14

The Age of Brezhnev

My students often balk when I call the late 1960s and ’70s “the age of Brezhnev.” Surely, they argue, there must be more significant figures to name an era after? What about Johnson, Nixon, or Kissinger? Or, maybe even more appropriately, and certainly with more approbation, Willy Brandt, Betty Friedan, or Julius Nyerere? They would be right in substance but wrong in illustration, as students sometimes are. Nixon or Brandt—in very different ways—may have contributed more. But it was Brezhnev who symbolized the spirit of the age within the Cold War. In a time when social and economic realities changed very rapidly, the Soviet leader stood out for his unwillingness to conform to the new conditions and his stubborn defense of his country’s position within the Cold War system. Cautious, reactive, formulaic, and technocratic, Brezhnev is the very model of the middle Cold War, a time when leaders tried to impose order on uncertainty.

Leonid Illich Brezhnev was born to Russian working-class parents in 1906 in a hardscrabble town in eastern Ukraine. He was old enough to remember life before the revolution, but only vaguely; his whole life had been spent in the Soviet Union. As the first in his family he went to college, graduating as an engineer. He joined the Communist youth league at seventeen and the Communist Party at twenty-three, in 1929. Brezhnev passed through the Stalin purges unscathed—by sheer luck, he admitted later—though several of his friends were arrested. During the war he served as a political officer first in the Caucasus and then on the Ukrainian front. By the time Germany capitulated, Brezhnev, not yet forty years old, had been promoted major-general, after the Eighteenth Army, which he served with, had fought all the way to western Czechoslovakia.

World War II was the decisive experience for Leonid Brezhnev, as it was for all of his Soviet generation. It taught him about the need for organization, discipline, and ruthlessness. It also taught him about the horrors of war. There is no doubt that Brezhnev, even though he rarely saw combat close up, carried the images of devastation with him for the rest of his life, and they made him fear war. “I do not want to inflict that on my people again,” he told US president Gerald Ford in 1974.¹ In war, Brezhnev said, “everyone loses.”² But, while fearing the ravages armed combat could bring, he also believed in the global mission of Communism and the need to defend Soviet achievements, including the control of eastern Europe. “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,” he told the Poles in his usual clunky terms.³

Brezhnev became a member of the top Soviet leadership in 1956, responsible for the defense industry. In 1960 Khrushchev, whose protégé Brezhnev had been back in Ukraine, made him chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, meaning titular head of state. It was a safe choice, Khrushchev thought, because of Brezhnev’s low-key style and proven loyalty. But as dissatisfaction with Khrushchev as party chief mounted, more and more leaders saw Brezhnev as a possible successor. In October 1964 the majority of the Soviet leadership rebelled against Khrushchev in what amounted to a palace coup. This time the first secretary had no stomach for putting up a fight. “I thank you for the opportunity you have given me to retire,” he told his colleagues. “I ask you to write me a suitable statement, and I’ll sign it.”⁴ Brezhnev was made the new general secretary of the Communist Party. Khrushchev retired to his dacha outside of Moscow.

It was the first peaceful change of power ever in the Soviet Union, and one with enormous implications for the future, not just because of how it happened, but also because of the meaning that the co-conspirators put into it. The main charges against Khrushchev had been that he was uncollegial and rash, that he disparaged other leaders and acted on his own. The mercurial, ever-present, high-handed Khrushchev was simply too much for them. They wanted a more collectivist leadership, with the party organization as the key institution. The accusations against Khrushchev had referred to domestic mistakes, but in the materials prepared there were also references to foreign affairs. In 1961 Khrushchev, it stated, had given “an ultimatum: either Berlin will be a free city by such and such a date, or even war will not stop us. We do not know what he was counting on, for we do not have such fools as think it necessary to fight for a ‘free city of Berlin.’” Khrushchev, it continued, “wanted to frighten the Americans; however, they did not take fright, and we had to retreat, to suffer a palpable blow to the authority and prestige of the country, our policy, and our armed forces.”⁵

Brezhnev and his colleagues’ mandate was therefore quite clear. Those who had helped put them in power wanted more emphasis on planning, productivity growth, and welfare. They wanted a leadership that avoided unnecessary crises with the West, but also stood up for Soviet gains and those of Communism globally. Brezhnev was the ideal man for the purpose. As a leader, he liked to consult with others, even if only to bring them onboard with decisions already taken. After the menacing Stalin and the volatile Khrushchev, Brezhnev was likeable and “comradely”; he remembered colleagues’ birthdays and the names of their wives and children. His favorite phrases were “normal development” and “according to plan.” And the new leader was easily forgiven a certain vagueness in terms of overall reform plans as long as he emphasized stability and year-on-year growth in the Soviet economy.

Contrary to what is often believed, the Soviet economy was not a disaster zone during the long reign of Leonid Brezhnev and the leadership cohort who came into power with him. The evidence points to slow and limited but continuous growth, within the framework provided by the planned economy system. The best estimates that we have is that the Soviet economy as a whole grew on average 2.5 to 3 percent per year during the 1960s and ’70s. This is lower than both the United States and western Europe during the same period, and considerably lower than the east Asian economies, but enough to keep the economy afloat and provide limited real growth in at least some sectors. In addition, the Soviet planned economy provided an even (though slowing) expansion, unlike the capitalist economies where unevenness year on year is part of the game.

But the Soviet system also had some intrinsic defects built into it. Inaccuracies in centralized resource allocation led to high levels of waste in production. And the economy was plagued by persistently low levels of productivity, which became more visible as the economy grew and capital became more abundant relative to labor. By the 1970s the diminishing returns of the planned economy had become obvious, even though Soviet leaders hoped that selective reform could reinvigorate it. In reality, though, the slowing growth rate was hard to reverse. The very high growth in the early years of the Soviet Union had probably stemmed from the exploitation of abundant resources and simple catching up with a lag created by years of war and dislocation. With the Soviet economy isolated from world markets of technology, education, capital, and investment, further growth was extremely hard to produce. This relative stagnation was an obvious challenge, especially for a country that claimed to represent the future of the world.

