by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] Sixty years ago, on April 8, 1966, at the Party Congress, Leonid Brezhnev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. By that time, he had been the country's top official for over two years. The party elite, having overthrown Nikita Khrushchev, elevated Brezhnev to first among equals. It seemed that the changes in the party leader's "title" were purely symbolic: from 1964 to 1966, Leonid Brezhnev had been First Secretary of the Central Committee, and now the position had been renamed "General Secretary." But the details matter.
Joseph Stalin held the position of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and later of the CPSU, until his death. Khrushchev, a loyal Stalinist, having sidelined other contenders for the "master's" legacy and concentrated power, began, among other things, to renew the symbolic "façade." Therefore, in September 1953, he became First Secretary, not General Secretary.
Under Khrushchev, the Politburo was called the Presidium of the Central Committee. Strictly speaking, this rebranding occurred during Stalin's lifetime, in 1952, but the new name was still perceived as something fresh, in the spirit of the numerous innovations that marked Nikita Sergeyevich's "reign."
There have been plenty of them in less than 11 years—from debunking the personality cult to replacing Moscow's sectoral ministries with regional economic councils (national economic councils), from the corn campaign to the project to split regional and city party committees into industrial and agricultural ones. And that's not counting the spontaneous personnel decisions.
The period now called the Thaw was a natural disaster for the ruling nomenklatura.
The long-time First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR, Mykola Podgorny, said that "Nikita" often "pulled the blanket over himself," interfering in affairs at all levels of the power vertical, and disregarding respected comrades at the local level. But most importantly, he scandalously removed Podgorny from his post as Ukrainian leader, a move Podgorny never forgot or forgave, becoming a participant in the 1964 conspiracy.
Khrushchev's foreign policy, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis, also caused confusion among the highest echelons of the party and government. The usually calm Brezhnev, years after his predecessor's overthrow, was not holding back his emotions.
"He suddenly got worked up. He remembered Khrushchev, who, in his words, had left such a situation that moving toward peace had probably become more difficult than it had been ten years before 1964. He had taken a foolish gamble in the Caribbean affair, and then he had shit his pants," Anatoly Chernyaev, an employee of the Central Committee's International Department from 1961 to 1986, reported Leonid Ilyich's words in his memoirs.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Khrushchev, like his discredited predecessor Stalin, concentrated power in his hands. Hence the accusations of notorious voluntarism—that is, tyranny and disregard for "Leninist norms of leadership."
But Khrushchev's personal regime, unlike Stalin's tyranny, was "without arms." Nikita Sergeyevich could rely neither on the party nomenklatura (infuriated by the experiments with industrial and agricultural regional committees), nor on the army (dissatisfied with the cuts of 1955, 1958, and 1960), nor on the repressive apparatus.
THE ILLUSION OF COLLEGIALITY, THE APPEARANCE OF RESTORATION
KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny was one of the driving forces behind the conspiracy, as was former head of state security and, in 1964, head of the Council of Ministers Alexander Shelepin, nicknamed Iron Shurik.
The "Komsomol members" (as the duumvirate of Shelepin and Semichastny, who came from the Komsomol leadership, was called) were counting on a return to the "post-1953" situation, when, following Stalin's death, there was no clear leader.
The penultimate palace coup of the Soviet era (the GKChP putsch can be considered the last)—the plenum at which Khrushchev was stripped of all his posts and sent into retirement—was held under the banner of “normalization” and a return to collegial rule.
The team was quite narrow: Podgorny, Shelepin, Semichastny, the new head of the Council of Ministers, Alexei Kosygin, and Brezhnev as the formal leader of the group that came to power.
The leadership of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, which had previously been in the hands of Khrushchev, was divided between Brezhnev and Kosygin.
Normalization also implied a partial restoration of Stalin's "façade," complete with the General Secretary and Politburo. The 23rd Congress of the CPSU—where the cosmetic changes were approved—became for Brezhnev what the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) had been for Stalin: a "congress of victors." More precisely, a victor.
By this time, in the apparatus struggle, he had removed “Iron Shurik” Shelepin and Semichastny from the field (in 1967 they were removed from their posts), weakened Podgorny’s position and left economic issues to Kosygin.
Like Stalin in the late 1920s, Brezhnev in the late 1960s relied on the vertical chain of command of party leaders to push his competitors out of power.
