Breshnev and Interim Leadership: "Nomenklatura" Communism
Although they are called the "Breshnev" years, after the General Secretary, the 18 years between 1964 and 1982 were essentially years of a collective leadership between the Party cadre of Breshnev, Kosygin (Prime Minister), and Suslov (who was slightly older than the other two and the quintessential Party man.) Breshnev was a Party traditionalist: he abhorred the direction Khruschev had started to move the Party in. Breshnev intended to undo the damage of Khruschev by instituting hard-line reforms in a program that after the fact was referred to as "re-Stalinization" (which was actually a very soft Stalinism.) In the absence of the terror used by the Stalin regime, the party leaders found themselves accountable to the party bureaucrats and technocrats, not the other way around as under Stalin. These years thus became known as the years of nomenklatura communism.
Definition of nomenklatura:
The CPSU's system of appointing key personnel in the government and other important organizations, based on lists of critical positions and people in political favor (can also refer to people on those lists.) Although some measure of privelege was accrued to all Party members, real power and signficant perqs were reserved for full-time apparat. The nomenklatura commanded everything, yet produced nothing.
Stagnation
The new leadership envisioned their agenda as one of advancing stability. They never intended for it to end in stagnation. The initial program consisted of 3 primary goals: 1) to end de-Stalinization and end intellectual dissent, 2) to pursue a more moderate course of economic reform to provide for the country's long-term strength, and 3) to proceed more slowly in the quest for global parity with the United States. The leadership reinstated management from above in all sectors of the economy, and the result was new levels of impoverishment in both agriculture and industry. Despite (or perhaps due to) the expansion of the Soviet bureaucracy during this period, the rates of growth in terms of national product and worker productivity continued to decline. In fact, by the '79-'80 fiscal year, the USSR had entered the zone of negative growth. By the end of Breshnev's rule, the natural resources of the country had been seriously depleted and ecological disaster loomed, there was a chronic housing shortage, and the technological gap between the USSR and West continued to grow. Malia writes:
"The descent into stagnation and then deterioration was the direct result of the logic of the Plan. For in the final analysis, planning implies not only a static level of supply and demand but also a static technology, and such conditions can never exist in the real world. Things either go up or they go down, but they never remain stationary. Yet the whole Soviet system was predicated on attaining 'socialism' and then staying there, as if it were the end of history."
Interim Leadership: Andropov and Chernenko (1982-1985)
The leaders of the Breshnev old guard began to disappear around 1980: Kosygin died in 1979, Suslov in early 1982, and Breshnev himself a few months later. As usual, a contest for succession began between a secondary figure of the Breshnev "old guard", Kostantin Chernenko and a member of a CPSU reform faction, Yuri Andropov. Andropov was in the better position b/c he had the support of the military. He was promoted quickly from the KGB to Suslov's post in the Central Committee a few months before Breshnev's death. When Breshnev died, Andropov, at age 68, duly took over. But in a compromise, his rival Chernenko was left in the second Party position, so the rivalry between old guard and would-be reformers was not yet settled. Andropov's primary contribution to Soviet politics was to help groom the man whom he hoped would be his successor, Mikhail Gorbachev.