The essential policy thrust of the post-Khruschev Soviet leadership was toward what may be called the normalization of the state system and of Soviet society. In principle this was the logical continuation of Stalin's agenda of "building socialism in one country," creating a viable modern industrial society along state socialist lines. Revolutionary fervor had long since vanished; routinization and bureaucratization took its place.
The dismantling of the Stalinist cult of personality continued. Khruschev's leadership was seen as also too personal and erratic; while Leonid Brezhnev became the leading figure, ultimate decisionmaking authority was firmly collective. To speak of "Soviet dictatorship" in the 1970s was wholly misleading. The state remained authoritarian, theoretically totalitarian, but tending toward a "softer" authoritarianism, with dissidents repressed selectively in place of the vast Stalinist gulag system.
These reforms outwardly achieved normalization, but at the price of stagnation. The Soviet economy, which in the 1950s had seemed poised to overtake the American, was slow-growing, inefficient, and increasingly antiquated, unable to meet consumer demand or meet the challenge of American technology and its military potential.
By the early 1980s, the sense that the Soviet Union had entered an "age of stagnation" became pervasive (Shatirishvili, 2). Instead of being at the vanguard of history, the Soviet system appeared increasingly bypassed. Emerging Third World countries and even Marxist revolutionary movements had ceased looking to the Soviet Union as an example or alternative to the capitalist West. Under the leadership of Yuri Andropov, the Soviets began to undertake reforms intended to revitalize the system. These ranged from expanding the authority of plant managers in an effort to introduce some of the efficiencies of "market socialism," while not undermining overall central control, to a...