ABSTRACT
The dual leadership of Leonid I. Brezhnev and A. N. Kosygin embarked on an ambitious agricultural reform that sought to provide incentives for collective farmers and to reduce significantly the various impediments to production on collective farms. In September 1965, a Central Committee Plenum announced major reform of Soviet industry, dissolving Khrushchev's economic councils and restoring the branch system of administration. Despite the improvement in living standards, there were some serious defects in Soviet society and economic development. The move, made partly because of the prospect that Russians would soon be a minority of the Soviet population, was to ensure the hegemony of Russians over the Soviet empire. The more traditional view would hold that the Soviet Union was intent on promoting Russian interests to the detriment of those of the national republics. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the indigenous populations in most of the non-Russian republics could be found in positions of authority.
