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Subject essay: Natalya Chernyshova

Belarus in the 1970s was an exemplary Soviet republic and a success story of the Soviet modernisation project. It had recovered relatively quickly from the horrific devastation of the Second World War and embarked on a path of rapid economic development. The Brezhnev era saw this former nameless peasant backwater of the Russian Empire complete its transformation into an industrialized and urbanized national republic. By 1973, Belarus was riding high in the ‘family’ of Soviet nations. It received generous bonuses for its farming achievements in the 1973 All-Union Socialist Competition and asked Moscow for permission to build a metro in Minsk, only the ninth city in the USSR to do so, reflecting the Belarusian capital’s size and importance. The next few years saw the republic garner a raft of prestigious all-union awards and play host to a number of prominent international visitors.

Although it had little industry before the war, Belarus’s industrial output had grown 15-fold between 1940 and 1972. Its industry manufactured relatively sophisticated and high-tech equipment and consumer goods, including colour TV sets, refrigerators, high-precision metalworking lathes, haulage trucks, and computers. It boasted a growing chemical sector and contributed nearly half of the total Soviet potassium fertilizer output in 1970. It also developed its own oil-refining industry.

The republic’s once-primitive farming benefitted from modernization, turning Belarus into a major agricultural producer, which supplied the Soviet economy with meat and dairy products, eggs, grain, flax and vegetables. Over a million tons of Belarusian potatoes went to Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities and republics every year. In 1975, Belarus was awarded the prestigious Red Banner of the CPSU, Council of Ministers, Trade Unions and Komsomol for attaining the best results in the all-Union socialist competition and fulfilling the 1974 economic plan ahead of schedule.

Belarus exemplified the rural-urban migration patterns in the USSR as a whole. During the 1970s, the republic’s capital Minsk was one of the fastest growing cities in the USSR, with up to 55,000 new residents arriving annually. The capital’s ability to absorb this influx of migrants is remarkable, considering that Minsk was almost entirely razed to the ground during the war, so much so that the post-war authorities briefly considered moving the capital elsewhere. But in the 1970s, it was an attractive place to live, with the continual expansion of industry supplying job opportunities.

Belarus also occupied an important place in the ideological landscape of the Brezhnev era. In the context of the Brezhnev-era cult of the war, it came to be widely celebrated as a heroic and loyal ‘partisan republic’, whose strong partisan movement made a significant contribution to the Soviet war effort. Minsk was awarded the Hero City title in 1974. Such reputation offered more than just ceremonial honours. Former partisans held a firm grip on the local party and state politics well before Brezhnev’s team arrived to power. For most of Brezhnev’s tenure, the Communist Party of Belarus (CPB) was headed by Petr Masherau, a charismatic war veteran, who had received the Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union at the age of 26 for his feats as a partisan commander in the Vitebsk region. Unlike Brezhnev, he did not need to invent his heroic war record.

The ‘partisan republic’ played a key role in another conflict. Belarus was the only other Soviet republic besides Ukraine to have its own seat on the UN Security Council, an obvious asset to the USSR in the context of Cold War politics. It was one of only four republics to be entrusted with nuclear weapons. It hosted important foreign visitors and showcased what the Soviet project could achieve in an ethnic borderland. Josip Broz Tito (1965), Fidel Castro (1972), Georges Pompidou (1973) and Richard Nixon (1974) all made stops here.

But underneath the image of progress and loyalty lurked tensions. Along with industrialisation and urbanisation came the marginalization of the Belarusian language and culture, which frustrated and alienated part of the national intelligentsia. Minsk’s architectural redevelopment was criticized for neglecting its historical heritage. A good share of the republic’s agricultural growth was achieved through a programme of intensive amelioration, especially in the Poles’e region in southern Belarus, which brushed aside those who warned of the destruction of its unique eco-systems.

The full trauma of the Second World War, including the extermination of the Belarusian Jewish community, had to be underplayed in a republic where hardly a family was left untouched by the war. The dark aspects of partisan experience and violence, as well as local collaboration, were taboo. Famous Belarusian writer Vasil’ Bykau, whose works showed that the war was uglier and more complicated than the official version allowed, was both rewarded and harassed by the authorities.

The Belarusians’ influence in the Kremlin began to wane towards the end of the decade, as did the partisans’ near-monopoly in the republic’s political structures. Behind the pride and triumph of receiving the Hero City status for Minsk lurked the uncomfortable fact that it took almost a decade for this recognition to arrive. In 1965, when most other Hero Cities, including Kiev, received their honours, Masherau’s petition was declined. Belarus was made to wait until 1974, when the 30^th anniversary of its liberation from the Nazi occupation combined with a series of articles about the heroic Minsk underground resistance in Izvestiia provoked a hail of readers’ letters to the CPSU Central Committee, asking why Minsk had not been awarded the Hero City status. It took ailing Brezhnev another four years to deliver the award to Minsk. It did not go unnoticed that his visit in 1978 was both delayed and short.

Masherau’s own life trajectory is telling. A loyal communist and Soviet internationalist, he joined the Communist Party during the war and rose rapidly through its ranks, exemplifying a whole cohort of Belarusian partisans-turned-politicians who dominated the republic’s post-war politics. Few knew that the hero’s father was an ‘enemy of the people’ who perished in the NKVD camps or that Masherau’s own brief spell as a POW during the war was a ‘stain’ on his biography that nearly cost him his career when a denunciation letter was sent to Moscow in 1949. It seems that he was not Moscow’s preferred choice for the leadership of the CPB in 1965, but the republic’s elites wanted him. His relationship with Brezhnev has been subject to speculation, no doubt fuelled by Masherau’s energetic persona and reputation for incorruptibility, which stood in sharp contrast to the geriatric Brezhnev leadership. But if he entertained any ambitions to move up the party ladder to Moscow, he failed. Masherau’s death in a car crash in October 1980 prompted an outpouring of popular grief and persistent rumours of the Kremlin’s involvement.

