ABSTRACT
The Brezhnev years are highly relevant for two reasons for what happened later. First, the reform concepts of the people of the sixties (shestidesiatniki), which have their roots in this period, provided the background to Gorbachev’s reforms and later to the opposition of a then older generation of economists against Western mainstream economics. In other words, the ideas of one of the two thought collectives in today’s Russian economic science can be directly traced back to this period. Secondly, in order to comprehend the thesis that – not only in ideational terms – the country today is approaching a kind of “neo-zastoi” (standstill), it is important to be familiar with the ideational foundations of the Soviet order of the 1960s to early 1980s. Both the political ideology of the Brezhnev period, in the centre of which stood the notion of “developed socialism” (see e.g. Evans 1977; Kelley 1977; Sandle 2002) and the development of Soviet economic thought in the 1960s to 1980s are relatively well researched topics (Sutela 1991, 2008; Sutela and Mau 1998), but to my knowledge no systematic research has yet been done into the relationships between economic ideas and the political doctrine behind what has later been labelled the period of zastoi. 1
