On November 10, 1982, Soviet radio and television announced the death of Leonid Brezhnev:
The name of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the great continuator of the great Lenin’s deed, ardent fighter for peace and communism, will always live in the hearts of Soviet people and all the progressive mankind” The sounds of sirens emanating from Moscow factories in memory of Leonid Brezhnev heralded the end of his epoch, which lasted for 18 years… Almost a quarter of a century have passed since that day… What do our contemporaries think about Brezhnev’s times now? In answer to this question here are recollections and reflections taken from mass media. Let’s begin with the results of a poll recently conducted by the All-Russian Opinion Research Center. The respondents were asked, in what era they would prefer to live. 31% of respondents said they would prefer the Brezhnev era. As for pensioners, 41% of them favoured the Brezhnev times. The desire to go back to the Brezhnev era, however, does not mean that respondents support the policy of the Soviet Union. 43% of those polled said the country developed in the right direction under Brezhnev, and 42 percent criticized his policy. Elderly respondents were more positive about Brezhnev with 51% saying they supported him. The poll has shown that it is the Brezhnev era that evokes nostalgia among post-Soviet Russians. The reason is that, in retrospect, the second half of the 1960s and 1970s are seen as years of stability and predictability compared with the terror and upheaval under Stalin, non-stop reorganization under Khrushchev, reform and disintegration under Gorbachev, and new turmoil and social insecurity under Yeltsin. Dmitri Lyutov from St. Petersburg, who called himself “a personality typologist”, thinks that Brezhnev was in no way dictator and adds: “…he showed indifference to ideological problems, however in Brezhnev’s years Russian life standards grew up…
And now let’s turn to memoirs of Sergei Roy, a journalist, translator, poet and writer from Moscow. Here’s what he wrote in the weekly “Moscow News”: “Throughout the Brezhnev years, except for a trickle of Jewish emigration, the intelligentsia stayed where it was, behind the Iron Curtain, and went in for “internal”, spiritual emigration en masse. Outward signs of this phenomenon were the universal craze for songs by singer/song-writers like Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudjava, Vladimir Vysotsky, and a million of their imitators all mocking the Soviet values or simply ignoring them. Annual escapes into the wilds with like-minded individuals, where everything could be discussed without fear of informers, in absolute freedom; nocturnal sessions with short-wave radios, listening to Radio Liberty, the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, etc. These broadcasts were also discussed freely – even, toward the end of Brezhnevism, in institutions that were supposed to be bastions of official ideological work, such as editorial offices, publishing houses, colleges, and the like. Plenty of people went underground, taking jobs as night watchmen or stokes to have plenty of free time, to have plenty of nice, dissident thoughts, and at the same time escape being jailed for “parasitism”. The future Nobel Prize winner, the poet Joseph Brodsky, did not bother to take that precaution and was tried and sentenced to five years of exile in the North, out of which he served about a year and a half - the best months of his life, according to the poet who emigrated in 1972. This must have been the greatest intellectual gift to America from Russia. Originating in the intelligentsia, a deeply negative and even cynical attitude toward the existing regime spread wide, encompassing practically the whole society, which learned to observe the regimes propaganda antics and general goings-on with a cynical grin – when it noticed them at all… As for the Brezhnev foreign policy, in general, with the exception of détente and the Helsinki Agreements, it was among the least popular aspects of the generally unpopular regime. Brezhnev’s era was the time of incredible efflorescence of the underground “political” joke, or anecdote. In good company, one could spend hours – I mean it, hours – listening to guys versed in the art. A particular favourite of mine - because I helped in the making of it, was made up some time after a real assassination attempt on Brezhnev, one which, according to rumor, he survived by the merest chance. Here is the anecdote: The Umpteenth Congress of the Communist Party is in progress, and Comrade Brezhnev is mumbling through his speech. In the gallery, some people are craning their necks to see the speaker better. One guy asks the man in front: “Could you move slightly to the right?.. Thanks. Now could you bend forward a bit?.. Thanks. No, that’s too much.” The guy in front asks in irritation, without turning, “Should I give you my field glasses, perhaps?” “No, thanks, I’ve got my telescopic sight!” End of this story, but there’s a sequel. The guy in the back row shoots, misses, is duly apprehended and taken to the KGB for interrogation. There follows the regular KGB routine: strong light in the victim’s face, rubber truncheons, who are your