Together with Andrei Kirilenko as organizational secretary, and Mikhail Suslov as Chief Ideologue, they made up a reinvigorated collective leadership, which contrasted in form with the autocracy that characterized Khrushchev's rule.

[1] Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin succeeded Khrushchev in his posts as First Secretary and Premier respectively, and Mikhail Suslov, Andrei Kirilenko, and Anastas Mikoyan (replaced in 1965 by Nikolai Podgorny), were also given prominence in the new leadership.

Brezhnev strengthened his position considerably during the early to mid-1970s within the Party leadership and by a further weakening of the "Kosygin faction"; by 1977 he had enough support in the Politburo to oust Podgorny from office and active politics in general.

[18] In the meeting an irritated Brezhnev asked why the Soviet Union should, in the words of Matthew Evangelista, "continue to exhaust" the economy if the country could not be promised a military parity with the West; the question was left unanswered.

At the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution a few weeks later (Brezhnev's final public appearance), Western observers noted that the annual military parade featured only two new weapons and most of the equipment displayed was obsolete.

For example, Kulakov, one of the youngest members in the Politburo, was ranked seventh in the prestige order voted by the Supreme Soviet, far behind such notables as Kosygin, Podgorny, Suslov, and Kirilenko.

The cumbersome procedures of bureaucratic administration did not allow for the free communication and flexible response required at the enterprise level to deal with worker alienation, innovation, customers and suppliers.

[65] With the mounting economic problems, skilled workers were usually paid more than had been intended in the first place, while unskilled labourers tended to turn up late, and were neither conscientious nor, in a number of cases, entirely sober.

[74] At the end of his life, Kosygin feared the complete failure of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981–1985), believing that the sitting leadership was reluctant to reform the stagnant Soviet economy.

General Nikolai Ogarkov also commented that too many Soviet citizens had begun believing that any war was bad and peace at any price was good, and that better political education was necessary to inculcate a "class" point of view in world affairs.

In the aftermath of Khrushchev's removal and the Sino-Soviet split, Alexei Kosygin was the most optimistic member of the Soviet leadership for a future rapprochement with China, while Yuri Andropov remained skeptical and Brezhnev did not even voice his opinion.

[92] Kosygin was afraid that China would turn down his proposal for a visit, so he decided to stop off in Beijing on his way to Vietnamese Communist leaders in Hanoi on 5 February 1965; there he met with Zhou.

[98] To counter the accusations made by the Chinese Central Government, Brezhnev condemned the PRC's "frenzied anti-Sovietism", and asked Zhou Enlai to follow up on his word to normalize Sino-Soviet relations.

The Soviet Union had by this time championed an Asian collective security treaty in which they would defend any country against a possible attack from China, but when the latter engaged Vietnam in a border war during early 1979, Moscow contented itself with verbal protests.

The Soviet leadership approved both countries' respective economic experiments, since it was trying to reduce its large Eastern Bloc subsidy program in the form of cheap oil and gas exports.

In the aftermath of the invasion the Brezhnev Doctrine was introduced; it stated that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene in any socialist country on the road to communism which was deviating from the communist norm of development.

[106] In the aftermath of the invasion, Brezhnev reiterated this doctrine in a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP) on 13 November 1968:[107] When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.On 25 August 1980 the Soviet Politburo established a commission chaired by Mikhail Suslov to examine the political crisis in Poland that was beginning to gain speed.

[108] Erich Honecker, the First Secretary of the East German Socialist Unity Party, supported the decision of the Soviet leadership, and sent a letter to Brezhnev and called for a meeting of the Eastern Bloc leaders to discuss the situation in Poland.

[109] When the leaders met at the Kremlin later that year, Brezhnev had concluded that it would be better to leave the domestic matters of Poland alone for the time being, reassuring the Polish delegation, headed by Kania, that the USSR would intervene only if asked to.

[110] The Soviet Union had intervened in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan the previous year, and the increasingly hard-line policies of the Reagan administration along with the vast organisational network of the opposition, were among the major reasons why the Politburo Commission pushed for martial law instead of an intervention.

In a similar vein, Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev's successor, claimed in a report to the Politburo that maintaining good relations with the Eastern Bloc "took precedence in Soviet foreign policy".

During the Soviet visit, President Lyndon B. Johnson had allowed US bombing raids on North Vietnamese soil in retaliation of the recent Pleiku airbase attack by the Viet Cong.

[142] Despite official claims that antisemitism was a bourgeois ideology incompatible with socialism, the truth was that Jews who openly practiced their religion or identified as Jewish from a cultural standpoint faced widespread discrimination from the Soviet system.

In 1978, a dissident movement of a different kind emerged when a group of unemployed miners led by Vladimir Klebanov attempted to form a labor union and demand collective bargaining.

Every time when we speak about Solzhenitsyn as the enemy of the Soviet regime, this just happens to coincide with some important [international] events and we postpone the decision.In general, the dissident movement had spurts of activity, including during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, when several people demonstrated at Red Square in Moscow.

While official figures put the number of believers at 9–10% of the population, authorities were nonetheless baffled at the continued widespread presence of religious belief in society, especially since by the start of the 1980s, the vast majority of Soviet citizens alive had no memory of tsarist times.

Vladimir Vysotsky, Alexander Galich and Bulat Okudzhava became the most renowned rock-musicians, and their lyrics, and music in general, were critical of the country's Stalinist past, as well as of its undemocratic system.

Authorities often conducted sweeps of movie theaters, restaurants, and saunas to locate people slacking off from work, particularly during major events like the 1980 Summer Olympics that attracted large numbers of foreign visitors.

Environmental damage and pollution became a growing problem due to the Soviet government's policy of development at all costs, and some parts of the country, such as the Kazakh SSR, suffered particularly badly with their use as testing grounds for nuclear weapons.

Despite the miserable failure of collective farming, the Soviet government remained committed to reducing imports of foodstuffs from the West, even though they cost less than domestic production – not only for reasons of national pride, but out of fear of becoming dependent on capitalist countries for basic necessities.