The direction of the output of the Soviet economy was almost entirely decided by political priorities. Like their predecessors, the Brezhnev leadership prioritized heavy industry and military hardware over consumer needs, even if they claimed to have other priorities. Therefore, though the economy as a whole expanded, consumer goods and certain types of food could at times be hard to find in the stores. “A woman walks into a food store,” goes a favorite joke. “Do you have any meat?” “No, we don’t.” “What about milk?” “We only deal with meat. The store where they have no milk is across the street.”

In the 1960s people hoped for better. The new Soviet premier, Aleksei Kosygin, in 1965 attempted reforms that could rationalize allocations, increase factory control over work methods and surplus, and reward those who worked hard. But even Kosygin’s careful reforms never got full support from his colleagues. Soviet central planners were unwilling to change their habits. Some felt that such innovation could threaten their positions. Others were worried that rationalization and incentives would get in the way of ideological purity. The result was a planning system that did not stand the test of an increasingly complex economy. And when some bosses fell back on Stalinist methods of coercion, that, too, did not work. In Novocherkassk in 1962 workers had rebelled with the slogan “Milk, Meat, and Higher Wages.” They had occupied party and police headquarters. At least thirty people had been shot as the KGB reestablished order. Soviet authorities did not want to see Novocherkassk repeated elsewhere in the country, and therefore were wary of demanding too much from the working class they professed to represent.

While the structural problems of the Soviet economy were clearly visible at the end of the 1960s, the overall living conditions for its citizens and its military strength both seemed to be improving. Compared to how they had lived a decade earlier, and not least compared with the war and with Stalin’s terror, the common Soviet citizen lived a life of security and plenty under Brezhnev, in spite of the shortages. More expensive consumer goods—cars, fridges, television sets—while still in short supply, were sometimes available. Most people earned what they considered an acceptable salary and lived in decent apartments (again compared with the past). The state supplied free education, health care, housing, and even vacations. Most families had access to free day care and after-school programs. There was full employment, free and generous disability insurance, and early retirement age on full state pensions (55 for women and 60 for men). “It felt very stable and secure,” said a friend of mine who grew up in Kiev in the 1960s. “We had most of what we needed. Nobody starved. And we always expected next year to be better than this year.”

By the 1970s socialism had become the new normal in the Soviet Union and there were few outward signs of opposition. Like in Europe and North America, youth chafed under the conformity imposed on them by the government. But the astonishing lack of democracy or due process of law in a country that set itself up as the envy of the world did not seem to trouble too many Soviets. Although propaganda was everywhere, the Brezhnev regime was selective in its use of repression. Jews were sometimes singled out for persecution, in part because of engrained anti-Semitism and in part because of (mainly fictitious) links with Israel, which by now had become an enemy of the USSR. Political dissidents were imprisoned or otherwise punished, as were suspected nationalists or religious activists in the non-Russian republics. But overall the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era seemed a country of remarkable, though somewhat deadening, calm, especially compared with the Russian past.

Eastern Europe under Soviet rule also seemed to have entered a new normality, even though it was not one that most of its people wanted. Soviet and Communist control were still seen as impositions by the majority. But people everywhere had learned to compromise with the regimes and make the best out of their situation. In this they were helped by modest but significant economic growth. Living standards were rising everywhere. Even if the eastern European economies suffered the same shortages of consumer goods as the Soviets did, they still, overall, had a higher standard of living than further east. This was especially true for the most advanced Soviet bloc countries, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where average monthly salaries for technicians and skilled workers were substantially higher than in the USSR. Even in Poland engineers earned on average 15 percent more than their Soviet counterparts in 1964.⁶ Still, people hoped for better, both in national and economic terms. Underground leaflets and proscribed books proliferated, in spite of the regimes’ attempts to stop them and punish the distributors. Many eastern Europeans still resented their lot, but they did so within a world that had become more predictable and comfortable than before.

Even so, social and economic progress in eastern Europe paled in comparison with what was happening in the West. Since the 1940s western Europe and other countries in the capitalist zone (including Greece and Turkey) had gone through a profound transformation. From being for the most part agricultural, localized, and oriented toward their own traditions and cultures, all of them by the 1960s were increasingly urban, industrial, mobile, and literate. This had happened on the back of strong economic growth, with the West German economy expanding 5.5 percent per year on average in the 1960s, the French 7 percent, and the Italian an astonishing 8 percent. For many countries the 1960s was the most intense growth period of all, part of what in France was called Les Trente Glorieuses, the glorious thirty postwar years of economic boom.

In the core countries of the western European economy, economic growth led to full employment and better conditions for workers, at least in terms of buying power. The regions at the periphery also benefitted, but on different terms: their benefit was as much in the export of labor as in local industrialization. Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, southern Italy, and all of Iberia sent workers to help build the western European miracle. Around 1970, money sent back by workers abroad constituted more than 50 percent of export earnings in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Portugal, and more than 90 percent in Turkey. It was Cold War alliances that made such migrations possible; Soviet-controlled eastern Europe saw nothing of the kind.

With full employment came a significant role for the trade unions, but in most cases (Britain being a partial exception) it was a less militant role than that of the interwar period. Negotiating from positions of strength, and with overall living standards for their members on the rise, most unions were happy to be integrated into mechanisms of collective bargaining within the capitalist system, rather than challenge that system from the outside. In this transformation they were much helped by the social welfare states that European political elites were building. Much of the impetus for the makeover in the role of the state came from the experience of wars and depression. But it also signaled that significant parts of the European Left and Right were willing to stand by their postwar dedication to new forms of social security networks as the economies began to grow. Indeed, it was the economic resurgence of western Europe that made the building of advanced welfare states possible. By 1970 all western European countries had developed systems of social security for the sick and elderly; they had free education up to college level, a guaranteed retirement age with benefits, and free or strongly subsidized health care.

