25c: Gerontocracy

When Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev took power in 1964, the Soviet Union began to lurch into gerontocracy - the rule by very old men. Although Leonid was a fairly young 57 when he took power, the Soviet Union seemed to age right along with him. Production of consumer goods continued and more apartment houses were constructed, but an essential shoddiness continued to creep into everything Soviet. As we saw in the previous segment, the great majority of the Soviet people had long since lost faith in Communism or even the leadership's ability to provide a better life. Party meetings would be called, a campaign would be started up and slogans shouted out... and then nothing. Nothing, that is, but more doom, despair and agony. The Soviet Union's foreign policy during the Brezhnev era also shows a dreary pattern of decline.

In January 1968 the leadership of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party reacted to an economic downturn by appointing a new party secretary, Alexander Dubcek. That spring, Dubcek won the Czechoslovakians' support with a reform program including free speech, increased power for trade unions, and the right to ignore Communist policy. The corrupt Czechoslovakian president resigned and was replaced by a Dubcek supporter. Dubcek pledged that Czechoslovakia would not leave the Warsaw Pact, but on August 21, 1968 Warsaw Pact forces invaded anyway. Dubcek was carted off to Moscow, from where he soon announced his support and gratitude for the intervention. Needless to say, Dubcek's reforms were also canceled. To justfify the Warsaw Pact intervention, Brezhnev  delivered the "Brezhnev Doctrine," which reserved for "all socialist countries" the right to intervene whenever and wherever a socialist country was being lured out of the Soviet bloc. Although the Western bloc - rightly - protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia, there were strong parallels between the Brezhnev Doctrine and the Monroe Doctrine. There was only so much arguing the United States could do.

Yet Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's mental ossification also caused the USSR's biggest foreign policy blunder - the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. In 1904, Russia was faced with a war against Japan. Instead of working toward an agreement (certainly there was enough of Asia for both empires), Tsar Nicholas II listened to advisors who thought a "splendid little war" would bring Russia into line behind him. What Nicholas II got instead was double disaster: a stunning defeat by Japan followed by the Revolution of 1905. In December 1979, Russian history repeated itself. The Soviet Union got interested in Afghanistan in the late seventies for the usual Russian reasons. It was there. It was also directly south of the Soviet Union; the USSR did not want to see a fundamentalist Muslim regime seize power, as had just happened in Iran. Besides, the military/industrial complex was in the mood for a splendid little war. Once Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, by then a very old 73, gave the go-ahead, Soviet troops seized the Afghani capital of Kabul and installed a puppet government. The Soviets eventually deployed 85,000 elite soldiers in Afghanistan, but could not control the rugged countryside outside of Kabul. The Soviets also proved unable to train the Afghani army into a force which could stand on its own two feet. The Soviets were forced to settle for occupying Kabul and maintaining a bloody stalemate everywhere else. Their splendid little war had turned into a Russian Vietnam.

The Soviet press tried hiding the war from the people. But over time, as more and more troops were sent into Afghanistan (over a million Soviet soldiers ultimately served there at one time or another), and more came home dead, word got out. To make matters worse, America, Saudi Arabia, and China all supported the anti-Communist rebels, also known as "mujahedin." Muslim fighters came from around the world to join the mujahedin against the Russians, recruited by, among others, a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Despite the USSR's vast technological and numerical superiority, their forces were stuck in a bloody quagmire, with no real purpose for getting in and no plan for getting out. Further, the Soviet government's lies about Afghanistan further corroded the morale of a people that had already given up on Communism. Because of the Afghan war, the United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Even though the Soviets returned the favor by boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the Soviets clearly got the raw end of the deal.

The Soviet Union was also starting to resemble a paper tiger. When the Polish Solidarity movement arose in 1980, the Soviets had to let the Polish prime minister handle the crisis his own way, because the Red Army was too heavily committed in Afghanistan. Even though the Red Army was 5 million men strong on paper, most of these men were between 18 and 20, serving their mandatory two years. The hard core of the army was busy getting shot up in Afghanistan. Absent any force to back it up, the Brezhnev Doctrine of 1968 was dead as a doornail before its fifteenth birthday. One year later, on November 10, 1982, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev went to his eternal reward, succeeded by the 68 year old KGB chief Yuri Andropov. Andropov, who had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution 26 years earlier, had big ideas for saving the Soviet Union. But he was already in poor health, and died after sixteen months in office on February 9, 1984. His successor, a 73 year old Brezhnev crony named Konstantin Chernenko, lasted until March 10, 1985. By that time it was clear even to the old coots on the Soviet Politburo that the Soviet gerontocracy drastically needed shaking up. And a drastic shakeup the Soviet Union got.