Брежнев и Сталин в китайской советологии 1990-х гг.

In the late 1990s, CASS senior researcher Xu Kui (徐葵) retraced Brezhnev’s early life and trajectory to power, and studied his personal attributes and characters, such as “mediocrity, lack of innovation, being pleasure-seeking and vainglorious”. He argued that these explained why the Soviet Union since the 1970s had been fraught with personality cults, incorrigible bureaucracy, and economic deterioration. He commented that the era of Brezhnev was “the turning point when the Soviet Union went from prosperity to decline” (Xu, 1998: 27). In late 1998, Chen Zhihua (in his new book funded and published by CASS) re-examined Brezhnev and his time. At the beginning of the book, Chen wrote that his analysis was in accordance with the motif of Deng’s speech in 1992, which was the theoretical framework of the project (Chen, 1998: 1). The author said that the rule of Brezhnev was not only the dividing line for the USSR’s turn from strength to weakness, but also “the bane of the final demise in 1991”. In his view, “Studying Brezhnev’s period is a must in finding out reasons for the downfall” (Chen, 1998: 4-5). He finally contended that the crumbling of the USSR was not historically inevitable. The state under Brezhnev was ripe for reforms, but he slept through it, as it were. Brezhnev might have helped the Soviet Union survive, but he had missed the chance to transform the sorrow into strength in the 1970s (Chen, 1998: 24).

First, the renewed discussion on Brezhnev was a product of a more open political milieu resulting from Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 landmark speech. Accordingly, Chinese intellectual debates became, to a limited degree, more lively and animated than the dreary period after 1989. In the wake of Deng’s southern tour, the spirit of “seeking truth from facts” was re-emphasized to give a new impulse to the study of socialism (Deng, 1995d: 369-370). Although the general political climate in China was still uncertain, this modest progress had made it possible for scholars to discover more objectively the problems of the USSR, and to diversify the roots of the collapse. It provided encouragement to reinterpret and challenge the prevalent one-sidedly views that were mainly concerned with the cause of Gorbachev.

Second, unlike the post-Tiananmen official and academic analysis, which argued that the peaceful evolution engineered by the West had played a prominent role in jolting Eastern Europe and the USSR, the debate on Brezhnev and the moribund economy under his administration marked the termination of the peaceful evolution thesis, which seemed to be an exaggerated accusation that the Soviet collapse was simply a victim of Western subversion. The doctrine of peaceful evolution was more a propaganda trick than a genuine academic argument. 1 The Party hard-liners had used the threat of peaceful evolution as the justification to shut down reforms. 2 The first PRC leader Mao Zedong once said that “the fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal” (Mao, 1965: 313). Some Chinese Soviet-watchers also remarked that putting blame for the Soviet downfall on external factors such as the peaceful evolution was either “superficial” (E, 1992: 8) or “one-sided and noxious” (Chen, 1993: 53).

Since 1992 some scholars also concluded that, if the impact of Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and the peaceful evolution were rational explanations for the collapse, then it was because the inherent weakness of the Soviet socialist system that had made it become unable to resist the restoration of capitalism and democratization (Chen, 1993: 56; Lu, 1997: 14). By dispelling the assertion of peaceful evolution, Deng won the power battle over his Party rivals, ensuring a state-wide consensus to embrace his strategy of faster growth, enhanced economic reform, and greater interaction with the outside world. Similarly, the research on Brezhnev in the 1990s also signalled the return of a down-to-earth and critical approach in studying the Soviet demise, and the repudiation of seemingly non-scholarly and irrelevant official rhetoric.

Last, there was a distinct change in Chinese writings in the 1990s, from attacking Gorbachev’s liberalization to condemning Brezhnev’s conservatism. After that, Gorbachev became the lesser of two evils and was rarely seen as the cardinal source of the downfall. 6 In and after 1992, when China had come out of the shadow of Tiananmen and the Soviet demise, and was at the height of campaigning for anti-leftism, the practice of criticizing Brezhnev’s orthodoxy instead of attacking Gorbachev’s liberalization was instrumental in encouraging more innovation to keep the socialist regime vital. The discussion of Brezhnev played a role in affirming and promoting China’s market-oriented path, thereby revivifying the pace of reform that had slowed in the wake of the 1989 repression. Chinese writings intended to take advantage of the study of Brezhnev to give credit to the ethos of Deng’s 1992 speech, and to enlist support for his future vision for China in the post-communist world.