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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

During the Cold War when both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed nuclear arsenals sufficient to destroy each other and much of the rest of the world, the late 1960s to the middle of the 1970s stands out as a time of relative cooperation between the two superpowers and among their respective blocs of nations. This period came to be known as that of détente, from the French for “relaxation” (in Russian разрядка). There was no event that precipitated the adoption of the term détente, no individual responsible for coining it, and no moment when it suddenly appeared on everyone’s lips. Rather, the word had been part of the language of diplomacy at least since the early twentieth century and was used fitfully thereafter. But, even more so than “reduction of tensions,” “thawing,” and other metaphors, it came to serve as the dominant characterization of superpower relations during the years of the Nixon-Ford and Brezhnev administrations.

Several bi- and multi-lateral agreements punctuated the period of détente. Among them, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) of 1972 and the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe leading to the so-called Helsinki Accords (1975) generally are regarded as the most significant. The latter in particular, with its mutual recognition of post-World War II borders and implicitly spheres of domination, represented a major victory against what the Kremlin labeled revanchism (from the French for “revenge,” usually motivated by ambitions to recover lost territory). But these agreements themselves need to be explained – as part of the political calculus of respective leaders, their responses to unanticipated events or those over which they did not exercise control, and third-party initiatives. From the Soviet perspective, détente represented the culmination of a policy pursued since the mid-1950s, namely, to obtain formal recognition of peaceful coexistence and military parity with the United States and the West which implied acceptance of Soviet interests in various parts of the world. Previously reluctant to acknowledge the end of Pax Americana, the United States for its part was weary of global disorder, exhausted financially and in terms of morale by the war in Vietnam, and increasingly desperate for comprehensive agreement with “the Russians.” At the same time, Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger complemented their pursuit of détente by seeking out regional powers (Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil) to stave off Communist or other leftist insurgency movements and then, beginning in 1971, by “playing the China card.” Neither war in the Middle East, nor the subsequent defection of Egypt to the West, nor the US-backed overthrow of the Allende government in Chile disrupted détente.

Détente coincided with and was reinforced by separate initiatives undertaken by several European powers to improve relations with the USSR. Fiat’s “deal of the century” with the Soviet Union in 1966 to upgrade the Soviet car industry, Charles De Gaulle’s determination to break free of Anglo-Saxon tutelage with respect to French foreign policy, the Ostpolitik of West German chancellor Willy Brandt, and the popular revulsion throughout the continent against US neo-colonialism in Vietnam and elsewhere all played a role in persuading Washington to enter into serious negotiations with Moscow.

But the election of Jimmy Carter as president in 1976 and the increasing incoherence of Soviet foreign policy owing to Brezhnev’s incapacitation and widening divisions in the Soviet bureaucracy slowed down and eventually reversed the momentum. By the time of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan to prop up a client regime against US-backed rebels and the subsequent US-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, détente was over. Many historians date the coming to power of the Regan administration in 1981 as marking the definitive onset of Cold War II.

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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Soviet Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress in February 1956 precipitated a number of crises in eastern Europe. The most serious of these occurred in Poland and Hungary, two countries where ruling Communist parties had very limited popular support and where the Catholic Church provided a bulwark of opposition. In June 1956, workers in the Polish city of Poznan demonstrated against cuts in wages and the insensitivity of local authorities to their grievances. The demonstrations were suppressed but they did afford reformist Communists the opportunity to advance an agenda that included significant concessions to workers. After tense negotiations with Soviet leaders who flew uninvited to Warsaw, the Polish Communists rallied around the reformist, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who was appointed first secretary. Gomulka succeeded in containing popular discontent and thereby avoided the fate that befell Hungary.

Economic hardship and political repression were characteristic of the years of Matyas Rakosi’s leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party. When he was forced to resign in 1953 a more liberal New Course was advanced by the prime minister of the Hungarian government, Imre Nagy. However, in 1955 Nagy was outmaneuvered and stripped of his position by supporters of the Rakosi line. Grievances among Hungarians simmered until late October 1956. Having closely followed events in Poland, university students congregated in Budapest’s center to commemorate the poet Sandor Petofi, sing nationalist songs, and demand greater freedom of expression. Their demonstration turned militant. The printing plant of the party’s newspaper was sacked, and shots were fired in the streets. Reappointed as prime minister on October 24, Nagy failed to stem the disorders. With army units joining the insurgency, Soviet troops entered the fray but could not disperse the insurgents who by now were well armed and determined. Workers throughout the country formed councils to take control of factories and organize militia units. Nagy thereupon reconstituted the government to include non-Communists and sought to meet the insurgents’ demands. Meanwhile, Soviet troops withdrew to the outskirts of Budapest.

At this point, having received alarming reports from the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov (later to become head of the KGB and eventually party leader), Khrushchev resolved to intervene by sending additional troops. They began crossing into Hungary on October 31. In a desperate attempt to put himself at the head of national resistance, Nagy declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact alliance. But the new party chief, Janos Kadar, defected to the Soviet side and announced the formation of a new government, headed by himself. Nagy, denounced for having succumbed to the “counter-revolutionaries,” took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. On November 4 Soviet troops launched a massive offensive against Budapest, overwhelming its defenders. Lured out of the embassy, Nagy was arrested, secretly tried, and in June 1958 executed along with several other leaders of the insurgency. As many as 200,000 Hungarians fled across the Austrian border to the West. The Hungarian uprising –dubbed a counter-revolution in Soviet accounts but widely regarded elsewhere and in Hungary as a revolution — constituted the greatest crisis within the Soviet bloc before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.