Stagnation and Attempts at Reform

The Communist Party of Ukraine has always been a propaganda product. It was never created by an uprising of the peasants and working classes in order to topple a capitalist oppressor class, as per spec in Marx’s theory.

In 1964 Khrushchev was deposed, and Leonid Brezhnev ascended to the “iron throne” of the USSR. These were the days of the nuclear race, with world powers jockeying to gain a big enough nuclear stick to discourage anyone else dropping bombs on them—or interfering with their internal affairs, for that matter. A proxy war between Russia and the USA was launched in Southeast Asia. Cosmonauts battled astronauts for the press coups of space exploration. Ukraine faded into the background, into a few blessed years of relative peace. The nation was still smoldering internally, however, like a cargo of coal that had caught fire, but the ship of state was sailing on with at least nominal steerage.

Brezhnev followed a policy of letting sleeping dogs lie in Ukraine, which was fulfilling its grain, coal and steel quotas, so it could be ignored. New hydroelectric dams produced irrigation for the wheatlands, and electricity for the towns and industries. Everybody in Ukraine was (officially) housed in a heatable flat. However, development stalled at the point of its usefulness to the USSR, and Ukraine fell into economic stagnation. Ukraine’s gas was piped to Europe, for instance, but Europe paid Moscow for the supplies. Ukraine had to buy back its own gas.

Brezhnev was a great builder of mythical statues in Ukraine. All of them had a sort of xenophobic rationale that appealed to visiting Russian dignitaries—Look how much Ukraine admires Russia!—but failed to impress patriotic Ukrainians. Russian statues in Ukraine were intended to dominate the landscape in the way that the Russians wished to dominate the soul of the Ukrainians. Brezhnev’s vast 100 meter tall concrete and stainless steel depiction of Rodina Mat (“Mother Motherland”), erected in Kyiv in 1981 from 700 tons of Ukrainian steel, does not mean to the Ukrainians what the Russians wish it meant. Ukrainians call it “Brezhnev’s Daughter,” and it stirs the desire for freedom in every patriot whenever they catch a glimpse of it.