Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange ed. by Dina Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky (review)

In recent scholarship, Soviet society during the long reign (1964–1982) of Leonid Brezhnev has been transformed into something that previous generations of Sovietologists could scarcely have imagined—a happening place. Decidedly postrevolutionary in outlook, acquisitive at its core, riven with corruption and unofficial economies that provided everything from narcotics to rock-and-roll records, yet suffused with the familiar iconography, exhortations, and eschatology of Marxism-Leninism, Soviet society under Brezhnev defies easy categorization. That "stagnation" is a mostly inadequate description of its complexity is the central premise that Dina Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky put forth in their introduction to the anthology Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange.

Even though Fainberg and Kalinovsky claim that the idea of a Brezhnev-era stagnation is "by now well-established" (p. vii), few historians are likely to bicker with their revisionism. They show that despite a few references to "stagnation"—particularly on the economic front—in private circles during the Brezhnev years, the label did not come into wide use until after Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985. Gorbachev's aides put forth this derisive label mainly to underscore the need for reform. As Fainberg and Kalinovsky note, the Soviet Union was never as conservative, cynical, corrupt, and devoid of faith as the stagnation paradigm suggests. Nor was it entirely progressive, idealistic, law-abiding, and full of confidence in the Communist future. Instead, it was all these things and more. In short, contrary to the editors' stated intention, stagnation is less a hypothesis to be proven or disproven by historical research, than a discourse that informed the ways contemporaries understood their surroundings. In this respect, it bears some resemblance to Yanni Kotsonis's treatment of "backwardness" in the late Tsarist countryside.

Containing ten essays that range in focus from Soviet journalism (Simon Huxtable) and biomedical research (Anna Geltzer) to film (Andrey Scherbenok) and international music exchanges (Simo Mikkonen), Reconsidering Stagnation succeeds above all in showing how wide the current scholarly gaze is on the Brezhnev period. Although many of the essays would have benefited from further polish, the anthology contains a few gems. One is Juliane Fürst's oral-historical study of the Soviet hippie sistema, which first developed among hippies in central Moscow and then grew into a network of contacts, crash pads, and occasional summer camps that linked hippies across the Soviet Union. Fürst complicates the question of whether the hippie sistema proves or disproves stagnation by arguing that it does both. Hippies reacted to the "perception of zastoi [stagnation]… of 'being stuck in the status quo' and a certain ennui" (p. 139), yet their very existence suggests that this stagnation was far from all-encompassing. Hippies were themselves proof that Soviet society contained a "considerable amount of energy and creative force, which produced fashion, art, music, and literature… creating an increasingly parallel world" (p. 138).

Also significant is Lewis Siegelbaum's study of a rural exodus in the 1960s and beyond that was disproportionately female. Whereas women were in the clear majority in the Soviet countryside in the years following the Second World War, a "great reversal" (p. 47) had occurred by the late 1980s, when the countryside contained only 886 women for every 1,000 men. Like Fürst, Siegelbaum both affirms and challenges perceptions that the Brezhnev period was characterized above all by stagnation. On the one hand, such high mobility belies the view that Brezhnev's developed socialism was static in comparison with the great migrations of the final Tsarist and Stalinist decades. Women were drawn to the city by the trappings of the consumer economy, by educational opportunities, and by the perception that it offered gender emancipation. On the other hand, women were pushed out of the village by fears that it had become a...