IV.

Domestic and Foreign Policies

In economic terms, the increases in the standards of living that initially occurred under Brezhnev were soon overshadowed by the chronic crises of the Soviet economy. Hampered by the inefficiencies that were endemic to centralized economies, the Soviet economy was unable to compete with the West. The increasingly conservative, ageing leadership proved incapable of understanding the need for dramatic economic reform. The leadership had no answer to the long lines, shortages, corruption, and other symptoms of economic decline that characterized the Soviet economy in Brezhnev’s last years.

Brezhnev’s foreign policy initiatives met similarly mixed fates. The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 put an end to the Prague Spring, a movement to create “socialism with a human face”. This invasion demonstrated the limits of reform the Soviet Union would tolerate in Central and Eastern Europe. The official line, known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, warned that the Soviet Union would use military force if necessary to maintain its influence in Eastern Europe.

Brezhnev’s attempts to improve relations with the West achieved some initial successes. A non-aggression treaty with West Germany, signed in 1970, and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), signed in May 1972, were high points in the process of détente, the easing of relations between the Soviet Union and the West. In 1975 the Soviet Union in theory agreed to respect basic human rights when it became a signatory to the Helsinki Accords. However, Soviet hopes for a dramatic increase in trade and access to Western technology faded as a result of Western dissatisfaction with human rights violations in the USSR and Soviet support for revolutionary movements in developing nations. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 strained relations with the United States and helped ensure that the SALT II treaty, signed in 1979, would not be ratified by the US Senate. Relations with the United States continued to deteriorate after the Soviet Union supported the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 to suppress the Solidarity trade union movement.

The difficulties the Soviet Union experienced in both economic and foreign policy had parallels in the political realm. Dissidents were treated harshly. Those who violated the orthodoxy that the leadership imposed in intellectual and cultural life were subject to lengthy prison terms or incarceration in mental hospitals. The leadership also did little to involve the populace in political affairs.