Peter Gowan Archive | ETOL Main Page
London Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 1 No. 3, July–August 1977, pp. 19–21.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
| In Labour Focus No. 2 Tamara Deutscher surveyed the career of Khrushchev. Below, Oliver MacDonald reviews Brezhnev, the Masks of Power by John Dornberg, published by Andre Deutsch, £3.95. |
Leonid Brezhnev will not be with us much longer. The problem of the succession is becoming one of the main questions in Soviet politics today. True, his recent acquisition of the Presidency, his earlier removal of political opponents like Sheiest, Shelepin and now Podgomy are all signs of Brezhnev’s growing personal ascendancy within the Soviet leadership. But their significance is very different from the concentrations of power achieved by either Stalin or Khrushchev for the simple reason that Brezhnev is over 70. Whatever further steps he is able to take to mould the Soviet leadership in his own image, in a matter of years or even months these labours of an old man will be more or less destroyed by his successors.
But what is the Brezhnev mould? What does he represent in Soviet politics and what has been his characteristic style of leadership? Marxists tend to shy away from examining the roles of individual leaders, preferring to discuss broad historical tendencies of social development. Yet when considering likely political developments in societies ruled by huge authoritarian bureaucratic apparatuses we are forced to recognise the very considerable role which such social-cum-political systems give to a handful of political leaders at the top. And it is therefore of some importance to try to establish the characteristic features of Brezhnev’s political career.
The image of Brezhnev on the Western Left is very marked by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the repression of oppositionists in the USSR and perhaps his close relationship with Nixon during both the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis. These events do reveal a great deal about the overall nature of the regime of the Soviet Union, but they do not necessarily tell us much about Brezhnev’s own specific characteristics as a leader of that regime. On the other hand, such a well informed analyst of Soviet politics as Roy Medvedev has characterised Brezhnev as a “moderate” within the political spectrum of Soviet leadership. (See his Political Essays, p. 127, Spokesman Books, 1976.) To go deeper we must study the available facts about his career.
The only full-length biography of Brezhnev in English is a book by John Dornberg, a former Newsweek Moscow correspondent who now works as a free-lance journalist based, appropriately, in Munich. Dom-berg’s style is often hard to stomach: attempts to suggest that the author eats, sleeps and gossips with the politician he writes about is trying enough in relation to American politics, but becomes bizarre and even grotesque when the subject is the General Secretary of the CPSU. Nevertheless, from my own limited knowledge of Soviet history I have the impression that Dornberg is a reliable factual chronicler and in the frequent cases where Byzantine intrigues within the Kremlin are open to various conflicting interpretations he is generally content to explain the various alternative views. And perhaps the book’s greatest virtue lies in the fact that Dornberg has no particular axe to grind about Soviet society or Communism: he evidently simply wants to write a best-selling full-length biography of Brezhnev: he gives us a mass of information and leaves us to sift through it drawing our own conclusions.
Within the scope of this short review it is not possible to assess the entire span of Brezhnev’s political career. We will attempt only to examine some of the formative experiences in Brezhnev’s rise to the position of Party General Secretary – an aspect of his career little on the Left.
The leading organs of the Soviet Part, and State are still, to an extraordinary degree, staffed by men who began their political careers in the 1930s. These were the years of forced collectivisation and industrialisation. And they were also the years of the great terror which reached its height under Yezhov’s regime during 1937 and 1938. Brezhnev himself is in many ways typical of the new generation of political leaders who rose rapidly within the Party in that period.
Born of Russian working class parents in the industrial province of Dnepropetrovsk in the Eastern Ukraine in 1906, Brezhnev became a student in a local engineering institute at the age of 25 in 1931. He had previously trained as an agricultural technician but this career ended suddenly in circumstances that have never been made clear by Soviet official sources. In 1931 Brezhnev also joined the Party and by 1933 he was the head of the Komsomol (the Young Communist League) in his institute. At this time the Ukraine – the bread-basket of the USSR – was the scene of unparalleled rural devastation as a result of forced collectivisation. There was famine in the villages and hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of Ukrainian peasants were being rounded up, killed or deported. In the spring of 1933 25,000 Party supporters and Komsomol members were mobilised in Dnepropetrovsk province (known in Soviet parlance as ‘oblast’) to act as armed shock brigades to crush peasant resistance and collect the grain. This struggle against the peasantry must have been a profound experience for the young Brezhnev and he passed through it with enhanced standing in the local Party. By 1937, on the eve of the Ukrainian mass purge, he was director of the engineering polytechnicum in his home city. Nowhere in the USSR did the police terror exceed the scope of the purge in the Ukraine in 1937–38. With insignificant exceptions the entire upper and middle ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party were obliterated. Out of 102 members of the Ukrainian Central Committee elected in June 1937 only 3 survived by Christmas. In the same 6 months three Ukrainian Prime Ministers followed each other to liquidation and two entire sets of ministers perished in the same period. It is no exaggeration to say that the entire cadre of the Ukrainian Communist Party of the revolutionary period was crushed. This was the occasion for Brezhnev’s great leap up the Party hierarchy. By the spring of 1938 he had become a member of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast Party Committee in charge of ideological work. He therefore presided over the liquidation of the Ukrainian cultural intelligentsia and over the wholesale drive to Russify Ukrainian culture in the most important industrial centres of the Ukraine.
