ABSTRACT
If Brezhnev was the most popular (or least unpopular) General Secretary among the party faithful, it was because of a greater willingness to let people alone than had been displayed by his predecessors. However welcome this may have been to officials, it was in his later years to result in the institutionalisation of existing inefficiences. The rare intervention, such as the appointment of Ustinov as Defence Minister in 1976, resulted merely in stabilising military expenditure after that year at its existing proportion of Gross National Product rather than the reduction which would probably have been economically wise, as well as more consistent with the spirit of the detente which Brezhnev had ardently pursued. References to inefficiency and poor performance were not lacking from Brezhnev’s speeches, but action seldom followed. The consequences in diminishing growth rates internally and immobilism in foreign policy were becoming obvious long before Brezhnev’s death in November 1982. His immediate successor. Iuurii Andropov, a mere week after Brezhnev’s funeral, devoted most of his speech at a Central Committee Plenum 1 to severe criticisms of underfulfilment of the 11th Five Year Plan, and said that what mattered most was to improve management, planning and the economic mechanism. Stating that it was ‘mandatory’ to create conditions in which good management would be rewarded and bad penalised, he foreshadowed drastic changes. Although the collapse in his health occurred before any real action took place, signs of opposition from entrenched interests had already begun to be observed, and do-nothingism received a further lease of life under the next transitional leader, Konstantin Chernenko. On coming to office in March 1985, Gorbachev therefore faced a situation already recognised as serious by at least some sections within the leadership for several years, and his election must therefore have reflected, as had that of Andropov before him, a majority view within the Politburo of the need for thoroughgoing changes rather than for mere tinkering with the existing system. Much of his first year in office was taken up in advancing like-minded proteges to leading positions, and the 27th Party Congress of February–March 1986 represented his first opportunity to lay down the new ‘general line’ to the party as a whole, amplifying what he had already said to the Central Committee Plenum in April 1985, 2 soon after he took up his post.