The western European welfare state of the 1960s was only possible because of the combination of demographic growth, US consent, and fears over the ghosts of the past. Also, it demanded strong political leadership and an exchange of technology, products, and ideas across borders. Throughout western Europe, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats supplied the leadership necessary for creating a high degree of consensus around basic welfare provisions, while also preparing to fight the Cold War. And US leaders, as fearful of Europe’s past as western European leaders themselves, put no obstacles in place for the expansion of the European state or for the expansion of European integration that seemed to go with it, even though such measures in the past had been foreign to American thinking. On the contrary, by the mid-1960s many of President Johnson’s own US welfare programs seemed modeled on European prototypes.

In the 1960s, the only political challenge to the new form of capitalism that was being created in western Europe came from the French and Italian Communist parties. The other possible opposition, the Spanish and Portuguese Right-wing dictatorships, had long since capitulated to consumerism and welfare arrangements—it is very hard to be a Fascist if you have a complicated and negotiated social security system to look after. The French Communists were easily outmaneuvered by Charles de Gaulle, who assumed both the nationalist and the collectivist mantle. Only in Italy did the Communists present an electoral challenge. In 1972 they got 27 percent of the vote. And their key leader from the late 1960s, the young Sardinian aristocrat Enrico Berlinguer, was easily the most popular politician in the country.

But, while its working class popularity remained, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was being refashioned from within. A new group of leaders, symbolized by Berlinguer, believed that Italy had to find its own way to socialism, and—increasingly—that the Soviet Union was a hindrance rather than a help in that process. The 1966 party program emphasized electoral politics, gradual reform, and the alliance of Communists, socialists, and “progressive” Catholics. While continuing to communicate closely with Moscow, and receiving much financial support from the Soviet Union, it was clear that the PCI wanted to set its own priorities, including in foreign policy, where Berlinguer began to downplay the party’s opposition to Italy’s NATO membership.

The Italian Communist position had much influence on political views among Communists elsewhere in Europe, west and east. The Spanish Communists in exile began thinking about a peaceful transition from the Franco dictatorship to pluralist democracy. The French party, still influential in the international Communist movement, defended the Italian position when it was attacked by Moscow, even though many French Communist leaders felt that Berlinguer was going too far in his criticism of Communist traditions. Still, it was clear by the late 1960s that at least some western European Communist parties thought they now had more in common with each other than any of them had with the Soviet Union, giving rise to the sobriquet “Eurocommunism” (a term the Italian, French, and Spanish Communists never gave a concrete definition, but which they were fond of brandishing when it suited their domestic purposes).

Some eastern European Communists were also starting to query what the future would hold for their parties. In Czechoslovakia, which had a strong domestic Communist tradition that went back much further than the 1948 coup, younger party leaders wanted to develop a Communist state that was more in line with popular priorities than had been the case before. To begin with, they had the support of the Brezhnev leadership in Moscow, which regarded the Czechoslovak Communist leader, Antonín Novotný, as somewhat old hat. The new party head whom the reformists put in place in January 1968 with Brezhnev’s blessing, the Slovak Communist Alexander Dubček, at first tried to manage expectations, concentrating on economic reform along the lines of what had been proposed by Kosygin in the Soviet Union. But very soon he came under pressure to allow a more open political system and more freedom of expression. And, to everyone’s surprise, including Dubček’s own, the party majority seemed to agree with these demands.

In April 1968 Dubček launched what he called the party’s “action program.” Confirming the “leading role” of the Communist Party in state and society, the Czechoslovak Communists said that their country had to find its own way to advanced socialism:

Democracy must provide more room for the activity of every individual, every collective, every link in the management, both at the lower and higher levels, and at the center too. People must have the opportunity to think for themselves and to express their opinions. We must radically change the practices that turned the people’s initiative and critical comments and suggestions from below into words that met with the proverbial deaf ear. We must see to it that incompetent people… are really replaced by those who strive for socialism, who are concerned with its fate.⁷

Dubček and his colleagues aimed for a gradual reform of the economy and the political system, and hoped that their removal of press censorship, which took place in the spring, would help to give them the time they needed. They also believed that the majority of people supported socialism, even though they wanted to see it reformed. But the groundswell of criticism of the political system that quickly emerged in the press surprised them. The Soviets were horrified, especially when some Czech and Slovak commentators argued for their country’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Reluctantly, Moscow began contingency preparations for military action against the new Prague leadership.

Dubček, who had started referring to his program of reform as “socialism with a human face,” was certain that he could keep the situation under control. But the Soviets, who must have been wondering if they then represented “socialism with an inhuman face,” were not so sure. Together with the leaders of the other Warsaw Pact countries, who were terrified that the “Prague Spring” would spread to their territories, they worked out plans for removing Dubček by force. At a hastily called meeting on the Soviet-Czechoslovak border in late July, Brezhnev demanded that “anti-Soviet statements” in Prague and Bratislava had to be stopped. Dubček and his delegation promised that they would stop. The Czechoslovaks tried to convince the Soviets that “events in our country are not moving in a direction that would result in the destruction of the gains of the revolution, much less does one observe even the slightest departure from the socialist camp or from the foundations of socialism.” Kosygin acidly commented that the Czechoslovaks seemed more preoccupied with attracting Western tourists than defending the Warsaw Pact’s common border.⁸ After returning to Moscow, the Soviet leadership at first decided to take no further action. Even with all the preparations in place, Brezhnev still hoped that a full-scale invasion would be unnecessary. Such an action, he argued, might be required but would entail high political costs.