The young Brezhnev had all the right qualifications for rapid advancement in this period. He was too young to have gained any political experience of the revolution or the debates of the early 1920s. He was not contaminated by family links with intellectual circles, and his authentic working class background must have given him great confidence in his role and prospects in the society produced by the October Revolution. He possessed the vital technical qualifications for joining the new generation of managers of the industrialisation drive and as part of the Russian minority in the Ukraine he could be relied upon to have no sympathy for the culture of the national minorities. And by 1937 he had demonstrated organisational capacities and a willingness to apply ruthlessly directives from above.
The importance of the Second World War for subsequent Soviet history is generally grossly under-estimated on the Western Left. As the opening paragraphs of the new Soviet Constitution indicate, the victory over Nazism plays an ideological role in legitimising the regime almost on a par with that of the October Revolution. Brezhnev’s own war record appears to have been genuinely outstanding and it indicates some of his personal qualities as a political leader.
When the Ukrainian front collapsed in 1941, Brezhnev was drafted into the army as a colonel in the political administration. He remained in that field until the end of the War, by which time he had risen to the rank of general on the Southern Front.
The Red Army’s political administration was generally unpopular with both regular officers and troops for it was associated with avoidance of front line action, considerable privileges and repressive political functions. Yet during the war Brezhnev won many decorations of the sort given only for exceptional bravery in action and there is plenty of evidence that he turned his back on soft options and proved himself to be a dedicated military organiser. This indicates that Brezhnev was very different from those circles in the Party whose first thought was for their own safety and comforts behind the lines.
Twice after the War Brezhnev was given tasks requiring exceptional repressive measures and ruthlessness against the local population. In 1945 he was appointed chief of the political administration in the Carpathian military district, based in Lviv, (in Russian, ‘Lvov’), the main city of the Western Ukraine. This area, which the Soviet Union annexed from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the War was the scene of widespread popular resistance to Soviet control, and in spite of extremely heavy repression, armed guerrilla action in the Western Ukraine was not finally crushed until the beginning of the 1950s. Brezhnev was in political command of counter-insurgency operations there while the struggle was at its fiercest before moving back to Dnepropetrovsk as First Secretary of the Oblast Party in August 1946.
At the start of 1950 Brezhnev was given a similar job, this time as Party Secretary in the Moldavian Republic. Annexed from Romania after the war, Moldavia (formerly called Bessarabia) had a Romanian population of some 3 million people in 1945. By 1950 popular resistance to Sovietisation had been such that the authorities felt compelled to deprive hundreds of thousands – the figure current in the West is half a million – Moldavians of their rights, through deportations to ‘resettlement areas’ in the East, through incarceration in labour camps and through executions. At the same time a quarter of a million Russians were drafted into the Republic to staff the state machine, change the ethnic balance and push forward cultural Russification. Brezhnev’s task was to complete this project, finalise collectivisation, crush armed resistance, and stabilise the regime. By 1953, the Moldavian Communist Party had still not pushed its membership figures beyond 20,000 but Brezhnev had been considered sufficiently successful to be selected for the top Party leadership at the 19th Party Congress, Stalin’s last, in 1952.
Brezhnev’s other main role between 1945 and the fall of Khrushchev was that of organiser of crash economic programmes. Between his jobs in Lviv and in Moldavia he was charged with organising industrial reconstruction at break-neck speed in Dnepropetrovsk and in neighbouring Zaporozhe, one of the main industrial zones of the USSR. He managed to meet his targets and this achievement no doubt encouraged Khrushchev to make Brezhnev his lieutenant in Kazakhstan when the virgin lands scheme was launched at end of 1953.
