USSR — Brezhnev's stagnation and Gorbachev's reforms
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Flip to reveal answersWhat year did Khrushchev fall from power, and who replaced him?
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Question
What year did Khrushchev fall from power, and who replaced him?
Answer
October 1964 — replaced by Alexei Kosygin (Premier) and Leonid Brezhnev (General Secretary).
Question
What did the 1965 Kosygin reforms try to do?
Answer
Give factory managers more autonomy and judge them on profit/sales rather than just output quotas, to make the economy more efficient.
Question
Why did the Kosygin reforms stall by around 1970?
Answer
Central planners kept overruling local decisions, prices stayed fixed by the state, and post-1968 Prague Spring fears made the leadership nervous about any loosening of control.
Question
Define: nomenklatura
Answer
The privileged class of senior Communist Party officials who filled key approved posts across the USSR and enjoyed special access to goods, housing and healthcare.
Question
Define: stagnation (zastoi)
Answer
The term historians use for the Brezhnev era (1964–1982) — slow economic and political decline hidden beneath a surface of outward stability.
Question
Name two famous Soviet dissidents and how the state treated them.
Answer
Alexander Solzhenitsyn — exiled abroad in 1974. Andrei Sakharov — sent into internal exile in Gorky in 1980.
Question
What was "punitive psychiatry"?
Answer
Declaring dissidents mentally ill and committing them to psychiatric hospitals to silence them without a public political trial.
Question
What year did Gorbachev become General Secretary, and how old was he?
Answer
March 1985, aged 54 — the youngest Soviet leader in decades.
Question
Compare perestroika and glasnost.
Answer
Perestroika = economic restructuring (enterprise autonomy, limited private cooperatives). Glasnost = political openness (relaxed censorship, freer public debate). Both were meant to renew the system but instead exposed its weaknesses.
Question
What happened at the 1989 Congress of People's Deputies elections?
Answer
The first genuinely competitive Soviet elections since 1917; multiple candidates could stand, and reformers/critics won seats in nationally televised proceedings.
Question
Outline the August 1991 coup and its outcome.
Answer
Hardliners placed Gorbachev under house arrest (19 Aug 1991) fearing his new Union Treaty; Yeltsin rallied resistance from atop a tank in Moscow; the coup collapsed within three days, fatally weakening Gorbachev's authority.
Question
When did the Soviet Union formally dissolve, and how?
Answer
8 December 1991 — Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords; Gorbachev resigned 25 December 1991 as the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin.
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Topic 13.11 hub
The USSR and post-Soviet Russia (1945–2020)
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