ABSTRACT
Towards the end of the Brezhnev period the 'bureaucratic consensus' of the post-Stalin decades came under increased strain. American and recent Russian estimates suggest that growth was even more modest and that the rate continued to decline to the point of stagnation in the early 1980s. In the early 1970s the abrupt rise in the world price of oil, for supplies of which the eastern European satellites depended on the Soviet Union, very substantially increased the effective subsidy paid by Russia. The Soviet citizen was still constantly urged to work harder for the common good, and full panoply of medals, decorations and publicity continued to be used to encourage labour effort. In the case of Russian nationalism, it was of greater political significance as a current within the establishment rather than as a focus for anti-Communist protest. Soviet economists argued that nothing could be more wasteful than the mass unemployment, industrial stoppages, and frivolous consumerism of capitalist society.
