When did the USSR stop being "great"?

 

Dima Vorobiev

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Updated September 8

Former Propaganda Executive at Soviet Union (1980–1991)

Short answer:

The USSR stopped being “great” and started down the slope toward “ridiculous” and “hopeless” in the mid-1960s. Looking back, the process passed the point of no return after the invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and our defeat in the Moon race in 1969.

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Longer answer:

The 1960s started well for us. Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and many more were to come. Our military build-up gave the Americans the fright of their life during the Caribbean crisis. The rulers promised us that by 1980 we would be reaching Communism, the most prosperous and just society of all.

Then the following happened:

• The ruler who promised us Communism and made the Americans shake in their boots turned out be an incompetent, bumbling voluntaríst (Soviet speak for a pigheaded comrade who goes against the grain, but is not deemed criminal or enemy of the people) and was kicked out of the Kremlin.
• The Jews in Israel not only became BFF with America, but humiliated our Arab friends in the Six-Day War. Our own Jews openly cheered for Israel, and ridiculed the freedom-seeking “Arab people of Palestine” (we didn’t know any “Palestinians” at the time) and our friends in the United Arab Republic

.

The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial

opened the era of persecution of Soviets dissidents, among which ethnic Jewish intellectuals were over-represented. Together with the increasing push of our Jews for emigration to Israel, this irreparably tarnished the image of the USSR among Jewish progressives in the West, who ever since the 1917 revolution had been our most vocal supporters.

The government’s efforts to fill the shelves of our grocery stores with cheap abundant food failed. The USSR started importing big quantities of food from the West, and kept doing it until the end in 1991.

The discovery of oil and gas in Western Siberia diverted our economy in the extractive direction. Making industry more effective stopped being a priority. Under the torrent of petrodollars, productivity stagnated.

The violent suppression of Czechoslovak reforms in 1968 made plain for everyone the ossification of Real Socialism

• .
• Maoism overtook the role of Stalinism as the shining star of the radical left in the West. The social unrest of the late 1960s in Europe and the US failed to boost our influence the way it happened in the 1930s.
• China not only stopped being our friend and closest ally, but increasingly became “the most likely adversary”.

The 1970s still held out for us a few sweet years ahead. The spike in oil prices, the 1973–1975 recession

in the West, and the general post-Vietnam, post-Watergate gloom in the US opened in the mid-1970s the last chance for us to win the Cold War. But consumerism already infected the USSR, and senility the Kremlin. From there, the death of the Communist project was only a matter of time.

Additional reading

• What were the root causes of "stagnation" under Brezhnev?
• Which year was considered the high water mark of the Soviet Union in most ways?
• Why was the Soviet Union prosperous in the 1960s and early 1970s but stagnated and collapsed in the later years?
• At what point in Soviet history, do people stop believing in the state and in socialism?

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Below, some photos from the streets of Prague in 1968 immediately after the “insertion of the troops of the Warsaw Treaty” in order to “liquidate a threat to the Socialist system and the constitutional order in Czechoslovakia”, as the TASS agency put it

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Surrounded by angry locals, the faces of the Soviet soldiers are marked by confusion and sadness rather than fear. Before 1968, we always had been sure we came to free other nations, not suppress them. From then on, more and more of us started to silently question ourselves and wonder if we really were “the good guys”.

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