Was the Soviet system in 1985 doomed or still reformable?

The short answer

• Khrushchev’s campaigns made stability attractive. Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, reorganised the party twice, launched the Virgin Lands campaign and taken the world to the brink over Cuba in 1962. Party officials, tired of constant reorganisation and threatened by his plan to rotate them out of office, removed him in October 1964. The new collective leadership defined itself against his restlessness, which made predictability and security for officials the central values of the next eighteen years.
• Extensive growth ran out of inputs. Soviet industrialisation since the 1930s had worked by moving peasants into factories and pouring investment into heavy industry. By the 1970s birth rates in the Slavic republics had fallen, the cheapest resources in European Russia had been used up, and new oil and gas lay thousands of kilometres east in harsh climates. Each additional rouble of investment produced less growth than before. Without new sources of productivity, a slowdown was built into the system.
• Prague 1968 made reform look dangerous. When Czechoslovakia’s communist leader Alexander Dubček relaxed censorship and promised “socialism with a human face” in 1968, Soviet leaders feared that reform would spread and that Czechoslovakia might leave the bloc. In August Warsaw Pact armies invaded, and Brezhnev declared that socialist states had the right to intervene where socialism was threatened. Inside the Soviet Union the lesson was that economic reform could lead to political reform, so the Kosygin reforms faded.
• Oil windfalls postponed hard choices. The fields of West Siberia came on stream just as world oil prices soared in 1973–74 and again in 1979. Hard-currency earnings from oil and gas rose many times over, paying for imported grain, Western machinery and the arms race. Yegor Gaidar later argued that this income allowed the leadership to avoid reform for a decade, and that it tied the state’s solvency to a price set in world markets that Moscow could not control.

What it changed

A generation of reformers waited. Younger officials who had watched the Prague Spring crushed, among them Mikhail Gorbachev, rose through the party in the 1970s and talked privately about change. Gorbachev joined the Politburo in 1980 as its youngest member and served under Andropov, whose brief reign in 1982–84 attacked corruption and indiscipline. When the old leaders died in quick succession, these men inherited the problems they had watched accumulate.

Dependence on oil set a trap. By the early 1980s oil and gas provided the majority of Soviet hard-currency earnings. When world prices fell by more than half in 1985–86, the budget lost a major source of income just as Gorbachev was launching expensive plans to accelerate growth. The windfall of the 1970s had become a vulnerability.

The bloc became a burden. Moscow sold oil to its East European allies below world prices and propped up their economies, which cost billions in lost hard currency, money that could buy goods on world markets. In Poland the Solidarity trade union, founded in 1980, showed that workers could organise against a communist state, and only martial law, rule by the army with ordinary rights suspended, contained it in December 1981. By 1985 Eastern Europe cost Moscow money it no longer had for a loyalty it could no longer count on, which made Gorbachev’s later refusal to defend it by force easier to choose.

Afghanistan’s war outlived the decision. The war drained money, killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers, damaged the army’s morale and isolated the Soviet Union in the Muslim world and at the United Nations. Its veterans, the afgantsy, came home to a society that preferred not to hear about the war. Withdrawal became one of Gorbachev’s first foreign-policy goals.