accomplices, the works. This goes on round the clock, and in an unguarded moment in the wee hour of morning the KGB interrogator asks a question straight from the heart: “Look, you asshole, how could you miss, with your telescopic sight and all?” This really hurt. “You try it yourself, with everybody shoving and pushing. Let me have a go, no, let me…” The real story of the assassination attempt is probably even more grotesque than the invented one because it was much more boring and insipid, entirely in the spirit of the times. Back in those days, when the idea of doing in some of the topside zhaby “toads” entered quite a few heads, the rumor of the failed attempt was eagerly discussed. Some of the intelligentsia welcomed it as the start of yet another era of anti-establishment terror, of the sort that racked Russia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Recently, though, the newly accessible FSB archives showed it to have been a rather tawdry, isolated affair – at least, that is the impression one gets from the TV film shown on television in March 2000. A certain Victor Ilyin, born in 1947, an obvious psycho, decided to kill Brezhnev so that his place could be taken by that grayest of eminence grises, Mikhail Suslov the Insipid. He got hold of a couple of pistols and on the 22nd of January, 1969 started firing at Brezhnev’s motorcade as it was driving into the Kremlin gate. He had no idea where exactly Brezhnev was and only succeeded in killing one of the chauffeurs and wounding a cyclist. Real Dostoyevsky stuff – an epitome of the way things were over here in those days, when you could bet your life that even an assassination attempt would be bungled, a hundred percent. Ilyin was interrogated by none other than the future General Secretary Yuri Andropov, who eventually decided to send him to a mental hospital for twenty years. This favourite punishment for dissidents in those days always puzzled me – as if there was all that much difference between life inside and outside the loony hatch…” Sergei Roy writes. And now a piece of information from the Ukraine by the journalist Alexander Gorobets dating back to the 20th of December, 2000, and devoted to the birth anniversary of Leonid Brezhnev: “Today is Leonid Ilyich’s birthday,” said the posters displayed by a handful of various-age people demonstrating yesterday in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital city. Women carried pictures of the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union amply decorated with the variety of orders. Surely, it was December 19th, the birthday of our unforgettable leader. Later local news agencies reported that, according to an opinion poll conducted in Simferopol (the Crimea), common people had lived best of all at the time of Mr. Brezhnev’s rule – that proved to be the opinion of the majority of those polled in the capital of the Crimean autonomy. 43% of the respondents spoke in favour of Leonid Brezhnev… The Brezhnev era was marked by overall stagnation perceived by many as stability”. In the opinion of Yuri Bogomolov, an analytic of the Russian “Novosti” news agency, “… the interest in Leonid Brezhnev’s persona today is quite possibly explained by not so much the scale of his personality, as a romantic attitude to the epoch he embodies, when there were none of today’s problems. We recall with particular warmth how hard it was for Leonid Ilyich to cope with such words as “systematic” when making speeches up on the rostrum, how we enjoyed telling each other political anecdotes, sitting in the safety of our kitchens… All the while, we seem to have forgotten that it was this politician who ordered tanks into Prague in 1968, that he was the one to sanction the war with Afghanistan, and during his stint in power dissidents were shoved away into psychiatric asylums and prison camps, and so forth. This illogical reasoning can be explained in turn by only one thing: today we acknowledge that responsibility for our future lies on ourselves, while in Brezhnev’s time this responsibility was shouldered by the Government.” So, as you may see, our contemporaries are not unanimous in their attitude towards Leonid Brezhnev’s epoch. However, everybody agree to the fact that the Brezhnev times were the most peaceful period of our history. |
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“The Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Presidium of
the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and Council of Ministers of the USSR with
deep sorrow inform the party and all the Soviet people of a sudden death
of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, the Chairman of
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR - Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev
on November the 10th 1982 at 8 a.m.
It was really
much better than under Stalin’s rule. The difference is that any critics
was prohibited under Stalin; but under Brezhnev, we, Russians, rediscovered
the Western culture. Brezhnev understood the West as a competitor.
But he applied this attitude only to political affairs (like Czechoslovakia
and Afghanistan) while remaining tolerant to the rest. And Brezhnev was
the one who began to import widely foreign goods to Russia.”