By the middle of August the Soviet leaders felt trapped. They wanted to stop a congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, scheduled for September, from going ahead, because they feared that it would enact further liberal reforms. Brezhnev called Dubček on the phone one last time. He insisted that the Czechoslovak leader immediately ban the most outspoken newspapers and throw dissidents out of the party. Dubček asked for more time. Brezhnev interrupted him.

BREZHNEV: Sasha, I can’t agree with this. Over the past two to three days, the newspapers I mentioned have been doggedly continuing to occupy themselves with the publication of defamatory ravings about the Soviet Union and the other fraternal countries. My comrades on the Politburo insist that we make an urgent approach to you on this matter.… This is just one more sign that you’re deceiving us, and I can’t regard it as anything other than that, let me say to you in all honesty. If you’re not even able to resolve this matter now, then it seems to me that your Presidium in general has lost all its power.

DUBČEK: I don’t see any deceit in this. We’re trying to carry out the obligations we undertook. But we’re carrying them out as best we can in a fundamentally changing situation.

BREZHNEV: But surely you understand that this arrangement, this way of fulfilling the obligations… will compel us to reevaluate the whole situation and resort to new, independent measures… ⁹

Brezhnev and Dubček agreed to speak again. Instead, in the morning of 21 August, troops from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia and occupied the main cities. Dubček, President Ludvik Svoboda, and other members of the government were arrested and brought to Moscow, where they were forced to sign a protocol agreeing to the stationing of Soviet troops, the closing of newspapers, and the end of the most controversial reforms. There was sporadic resistance in the cities, in which seventy Czechoslovaks were killed. Seventy thousand fled across the border to western Europe. After he had been kept in place as a figurehead long enough for the Soviets to hope that he had been compromised among the Czechoslovaks who hated the invasion, Dubček was packed off to work for the Slovak forestry service. His successor, Gustáv Husák, handpicked by the Soviets, made Czechoslovakia the most repressive regime in the Soviet bloc.

The international reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia showed that the world was moving in new directions in the late 1960s. Different from the aftermath of Hungary in 1956, the United States’ reaction was muted, almost nonchalant. When USSR ambassador Dobrynin visited President Johnson at the White House to inform him about the invasion, LBJ—consumed by the Vietnam War—barely took note and offered the astonished ambassador a mint julep. The main reaction was from ordinary western Europeans, who turned out in large numbers to protest the invasion. Even the majority of western European Communist parties condemned the Soviet action, with the PCI publicly calling it “unjustified” and noting its “strong dissent.”¹⁰ To Brezhnev’s horror, Romania, a member of the Warsaw Pact, also dissented, with its strongman, Nicolae Ceauşescu, calling the invasion a “grave error and a serious danger to peace in Europe and the destiny of world socialism.”¹¹

While the Soviets struggled to keep their bloc together, US influence in western Europe remained high, though American patience was at times sorely tested there. The United States was seen as a guarantor for European security against the Soviet Union, and support for the US military presence in Europe was strong. But western Europeans, and especially young people, also sought inspiration from the United States in terms of social trends, fashion, music, dance, and film. Obviously US propaganda agencies, like the United States Information Agency (USIA), tried to strengthen such biases further. But the reality was that they did not have to, and sometimes, when they tried, their ham-fisted ways did them more harm than good. Much more important than the USIA were US commercial television programs, which by the mid-1960s had become available to most Europeans. In the 1950s, Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando had became US cult figures in Europe, not least because of their rebelliousness. And when rock music conquered the world in the 1960s, most of its reference points were American, even for artists who were profoundly anti-establishment. A Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix was against most things that the US government was for, but for young Europeans of the 1960s, they opened a window to an America that outsiders wanted to be part of, culturally if not politically.

Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam dented this image but did not destroy it. Older western Europeans, at least at first, sympathized with the US effort in Indochina, because they likened it to what the Americans had done in Europe after World War II. But younger people increasingly disagreed, especially college students, who began staging protests, in part inspired by their US peers. What was fundamentally wrong with the US war in Vietnam, many people thought, was that a rich country was beating up a poor country. But some students felt that American behavior in Indochina was part of US imperialism, which Europe had also in their opinion been at the receiving end of. The protests against the Vietnam war in Europe were therefore, at least in part, a protest against what some people felt to be an overwhelming US influence in their own countries, a form of tutelage that could only be resented.

But the protests that were spreading among young people in the West in the 1960s were not only connected to what was seen as an unjust war in Vietnam. They also came out of a sense of powerlessness and lack of real democracy in their own societies. Because of the postwar baby boom there were far more young people around and a far higher percentage of them went to college, an influx that European and American universities were not prepared to handle. Very often protests that initially took aim at archaic forms of learning and governance in universities were widened to become protests against society’s and the state’s oppression of young people. And gradually at least some of the youthful protesters began to see links between unfulfilled dreams of equality and representation for themselves and other marginalized groups: ethnic minorities (especially African-Americans in the United States) and women, above all. The capitalist world may be delivering economic growth, their argument went, but not real democracy or equality. The Port Huron Statement, put out by the US organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in 1962 summed their accusations up well:

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity—but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world?… The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us.… On such a basis do we offer… an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.¹²

Although all western European countries saw youth protests during the 1960s, Paris in 1968 quickly became the symbol of what students and young people could (and could not) do. There students began protesting in the spring against conditions in the universities, and gradually also against consumerism, patriarchy, and a general lack of democracy. Police brutality against the protesters drew even more people to the streets. “To be free in 1968 means to participate!” was one of the slogans. “The boss needs you, you don’t need him!” “Power to the imagination!” And, the inimitable “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” By late May, millions of workers had also gone on strike, against the advice of their unions, demanding more influence in the workplace and better pay. President de Gaulle panicked and left to join the French forces stationed in Germany, whom he hoped would be loyal to him. Power seemed to be in the streets; to some it seemed a classical French revolution.