The early successes of the Virgin Lands scheme were crucial in enabling Khrushchev to vanquish Malenkov at the beginning of 1955 and Brezhnev was able to return triumphant to the top leadership in Moscow before the project showed unmistakeable signs of coming unstuck. At the 20th Party Congress he became a Central Committee Secretary and candidate member of the Politburo. His jobs during the late 1950s and early 1960s involved less spectacular tasks: he was CC Secretary responsible for relations with foreign CPs, deputy chairman of the bureau in charge of affairs in the RSFSR – the Russian part of the USSR – and President of the USSR. These posts enabled him to establish contacts in the Soviet heartland – he had previously always been based in the minority national republics – and it also enabled him to travel abroad and learn about Soviet foreign policy problems. But his political style and profile had already been formed in his earlier years.
A fundamental feature of Brezhnev’s entire career from 1937 to 1964 was the fact that he was a protegé and lieutenant of Khrushchev. It was Khrushchev who took over the Ukraine at the height of the terror in the 1930s. Brezhnev operated directly under Khrushchev on the Southern Front during the war, and his work in the Eastern Ukraine in the late 1940s was again, apart from a brief interlude, under Khrushchev’s overlordship. Brezhnev’s appointment to Moldavia was almost certainly Khrushchev’s work, as was his posting to Kazakhstan and his later rise to the top of the Party. In the factional struggles of the 1950s Brezhnev remained loyal to his protector and the plot to remove Khrushchev in 1964 was almost certainly not Brezhnev’s work at all – Suslov, Shelepin and Semichastny were the organisers.
Such loyalties within the apparatus are common form in Soviet politics, where protectors at the top and informal networks of loyalty down below are elementary requirements of political security. Yet it is also common form for ambitious aspirants to high office to break early ties and strike out independently as challengers for power. The fact that Brezhnev never seems to have attempted this gives a clue to a striking feature of his career: he has never appeared to be a man with independent ideas and policies. He has appeared at all times as an executor of the policies of others, without any of the independence of vision which characterised both Stalin and Khrushchev. Brezhnev has been par excellence a manager for the policies of others; and not much more than that.
This lack of independent ideas made Brezhnev an attractive candidate in 1964. And his past career provided him with two other qualities that made him an ideal successor to Khrushchev: first, his links with the fallen leader over three decades would make him unlikely to want to massively purge the apparatus of others who had risen to power with Khrushchev; many of these people were indispensable and long-standing allies of Brezhnev himself; but secondly, Brezhnev’s past had built him a reputation in no way associated with policies of either democratisation or liberalisation. On the contrary, he was known as one of the toughest managers of popular dissent in the Party hierarchy and his activities in this sphere had earned him a network of supporters who were strongly opposed to Khrushchev’s ‘destalinisation’ initiatives. This combination of qualities indicated that Brezhnev would be a unifying force within the apparatus, and a tough opponent of pressure for political reform.
In 1964 Western commentators debated two possible views of the new General Secretary: either Brezhnev would be a short-term caretaker leader; or he would be a new strong man like Stalin or Khrushchev, carving out an unassailable power-base and surviving for a long time. In reality, Brezhnev consolidated his position and survived precisely on the basis of being a caretaker leader. He has attempted to manage the house in as orderly way as possible without any striking innovations, preserving as much of the furniture of the past as possible. Both Stalin and Khrushchev took dramatic, bold initiatives to try to solve their problems. Brezhnev has attempted to avoid any such moves. And as a result, the leadership of 1964 has survived remarkably intact. But so have all the problems that Khrushchev faced: the dispute with China, growing difficulties in Eastern Europe, tensions with the Western CPs; a chronic crisis in agriculture, increasingly sluggish economic growth, a failure to make a decisive shift to consumer goods production; chronically low productivity of labour and work discipline reflecting the alienation of the working class, strong tensions within the intelligentsia, growing national tensions in the USSR, and difficulties in culturally integrating Soviet youth into the social and political order.
The Brezhnev era has been a golden age for the generation of functionaries that began their rise within the CPSU during the purges of the 1930s: men like A.P. Kirilenko, once Brezhnev’s colleague in Dnepropetrovsk in the late 1930s, now his second in command in the Politburo; N.A. Shchelokov, once Brezhnev’s assistant in Dnepropetrovsk in the 1930s, now Soviet Minister of the Interior; K.S. Grushevoi, another colleague in Dnepropetrovsk in the 1930s now holding the key post of chief political officer of the Moscow military district; or Trapeznikov, once Brezhnev’s ideological ‘expert’ in Moldavia, now in charge of science and culture for the whole of the USSR. During 13 years of office Brezhnev has served these aging men, and hundreds like them, exceptionally well. And he has also piled up a heap of trouble for their successors.
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