But the times were already, as they said then, vegetarian. The retired leaders continued their careers, and the deposed Khrushchev lived out his days as a personal pensioner at his dacha in Petrovo-Dalny, tending a vegetable garden and listening to "Western voices."
But the main thing is that the principle of consolidation around the leader changed: not career advancement “on the bones” of repressed predecessors, but the rule that Leonid Ilyich strictly observed until his death: live yourself and let others live.
LIEBERMAN-KOSYGIN REFORM
The party and Soviet nomenklatura breathed a sigh of relief. Hysterical reprimands, illogical personnel changes, and constant shifts in development priorities disappeared from their lives for a long time.
When it became clear that no one in the Kremlin would show their hand anymore, the time came for economic reforms.
And this happened at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in September 1965. The reforms, although they did not entail changes in forms of ownership or, for example, the liquidation of party committees at enterprises, turned out to be quite reasonable.
It seemed like nothing complicated: sectoral ministries were being reinstated in place of regional economic councils, and at the enterprises themselves, not only directives from the center became important, but also performance and profitability indicators.
The word “profit” has gone from being a semi-abusive concept in the political economy of capitalism to one of the goals of a socialist enterprise.
The economic reform was popularly called the Kosygin reform after the person primarily responsible for its implementation. But its true author was someone else—Kharkiv professor and economist Evsey Grigoryevich Liberman (1898–1981).
Even under Khrushchev, in September 1962, the newspaper Pravda published an article by Lieberman entitled “Plan, Profit, and Bonus.”
What the non-party Jew—who was also a victim of repression—explained on the pages of the main party organ was a sensation.
It turns out that the USSR desperately needs reform of its industrial planning and incentive mechanisms; otherwise, stagnation and catastrophic underperformance relative to capitalist countries are inevitable. Enterprises everywhere are "overfulfilling" their plans, producing low-quality and unsold products that, nevertheless, are counted toward gross production figures.
Liberman proposed taking into account in plans not gross indicators, but the cost of sold products, and giving company directors a greater degree of independence in relations with partners and in the management of working capital.
The article was published in Pravda, so the action plan, by definition, could not have been the opinion of Comrade Lieberman alone. It was a trial balloon launched by Kosygin's team.
The following year after the coup, in 1965, the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee approved Kosygin's own reform: the introduction of enterprise profitability assessment based on revenue from sales into the planning system. However, this was only one indicator, alongside the traditional gross profit.
The 1966 "Victor's Congress" sanctioned the continuation of reforms: as an experiment, bonuses for the best employees were permitted, but only at 8% of wages and only at 43 enterprises across the country. Enterprises were also allowed to enter into direct supply contracts with each other without the approval of central ministries.
On February 12, 1965, the popular American magazine Time published a photo on its cover with the caption “Soviet economist Lieberman.”
The issue's main article, headlined "Communists Flirt with Profit," was devoted to the current state of the Soviet economy and the role of Professor Lieberman's ideas in its reform. That same day, the professor's Kharkiv apartment received an international phone call. The distinguished pianist Vladimir Horowitz was calling his older sister from the United States : "Regina, your husband has become famous!"
THE LAST SUCCESSFUL FIVE-YEAR PLAN
Brezhnev's first congress adopted the eighth five-year plan for the country's socioeconomic development, which proved remarkably realistic. Never in the post-war years had growth rates been so high. Over five years, national income increased by 42%, gross industrial output by 51%, and agricultural output by 21%.
It was then that the country's unified energy system was created and industrial oil production began in the Tyumen region. This was the first step toward a hydrocarbon addiction that led to economic stagnation.
But the facilities commissioned in those years are still operating today. These include the Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power plants, the first phase of VAZ, and many other giant enterprises. The country, which had experienced a bread shortage in 1963, could boast of fully stocked stores for the first time in many years.
By the end of the five-year plan, the Kosygin-Lieberman reform was running out of steam. The number of regulatory targets issued by central agencies increased sharply. Enterprise autonomy was curtailed everywhere, and by the mid-1970s, the country had become fully familiar with shortages and queues. It wasn't perestroika-era publicists who were the first to speak of stagnation.
"Nothing remains, everything has collapsed. The reforms have fallen into the hands of people who don't want them at all. And I no longer expect anything..." Kosygin bitterly remarked to his Czechoslovakian counterpart, Lubomír Štrougal. The reforms were "unpaused" in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed "acceleration of socio-economic development," unaware of the consequences of his good intentions.