Word: brezhnevs
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Nonetheless, any aspiring party chief, whatever his personal views, must be responsive to the aspirations of the Soviet political elite who constitute his power base. What will the political elite seek in the post-Brezhnev era? Certainly it wants to unclog the avenues of advancement that Brezhnev and his gerontocrats have blocked. Beyond that, the top priority is to get the country moving, after the sharp economic slowdown that has set in during the past three years. In the next generation's struggle for power, "the domestic economy has to be the major issue," says the Rand Corporation's Thane...
Diverse groups within the society will be struggling for their share of shrinking national resources in the post-Brezhnev era. The Soviet leadership under Andropov is expected to maintain Soviet military spending at its present high levels, estimated to be 12% to 14% of the G.N.P. What is left will have to be spread more thinly. Says Robert Legvold, an expert on East-West problems at the Council on Foreign Relations: "The Soviet Union simply does not have the resources to invest in all the necessary sectors. The leadership is going to have to make tough decisions on allocations...
...loser in this battle for allocations will be the Soviet consumer. Accustomed to a steady, though scarcely dramatic, rise in the standard of living under Brezhnev, Soviet citizens may have to settle for no further improvement in the 1980s. But they are not likely to rebel openly. Lacking any genuine forum in which to express dissatisfaction, Soviet consumers will probably do little more than grumble. Andropov, with his KGB background, may deal more harshly with strikes or other eruptions of anger that might occur. Says Historian Walter Laqueur: "Expect tighter discipline rather than liberalism, but expect some economic reforms...
Therein lies the irony of the Brezhnev legacy: all of the Soviet Union's gigantic military might has not proved sufficient to convince its leaders that they can depend on enjoying either domestic tranquillity or genuine security along the country's borders, even those it shares with Communist neighbors. On the contrary, insofar as the military sector has drained off resources from the civilian economy, the U.S.S.R.'s war machine has weakened the country. According to some reports, a number of party officials and theoreticians have even begun asking whether, as a result, their country ought to shift its concept...
...this debate or to predict that Andropov will have the power, the time, or even the inclination to push through the reforms that are necessary to turn the Soviet economy around. Still, it would be a mistake to underestimate the enduring strength of the gigantic industrial machine that Brezhnev helped build. Moreover, the often cumbersome Soviet political system is still flexible enough to allow a new generation of leaders to make crucial decisions on the allocation of resources, industrial growth and military spending that will assure the Soviet Union's survival as a formidable superpower...