of the death of “dear Leonid Ilyich” a day earlier. I remember when we were released from school. I remember how I, a first-grade student, came home through the park and saw how the workers were fixing red flags with black mourning ribbons on the buildings.

I also remember very well what was special about that moment – the absence of real grief among the “masses”, who, according to the official version, bitterly mourned their beloved leader. However, even to blind this most official version was possible with great difficulty.

The future right-hand man of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and the then Deputy Head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU Anatoly Chernyaev left detailed memories of the difficulties a group of high-ranking ideological functionaries encountered in the process of writing an obituary to the General Secretary: “I, for example, say: well, what did we write? “Led by Commissar Brezhnev, the Soviet soldiers accomplished an unparalleled feat on Malaya Zemlya.” There was an army commander, he had a headquarters, there were division commanders and the like. And here on you … “led by the commissar.” Agreed, removed … It’s a shame that it was not possible to remove the word “modesty”, which distinguished the deceased.

During his lifetime, Leonid Brezhnev did not really differ in modesty. But this indiscretion of the leader of the country was more than compensated for by the “ninth wave” of criticism that began to gradually fall on the Secretary General a few years after his death.

Of course, 90% of this criticism was quite fair. “Stagnation” was not at all an invention of the malicious ideologues of perestroika, as some especially malicious lovers of nostalgia sometimes assert.

As a lover of retro photographs, I am subscribed to several telegram channels with images from the times of the USSR and, while enjoying the photos themselves, I periodically get upset by what kind of “information” captions they are sometimes accompanied by: “Soviet Union, 1978. Everything was delicious, cheap and made from natural products.”

Yes, yes, exactly, natural products in the Brezhnev era were tasty and cheap – but only if you could get them. Empty or half-empty store shelves did not appear at all during Gorbachev’s “talking shop”.

About how the regions of the country that were not included in the privileged “supply zones” (Moscow, Leningrad, the capitals of the Union republics) lived, is exhaustively described in an anecdote familiar to every person of my generation: “Long, green and smells like sausage – what is it? Of course, the train from Moscow.

The American historian of the Russian fuel and energy complex Thain Gustafson in his book Wheel of Fortune described the model of Soviet oil production during the Brezhnev period as follows: “Drilling fluids, cement, cement pumps were of poor quality, the supply was unpredictable. Often all drilling operations were stopped at the same time, and everyone was waiting for the promised supplies…

Soviet geology was at a very high level, but reservoir modeling and geophysical methods lagged behind it, and drillers sometimes passed oil-bearing horizons without suspecting their existence …

Because of the emphasis on drilling, there were thousands of idle wells all over Siberia. They were drilled and cased, but never perforated or developed. Drillers simply moved to the next field to fulfill new plans. Such crude methods of extraction in Western Siberia – the result of pressure on oil workers and a poor supply system – were not only ineffective, but also harmful.

Not only ineffective, but also harmful – approximately the same can be said about a lot of what was done in the USSR during the Brezhnev era. The leaders of all countries and peoples at all times are divided into those who were lucky and those who were not lucky.

Leonid Ilyich is definitely a leader from the category of those who were lucky. During his reign, the dollar rain fell on the Soviet Union. Arab countries have managed to radically change the balance of power between producers and consumers of oil and gas resources in the world. The market, where the buyer used to rule the ball, turned into a market where the seller began to rule the ball. The USSR was among the beneficiaries of this process.

But did this “feed in the horse” turn out to be? Huge oil and gas revenues were gone like water in the sand, were eaten away, inefficiently used. When, under Brezhnev’s predecessor, our country launched the world’s first artificial satellite in 1957, it caused real panic in US political circles. The Yankees were afraid that American science would not be able to catch up with the Soviet one. Under Brezhnev’s successors, the question, in principle, could not arise in this way. It was obvious to everyone that we were lagging behind, and deafly and hopelessly.

Everything that I wrote about the Brezhnev era above was obvious for a long time – for the most far-sighted almost at the time of his death. But here’s what became obvious (at least for me) only in 2022: the political and managerial legacy of the era of Leonid Ilyich was also underestimated and mediocrely squandered.

Written on the basis of the declassified archives of the Soviet authorities, the book of the well-known journalist Vyacheslav Ogryzko “Secrets of the Old Square” contains, among other things, such excerpts from the reference written in January 1970 by the head of the fifth department of the KGB of the USSR Philip Bobkov: “The state security organs of the Ukrainian SSR in the Rogatin district of Ivano -Frankivsk region and in the city of Khodorov, Lviv region, several illegal groups were identified, which included students of secondary schools, vocational schools and schools of agricultural mechanization, with a total number of 25 people.

The members of these groups intended to unite in an organization called the Underground Organization of the Struggle for an Independent Ukraine. Each of them was assigned a nickname, given tasks to acquire weapons, funds for the production of anti-Soviet leaflets, as well as to involve new members in the groups.

This document, as well as the discussion in the top Soviet leadership in 1972 about the growth of nationalist sentiment in Ukraine described by Ohryzko in his book, can be assessed in two ways. You can – as proof that behind the facade of “friendship of peoples” in the Brezhnev USSR, everything in Ukraine was already seething and was ready to break out. Or you can – as proof that nationalist manifestations in Ukraine 50 or 40 years ago were of a pronounced marginal character.

The truth, as it usually happens, lies somewhere in the middle between the two poles. But the question is: could anyone at the time of Brezhnev’s death imagine our current situation? Could anyone, even in a state of delirium tremens, assume that in order to prevent Ukraine from joining the NATO camp, Russia would deem it necessary to conduct a special military operation on its territory, and all this would result in a political crisis on a global scale?

Questions like this don’t even deserve an answer. Leonid Brezhnev left to his successors a functioning single state, in which Russia and Ukraine felt quite comfortable.

Did I get a clumsy wording? I will be more specific then: at the time of Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, the brotherhood of Russia and Ukraine seemed to be the natural state of things. And with all the obvious shortcomings of Leonid Ilyich, it is hardly his fault that over the past four decades this natural state of things has become a big question. In short, everything is according to the classics: “What we have, we do not store, having lost, we cry.”

I don’t know, to be honest, how to end this text. Any attempt to deduce morality, to formulate clear and unambiguous political conclusions, turns out to be flat, banal or even vulgar. Perhaps this is what morality is about – clear and unambiguous political conclusions are far from always possible?

Life and politics are rarely black and white. Much more often, life and politics are woven from various contradictory nuances, shades of different colors. 40 years after I was released from school due to the death of the general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, this is perhaps the only conclusion related to him that seems completely obvious to me.