But it was not. When new elections were held in June, de Gaulle won a decisive victory. The French Communists, who had tried to join the youth movement even though they had been politically attacked by it, lost half their seats. For most Frenchmen, who had been through profound social and economic change since 1945, the protests had provided an opportunity to speak out against conditions that they found oppressive, boring, or simply puzzling. But at the polling booth they confirmed their belief in the existing order, just like many young street fighters did indirectly when they donned their Levi’s jeans or threw their Coca-Cola bottles at the police.

The real loser of May 1968 may have been the Communist Party. To young people it seemed old-fashioned, timid, and increasingly out of touch. Instead, some of the May protesters in Paris, alongside with their sympathizers elsewhere, championed a New Left, in which Marxism was seen as an instrument for personal as much as social liberation. The heroes of their imagination were Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara (both safely dead by 1968) or, remarkably enough, Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution they equated with their own rebellion against authorities at home. Third World symbols and ideas received an afterlife among mostly bourgeois youth in western Europe, where they were seen as representing part of a global rebellion, in which some young Europeans also craved a role. While the shrinking working class mainly remained sympathetic with the old-style Communist parties in France and Italy, or the Social Democrats in West Germany or Scandinavia, youthful rebels formed small Maoist or Trotskyist parties of their own. As long as the Cold War lasted, none of these new radical parties—the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière in France, for instance, or the Maoist Communist Party of the Netherlands (Marxist-Leninist) and the Norwegian Workers’ Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)—ever got much support outside of university campuses.

The one social and political campaign of the 1960s that had a lasting impact, also on the Cold War, was the women’s movement. While economic growth had exploded in the West in the postwar era, the position of women within this growth was still weak: in society, in the workplace, and in the family. One of the recurrent arguments of the Communists was that the Soviet bloc had abolished discrimination against women (an argument that barely held up but was useful for propaganda purposes). By the 1960s, autonomous women’s groups in western Europe and North America had begun campaigning for a greater role for women in all walks of life. Though discrimination against women at work persisted, especially in terms of equal pay, these women’s movements scored some stunning successes in terms of legal rights, family planning, and sexual liberation. The American feminist Betty Friedan was among the many women who gave direction to these groups. Could it be acceptable, Friedan asked in 1963, that women in industrial societies could not combine being a homemaker with a satisfying and well-paid job to which they were qualified through their education? “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’”¹³

By the 1970s thousands of women leaders all over the West had made sure that it was not all. The representation of women in skilled labor and in the professions exploded. In 1980 there were 32 percent women lawyers in West Germany (as against less than 7 percent in 1960). The changes in politics were equally dramatic. In Finland there were more than 30 percent female members of the national assembly in 1985 (compared with less than 15 percent in 1965). With better political representation—across the political spectrum—came more attention to issues that were especially important for women, such as child care, contraception and abortion, and the right to divorce. By the end of the Cold War, women were still discriminated against in terms of pay and career patterns (less than 15 percent of top executives in leading US companies are female even today). But the Communist argument that only socialism could end the unfair treatment of women had been proven false.

THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF social movements in the capitalist West did not prevent many political leaders from seeing the 1960s as a decade of increasing chaos and dislocation. The autonomy that many campaigning groups sought for themselves fueled elite concerns about society becoming ungovernable. Over time this pushed in the direction of finding new ways of stabilizing the Cold War, of making it less disruptive and dangerous, at least in Europe and in the relationship between the Superpowers. None of the events of the late 1960s seemed to push in the direction of an immediate Superpower confrontation, or a conflict across the division lines in Europe. No American thought that the Soviet Union was about to intervene in their all-consuming obsession, the war in Vietnam. And the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed that even if western Europeans protested the crimes of the USSR, they were not up to doing anything about them. The nadir of disinterest was reached by western European student radicals, many of whom in 1968 were chanting not for Dubček but for Mao Zedong.

From a western European and Superpower perspective the idea of stabilizing the Cold War through a gradual lessening of tension between the blocs made sense in the late 1960s. Such a détente could enable leaders to better handle problems in their own societies, within their alliances, and in the Third World. It would reduce the chance of nuclear war and—crucially in a time when both the Americans and the Soviets were feeling the sting of military expenditure—reduce the cost of further military buildups. There were also those, at least in the West, who thought the two ideological systems would converge over time. Industrial society seemed to pose similar challenges to East and West, the thinking went. Some of the solutions, through technology and social engineering, were also likely to be similar, and therefore the states that carried them out would come to look more like each other, even if the political context was different.

The attempts at stabilizing the Cold War through a lasting détente began in Europe in the early 1960s. France’s President de Gaulle—always upset at the thought of Superpower bipolarity and seeking a greater role for France in international affairs—attempted to reach out to the East on his own. Having successfully tested France’s first nuclear weapon in 1960, de Gaulle felt that France should defend its foreign policy independence, even within the NATO alliance. The French president, a conservative with a deep-seated sense of the cultural unity of Europe, believed that the United States had become too predominant in the relationship with its partners. He wanted to see a more independent western Europe, under French leadership, that could balance the American role in NATO. De Gaulle’s famous non to British attempts at joining the increasingly integrationist European Economic Community was based on his sense of London as a Trojan horse for Washington. France was the only country that could lead a more independent western Europe, de Gaulle thought, while keeping the US security guarantee and building bridges with the East.

