Soviet Union: post-Stalin party-state and stagnation (1953–1985)

Background

Stalin's death in March 1953 left a leadership that feared both a new dictator and the security police that had killed so many of its own. Lavrentii Beria was arrested in June 1953 and shot. A mass amnesty began to empty the Gulag, and in February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress denounced Stalin's personality cult and the killing of party members. When a majority of the party Presidium tried to remove Khrushchev in June 1957, the Central Committee overruled them; in October 1964 the Central Committee in turn removed Khrushchev, peacefully, and Leonid Brezhnev became first (later general) secretary.

How it was governed

• Collective leadership. Power lay with the Politburo, a council of a dozen or so senior party leaders, and the general secretary was first among them rather than a despot. Milan Svolik uses such arrangements as an example of "power-sharing" autocracy: an inner council that can monitor the leader and, in extremis, replace him.
• Stability of cadres. Under Brezhnev officials enjoyed near-permanent tenure. Regional party secretaries and ministers kept their posts for decades, the leadership aged, and the nomenklatura became a privileged, self-reproducing stratum.
• The party's leading role. The 1977 Constitution wrote into Article 6 that the Communist Party was "the leading and guiding force" of society and the nucleus of its political system. Elections to soviets remained single-candidate.
• Repression without mass terror. The KGB (from 1954) kept surveillance, censorship and prosecution of dissidents: writers on trial (Siniavsky and Daniel, 1966), forced psychiatric treatment, exile (Andrei Sakharov to Gorky, 1980) and labour camps for "anti-Soviet agitation". Workers' protests were suppressed, as at Novocherkassk in 1962, where troops fired on strikers. Abroad, the USSR crushed reform in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) and invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Economy

Central planning continued, with ministries, Gosplan and enterprises bargaining over targets. Reforms tinkered with it: Khrushchev's regional economic councils (1957), abandoned in 1965, and Aleksei Kosygin's 1965 reform, which gave enterprises some profit incentives before it was quietly reversed. János Kornai's analysis of the "socialist system" explains why such reforms struggled: soft budget constraints, chronic shortage and the party's control over managers' careers meant that enterprises answered to their superiors, not to customers or prices. From the 1970s the West Siberian oil fields and higher world oil prices paid for grain imports and consumer goods.

Growth slowed decade by decade. Official statistics overstated it; Mark Harrison's review of the alternative estimates of the Soviet economist Grigorii Khanin shows much slower growth than the official series from the 1960s on. William Easterly and Stanley Fischer argue that the decline is explained by heavy reliance on capital accumulation in an economy where capital was a poor substitute for labour, so that returns to investment fell sharply.

Outcomes

The period brought real gains for many citizens: mass housing construction from the late 1950s, rising real wages into the 1970s, pensions for collective farmers, near-universal secondary education, and a scientific and space programme that launched Sputnik (1957) and the first human spaceflight (1961). It also brought falling male life expectancy from the mid-1960s, persistent shortages and queues, a widening technological gap with the West in computing and consumer goods, and an elite that the population saw as privileged. Projects to computerise planning, such as Viktor Glushkov's proposed national network (OGAS), were discussed for years but never implemented at scale.

Debates

• Stability or stagnation? Defenders of the Brezhnev years point to order, welfare and great-power status; critics see a gerontocracy that postponed decisions while growth ebbed.
• Was reform possible within the system? Kornai argues that market socialism ran into the party's control of firms; others see the 1965 reform as abandoned for political, not economic, reasons.
• Why the slowdown? Easterly and Fischer emphasise falling returns to capital; others stress the arms burden, the information problems of planning, or poor incentives for innovation.

Lessons for institution design

• A council can restrain a leader. The Central Committee's removal of Khrushchev showed that an oligarchic body could replace the top leader without bloodshed.
• Tenure without accountability ossifies. Security for officials removed both fear and feedback; nothing replaced them.
• Statistics are institutions. When producers report on their own performance and are rewarded for it, official data drift away from reality.

Further reading

• János Kornai, The Socialist System (1992)
• William Easterly and Stanley Fischer, "The Soviet Economic Decline", World Bank Economic Review (1995)
• Mark Harrison, "Soviet Economic Growth since 1928: The Alternative Statistics of G. I. Khanin", Europe-Asia Studies (1993)
• Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (CUP, 2012)