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Military Industry Under Brezhnev

After removing Khrushchev from power, the leaders of the Politburo (as the Presidium was renamed in 1966 by the Twenty-Third Party Congress) and Secretariat again established a collective leadership. As was the case following Stalin's death, several individuals, including Aleksei N. Kosygin, Nikolai V. Podgornyi, and Leonid I. Brezhnev, contended for power behind a facade of unity. Kosygin accepted the position of prime minister, which he held until his retirement in 1980. Brezhnev, who took the post of first secretary, may have originally been viewed as an interim appointment by his fellows.

The years after Khrushchev were notable for the stability of cadres in the party and state apparatus. A cadre was a party member who holds a responsible position (usually administrative) in either the party or the government apparatus. In a more restricted sense, a person who has been fully indoctrinated in party ideology and methods and uses this training in his or her work. By introducing the slogan "Trust in Cadres" in 1965, Brezhnev won the support of many bureaucrats wary of the constant reorganizations of the Khrushchev era and eager for security in established hierarchies.

On 3 March 1965 Radio Moscow announced that on 26 February 1965 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had ordered the transformation of several state committees into ministries, The changes made were as follows:

• USSR State Committee for Aviation Technology - All-Union Ministry of Aviation Industry
• USSR State Committee for Defense Technology - All-Union Ministry of Defense Industry
• USSR State Committee for Radioelectronics - Ail-Union Ministry of Radio Industry
• USSR State Committee for Shipbuilding - All-Union Ministry of Shipbuilding Industry
• USSR State Committee for Electronics - All-Union Ministry for Electronics Industry
• USSR State Production Committee for Medium Machine-building - All-Union Ministry for Medium Machine-building

At the same time, the chairmen of the former committees -- Dementiev, Zveriev, Kalmykov, Butoma, Shokin, and Slavsky, respectively -- were given the title of minister but retained in effectively the same positions. It was also announced that the old Ministry of General Machine-building, which had been merged with the Ministry of Defense Industries in May 1957, was being resurrected, with Afanasyev as minister.

The significance of this re-designation -- it could hardly be called a reorganization -- lay in the fact that the institutions were all concerned with defense technology and production. Their new names represent a clear increase in formal organizational stature, and the move might be interpreted as a gesture of militancy in a tense international climate. In fact, however, it represents an organizational retreat from the great economic reform of May 1957, or, to put it more accurately, the explicit recognition that one aspect of that reform simply never worked out.

It seemed clear that, by the very nature of their function, the defense industries were never really decentralized under Khrushchev. Output remained more important than efficiency in these branches, and they therefore had to remain as invulnerable as possible to the supply bottlenecks plaguing the rest of the economy. The administrative autonomy resulting from this situation also rendered these industries relatively less vulnerable to the reforming impulses of the First Secretary, a fact which no doubt irritated him.

The formal reconversion of these industries to ministerial status was in part result of the inherent inadequacies of the 1957 reform and the peculiarities of defense production itself. The new leaders, being men of both administrative experience and a practical cast of mind, recognized that these industries must remain more or less insulated from the rest of the economy. They recognized that in Soviet defense industries, as well as in those of the United States, for that matter, efficiency could not be pushed to the point where it jeopardizes total output.

Despite Khrushchev's tinkerings with economic planning, the economic system remained dependent on central plans drawn up with no reference to market mechanisms. Reformers, of whom the economist Evsei Liberman was most noteworthy, advocated greater freedom for individual enterprises from outside controls and sought to turn the enterprises' economic objectives toward making a profit. Prime Minister Kosygin championed Liberman's proposals and succeeded in incorporating them into a general economic reform program approved in September 1965. This reform included scrapping Khrushchev's regional economic councils in favor of resurrecting the other central industrial ministries of the Stalin era. Opposition from party conservatives and cautious managers, however, soon stalled the Liberman reforms, forcing the state to abandon them.

The Eighth Five Year Plan (1966-1970) was a period of political and economic awakening with respect to the need for expanding the planning capability of the USSR. Soviet economic planners were increasingly distressed by falling growth rates and the rising percentage of nonproductive (ie, clerical) workers. They were also having trouble controlling the sheer immensity and complexity of the economy. During the second half of the 1960s, there were two streams of though in the leadership. One was represented by Brezhnev, an advocate of limited decentralisation and a backer of the administrative management of the economics. The second one was personalised by Kosygin, who urged more radical and drastic steps towards economic reform with a stress on the market. Heavy industry grew rapidly through the 1960s, especially in fuel and energy branches. But this growth was followed by a prolonged slowdown beginning in the late 1960s.

Under the ninth Five Year Plan (1971-1976), for Brezhnev the priorities were agriculture, basic industry, and defense, while Kosygin was focused on light industry. But from one five-year plan to another the main economic figures fell down. Successive five-year plans resulted in no substantial improvement in the growth rate of industrial production.

The Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976-1980), approved by the XXV Communist Party Congress in February 1976, represented the ascendency of Brzhnev over Kosygin. It named the main priorities of the government policy as development of the defense industry, energy, agriculture and Siberia reclamation. The dramatic shift in the agricultural balance of power between the US and Soviet Union had been decades in the making. But contrasting food surpluses and deficits had been highly visible only in the 1970s. As recently as 1970 both countries were exporting grain - the US 38 million tons and the Soviet Union eight million tons. By 1981, however, US grain exports had humped to a staggering 115 million tons and the Soviets were importing 43 million tons.

The Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981-85) was released a year late at the November 1981 meeting of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev said food was the central problem of the whole Five-Year Plan. As the deterioration of Soviet agriculture continued, the need to import food became even greater. By 1982 the flow of grain from the US to the Soviet Union was on the verge of being the largest ever between two countries, about to eclipse the current US flow to Japan. The long line of ships that now connects American farms with the dining tables of the Soviet Union constituted a new economic tie between the two countries.

In industry, plans stressed the heavy and defense-related branches, with the light consumer-goods branches slighted. As a developed industrial country, the Soviet Union by the 1970s found it increasingly difficult to maintain the high rates of growth in the industrial sector that it had sustained in earlier years. Increasingly large investment and labor inputs were required for growth, but these inputs were becoming more difficult to obtain. Shortages of consumer goods abetted pilferage of government property and growth of the black market. Vodka, however, remained readily available, and alcoholism was an important factor in both the declining life expectancy and the rising infant mortality that the Soviet Union experienced in the later Brezhnev years.