In 1964, the French president began a more active program for technical and cultural cooperation with eastern Europe and with the Soviet Union. His aim, he declared at a dramatic press conference on the twentieth anniversary of the Yalta conference in 1965, was to overcome “Yalta” and bring an end to the division of Europe. “The reappearance of the nation with its hands free, which we again have become, clearly changes the global game, which, since Yalta, seemed henceforth limited to two partners.”¹⁴ The French president followed up with visits to Moscow, Warsaw, and Bucharest, where he received a hero’s welcome from the regimes after he abruptly withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966. Europe’s future, the general declared, was not in a bipolarity dominated by the Superpowers, but in “détente, entente, and cooperation.” The practical results of de Gaulle’s policies, however, were few and far between. And by 1968 both Moscow and Washington took some pleasure in seeing de Gaulle’s grandeur humbled by the May events. When he resigned the following year, after losing a referendum on administrative reform, those who found solace in the European status quo drew a collective sigh of relief.

The reason why the Americans, though annoyed, could more or less disregard de Gaulle’s shenanigans was that the future of the European component of NATO seemed secure. President Johnson knew that the last thing the French president wanted, in spite of his complaints about “Yalta,” was a US withdrawal from Europe. Johnson’s hope, especially in light of rising US military expenditure in Indochina, was to get western Europe (and Japan) to carry more of the economic burden for their defense themselves. But LBJ did not believe that the United States ought to withdraw forces from Europe. When the Democratic leader of the Senate, Mike Mansfield, put forward a resolution calling for substantial troop reductions in Europe, Johnson scoffed to his staff: “I’m not one of those folks that are just sucked in by the Russians. I don’t believe in the… whole goddamned theory that it’s all over there.… I think those sons of bitches want to eat us any day they can.”¹⁵

Johnson did believe, however, that Germany was less of an immediate Cold War issue because of West Germany’s safe anchoring in NATO. While de Gaulle huffed and hawed and students—not least in West Germany—protested against US imperialism, both main parties in the Federal Republic, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, saw their country’s continued integration with the West as crucial for Germany’s future. Indeed, de Gaulle’s insistence on building his “new Europe” around a French-German axis seemed to confirm West Germany’s place. Western European economic integration became an instrument both for further growth and for Cold War cohesion. Increasingly, the European integration project had West Germany’s spectacular industrial and commercial success as its center. By 1970 the West German economy was almost 40 percent bigger than the French, and 65 percent bigger than the British economy.

Placing the German economic dynamo at the heart of European integration made good sense, both in terms of economics and politics. The 1957 Treaty of Rome had created a European Economic Community (EEC), which committed the members—Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany—to set up a common market for goods, capital, and workers. In spite of Gaullist challenges and a slow, sometimes infuriating process of negotiation, ten years later the removal of internal tariffs was complete, with a full customs union inside what then was called the European Communities. The secret of the success was twofold. One was internal: allowing West Germany the free export of its industrial goods in return for it contributing heavily to subsidies for French and Italian farmers, the so-called Common Agricultural Policy. The other was external: the sense, in all western European capitals, that Europe could only regain a strong voice within the Cold War if it was more united.

It was therefore the combination of German economic strength and the Europeanization of Gaullist principles that under Cold War conditions created the new push toward European integration. After de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969, Britain was allowed to reopen negotiations to join the EEC, and it joined, after a referendum, along with Denmark, in 1973. By then it was clear that the Communities would be the future of European integration, and that the European Free Trade Association, the other European trade bloc that Britain had cultivated as a less integrationist alternative, could not deliver the connection to European markets that Britain wanted. Britain’s accession also convinced the Americans that they had little to fear, except perhaps in economic terms, from further western European integration. Britain in the EEC made the common market more of a European economic wing of NATO, increasing the attractiveness of the western European model for countries farther east.

West Germany’s bigger role in Europe was also on the agenda of that country’s domestic politics. In the 1965 elections the head of the Social Democrats (SPD), Willy Brandt, had argued for a policy of bridge-building with eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, both to further reduce military tension in Europe and to prepare the way for negotiations on German reunification. When Brandt became foreign minister in a grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in 1966, he was in a position to put some of this policy into practice. Having proven his anti-Communist credentials as mayor of West Berlin, Brandt felt that he could reach out to the East without creating a political backlash among West Germans who overall prioritized further economic growth and increase in welfare provisions over too much talk about German unity. It was going to be difficult, Brandt told SPD members in 1967. It would be about small steps, not big leaps. And a new West German eastern policy, Ostpolitik, was dependent on “a western policy oriented towards a European peace settlement.”¹⁶

The 1969 elections in West Germany made Willy Brandt Bundeskanzler, the head of government. For the first time since 1930 a Social Democrat was in power in Germany, and Brandt was determined to use the opportunity both for domestic reform and for détente with the East. His Ostpolitik had been developed gradually in conversations with his closest advisers. Egon Bahr, whom Brandt had worked with in Berlin and who became his point man in contacts with the East, had spoken of wandel durch annäherung (change through rapprochement). This became a good summing-up of Brandt’s policy: a careful building of trust among governments in the east and west of Europe, which would enable disarmament, increased trade, travel, and cultural contacts, and, eventually, German reunification and the full removal of Europe’s Cold War divides. It was less than revolutionary, as Brandt’s critics Left and Right were fond of pointing out. But it was also much more than Europe could have hoped for only a few years earlier.

Brandt knew that the road to East Berlin went through Moscow. In negotiations with Brezhnev in 1970, Brandt promised increased trade and economic cooperation and a treaty with the Soviet Union in which both sides agreed that the postwar borders in Europe, including the new Polish-German border and the border between East and West Germany, were inviolable. Brezhnev was delighted. A treaty with West Germany meant reducing the fear of German revanchism, and, even more important, the prospect that at some point a neutral Germany could tip the Cold War balance in Europe toward the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader bristled at those of his advisers who feared that the anti-Communist Brandt’s aims were more insidious, namely the gradual loosening of the bonds that tied eastern Europe to the USSR. Even when Brandt before the signing of the treaty handed Brezhnev a note that said “this agreement is not contrary to the policy objective of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is to work toward a condition of peace in Europe under which the German people will regain its unity through free self-determination,” the general secretary did not demur.¹⁷ It was just words, Brezhnev argued. Germany needed the Soviet Union much more than the Soviets needed Germany.

If it had not been for the new Nixon Administration itself engaging in renewed efforts at détente with the Soviets, Brandt’s policy could have been seen as positively treacherous in a NATO context. As things were, the Bundeskanzler could claim that he was building on initiatives launched by France and then by the United States itself. Even so, there was substantial weariness elsewhere in Europe and in Washington over Brandt’s actions. The questions were not so much about what Brandt did now as with what his ultimate aim might be. Did the German Social Democrats want to make a grand bargain with the Soviets in return for reunification? If so, the future of the NATO alliance could be at stake. But Brandt was clever enough to use his credentials as a pro-American European, a man who had fought against his own country in World War II, in order to reduce the effects of these doubts, even if they never entirely went away.

Brandt followed up his Moscow treaty with a separate treaty with Poland, later in 1970. In it, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) restated its acceptance of Poland’s western border and promised further peaceful cooperation between the two governments. But the most important aspect of the negotiations was Brandt’s December 1970 visit to Warsaw. Insisting on going to the memorial for the 1943 uprising against German occupation in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto, Brandt placed a wreath honoring the resistance fighters. He then sank to his knees in the snow and slush, and remained there, silently, in front of the TV cameras. For Poles and others who watched in eastern Europe, it was a powerful symbol of a new German government intent on peace, headed by a man of a new generation who himself had no blame in Germany’s wartime atrocities. It went further than any treaty in creating an image of a new West Germany for peoples in the east.

While all of this happened, the Communists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had been watching nervously from the wings. While they welcomed a less confrontational West German policy, they feared Brandt’s immense popularity and his appeal among Germans in the East. They also feared that he was going above their heads when dealing with Moscow and Warsaw. To them, the achievements of Ostpolitik seemed a bit like the late Stalin-era discussions in Moscow about the purposes of the GDR. They refused to meet Brandt unless he gave full diplomatic recognition to the GDR first. By 1972, however, it was clear to Walter Ulbricht and the GDR leadership that they had to negotiate with Brandt, both to avoid Moscow’s displeasure and to avoid undermining their position at home.

The result of these negotiations, mainly carried out by Egon Bahr on the West German side, was the Basic Agreement between the two German states in December 1972. To the East Germans the term “basic” meant that it contained the minimum of what they had to do. To Brandt it signaled the first step in a rapprochement between the FRG and the GDR. The treaty contained a promise by each government to respect the jurisdiction of the other on its territory and the mutual independence in international affairs. They also pledged to cooperate on a whole set of issues, ranging from science and sport to post and communications. The real significance of the treaty was that for the first time in twenty-five years the two German states were dealing directly with each other, even if full recognition was not forthcoming. And Brandt was right about it being a first step. Several other agreements between the two were reached during the 1970s, making it unlikely that one would return to the absolute confrontation of the earlier Cold War.

Brandt therefore seemed to have achieved quite a lot in his attempts at building bridges in Europe, even though it is unlikely that he could have achieved half as much if it were not for the overall spirit of détente in the early 1970s. The German chancellor also had his detractors among those who claimed that he was giving too much to the East and not standing up for human rights and freedom of expression. While Brandt and his successors negotiated with the East German authorities, forty-eight people were shot trying to cross into West Berlin and eleven thousand were imprisoned for speaking out against the Communist regime. What kind of change did the rapprochement bring, critics asked? Maybe the real change was in West Germany, where small extreme Left terrorist groups—secretly aided by the GDR—made the country more difficult to govern?

Brandt’s answer was that one could not deal effectively with the eastern European governments if one at the same time was actively and openly encouraging their populations to overthrow them. The breaking down of Cold War divisions in Europe would take time, the Bundeskanzler argued. What mattered in the meantime was to avoid war and build people-to-people contacts. What Europe needed, Brandt argued at the UN on the occasion of the admission of both German states, finally, to that organization in 1973, was “a condition of day-to-day peace.” The massive military budgets on both sides had to be reduced: “If we do succeed in reducing, through confidence building, the monstrous waste created by the lack of trust between antagonistic systems, then we will have set a historical example.… At the end of the Cold War… there will be neither victors nor vanquished. The truth is, that if one wants to achieve peace, one must not strive for victory for some and defeat for others, but rather for the victory of reason and moderation.”¹⁸

Brandt’s vision of a more peaceful Europe, so much based on his own experiences throughout the twentieth century, also contributed to what was undoubtedly the greatest achievement of European détente, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Back in the 1950s, the Soviets had launched a plan for an all-European security organization to replace the power blocs. It was a rather undisguised attempt at excluding the United States, as a “non-European” power, from discussions on Europe’s future. The western Europeans saw it as such and rejected it out of hand. But in the late 1960s Soviet suggestions of talks found a better reception among Europeans west and east. With new attempts in Washington and Moscow at building a Superpower détente, European leaders were eager to avoid decisions being taken above their heads. Brandt’s Ostpolitik had reduced the fear of Germany in eastern Europe. And, somewhat bizarrely, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had convinced many that there was no alternative to dealing with the Soviet Union if the partition of Europe was to be overcome.

The CSCE process was firmly anchored in the continued existence of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But in spite of its skepticism both toward Ostpolitik and the CSCE process, the new US Administration of Richard Nixon was wise enough to let its European allies explore what was possible. One clear condition, which the Soviets grudgingly accepted, was the inclusion of the United States in the talks. Another was regular NATO consultations both on process and positions. The western European leaders had no problem accepting this framework. While eager to explore what could be achieved with the East, none of them wanted too many internal difficulties in the Western alliance.

The most surprising element on the road to the CSCE was the activism of the eastern European governments. That the Romanians, as dissidents within the bloc, came up with their own proposals was no surprise. But that Poland and Hungary, which had shown their Soviet loyalism when co-invading Prague in 1968, were eager to present their own plans for the gradual dismantling of Europe’s Cold War divides was more astounding. Like the West, the East approached the talks through consultations in the Warsaw Pact and other Communist fora. But by the early 1970s it was clear that if the Soviets ordered a unilateral halt to the process, there would be a considerable political price to pay in eastern Europe.

By 1973 the Soviets found themselves in a quandary. They had primarily wanted to use a negotiation process as a propaganda weapon against the United States. But as the deepening of their own engagement with the Americans proceeded and expectations for a continent-wide security conference spread in Europe, they had little choice but to go ahead with their participation. A number of smaller western European countries, followed by France, insisted on human rights and freedom of speech issues becoming part of the negotiations, alongside military confidence-building and economic cooperation. These then became “Basket III” of the negotiation process when, to everyone’s surprise, the Soviets agreed to their inclusion. Brezhnev regarded talking about Basket III issues a small price to pay for making some headway on other concerns. Knowing how much the general secretary wanted an agreement, even the KGB concluded that “Basket III is dependent upon our interpretation.… These will be practical steps of the party and the organs of state security. Basket III gives no one the possibility of intervening in the internal affairs of another state. There are many references there to domestic legislation.”¹⁹

The ratification of the Helsinki Final Act of the CSCE in mid-1975 was the high point of European détente. For Brezhnev it was the highlight of his political career. Thirty-five countries agreed to a Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States. These principles included sovereign equality, inviolability of frontiers, and nonintervention in domestic affairs. All were propositions that the Soviets had put forward since the founding of their state. But the Final Act also included key paragraphs on the rights of the individual. The signatories, it declared,

will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion. They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development.… The participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States.… They confirm the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights and duties in this field.²⁰

Brezhnev told himself and others that it was just language, that it did not matter much. But in Cold War terms the Helsinki Final Act was to have consequences far beyond what anyone could have foreseen in 1975.

AS EUROPEANS STRUGGLED with managing their Cold War inheritance, the Third World project split further apart. With the enthusiasm for freedom and new opportunities now tempered by harsh postcolonial realities, the concepts of solidarity and transnational South-South cooperation developed during the anticolonial struggle receded into the past in most places. After the political turnarounds in the mid-1960s, most postcolonial governments prioritized their own state’s interests and their own plans for economic development over the wider cooperation and cohesion imagined by Nehru, Nkrumah, or Sukarno. Countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America could still cooperate against Cold War constrictions and against European predominance. But such cooperation would now be more narrowly conceived, and based primarily on each country’s strategic or economic interests.

At the first meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1964, a group of seventy-seven non-European countries promised to consult further among themselves on trade-related issues. At its first meeting as the Group of 77 in Algeria three years later, the new organization issued the Algiers Charter, which called for fairer prices for raw materials, acceptance of principles of political and legal sovereignty in global trade, and more open and equitable world markets. “The lot of more than a billion people of the developing world continues to deteriorate as a result of the trends in international economic relations,” the charter noted.

The rate of economic growth of the developing world has slowed down and the disparity between it and the affluent world is widening.… The international community has an obligation to rectify these unfavorable trends and to create conditions under which all nations can enjoy economic and social well-being, and have the means to develop their respective resources to enable their peoples to lead a life free from want and fear. In a world of increasing interdependence, peace, progress and freedom are common and indivisible. Consequently the development of developing countries will benefit the developed countries as well.²¹

Western European governments saw connections between their own wishes to reduce Cold War tensions in Europe and hopes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America for a more stable economic development. One point was to avoid revolutionary turbulence that could further complicate the global Cold War. Another, especially among European Social Democrats such as Willy Brandt and Sweden’s Olof Palme, was that the Group of 77 was right in seeing global development as interconnected, irrespective of political and economic systems. In his 1973 UN speech, Brandt had underlined exactly this dimension by stressing that it would not much gain the West—and especially the Europeans—if East-West conflicts were replaced by North-South conflicts. By the early 1970s the Group of 77 and other organizations working with it had developed a plan through which a fairer world economy could be initiated through the United Nations. The somewhat grandiosely termed New International Economic Order (NIEO), passed by a majority vote in the UN General Assembly in 1974, called for the right of states to control the extraction of their natural resources through state-managed resource cartels. It also wanted to see the regulation of transnational corporations, technology transfers from north to south, trade preferences, and debt forgiveness. In all, the NIEO charter aimed to create what Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere called a “trade union of the poor.” Others called it, less charitably but probably more accurately, “socialism among states.” The United States, predictably, rejected the demands, with its UN ambassador condemning the resolution as a “steamroller” representing the “tyranny of the majority.”²²

The demands for a New International Economic Order did have some positive effects. Pushed by Brandt and others, the EEC entered into a set of conventions with former European colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. These so-called Lomè Conventions, named after the Togolese capital, allowed duty-free imports into the EEC and set off $3.6 billion (almost $13.5 billion today) in aid and investment. But overall the immediate results were negative. By focusing on economic demands, the ailing Third World coalition blew itself apart. Countries that were dependent on cheap raw material imports for their burgeoning industries, say, Singapore, found that they had little in common with countries that relied on improving raw material prices, say, Zambia. Oil exporters found that their interests often clashed with those dependent on cheap oil. The 1970s therefore became a decade in which global economic as well as political roles changed dramatically, with considerable and sustained effects for how the Cold War was fought.