The Post-Khrushchev Landscape: A Leadership Adrift
The political earthquake of October 1964 that toppled Nikita Khrushchev left the Soviet Union with a collective leadership lacking clear direction in foreign policy. The new Politburo members shared a deep resentment toward Khrushchev’s brinkmanship during crises like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but they possessed no coherent alternative vision. Dmitry Polyansky’s critical report on Khrushchev’s foreign policy blunders revealed this leadership vacuum, condemning the former premier’s reckless nuclear gambits while offering only nostalgic echoes of Molotov’s hardline positions from the 1950s.
This leadership transition brought to power men like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, and Nikolai Podgorny – administrators with limited international experience who had risen through Stalin’s industrial bureaucracy. Their worldview remained frozen in the Stalinist paradigm that viewed America as an implacable imperialist foe. As Anastas Mikoyan observed, the quality of Politburo discussions noticeably declined, with dangerous “half-baked ideas” sometimes gaining traction among these provincial apparatchiks.
The Vietnam Quagmire and Missed Opportunities
The escalation of American involvement in Vietnam in 1965 became the first major foreign policy challenge for the post-Khrushchev leadership. Initially reluctant to support North Vietnam’s revolutionary ambitions, the Politburo found itself dragged into the conflict by ideological imperatives. Kosygin’s frustrating 1965 mission to Hanoi and Beijing revealed the limits of Soviet influence – neither Mao’s China nor Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam would subordinate their revolutionary agendas to Moscow’s preferences.
This period saw several critical missed opportunities for early détente. President Lyndon Johnson’s signals about strategic arms control talks fell on deaf ears in Moscow, where the Politburo remained preoccupied with demonstrating solidarity with Vietnam. The 1967 Glassboro Summit between Kosygin and Johnson might have jumpstarted arms control negotiations, but the Soviet premier’s ideological rigidity and anger over U.S. support for Israel prevented substantive progress.
The 1967 Middle East Crisis: A Watershed Moment
The Arab defeat in the June 1967 Six-Day War delivered a profound shock to the Soviet leadership. The rapid collapse of Moscow’s Arab clients exposed the fragility of Soviet influence in the developing world. More alarmingly, the war triggered an unprecedented surge of Zionist sentiment among Soviet Jews, challenging the regime’s control over its own population.
The Politburo’s response – severing relations with Israel and doubling down on support for radical Arab regimes – demonstrated how ideological reflexes continued to override pragmatic foreign policy considerations. This pattern would repeat throughout the late 1960s as Soviet leaders found themselves trapped by their own revolutionary rhetoric, pouring resources into client states that often acted against Moscow’s interests.
Brezhnev’s Unexpected Transformation
Against this backdrop, Leonid Brezhnev’s emergence as a champion of détente surprised both contemporaries and historians. The mediocre party functionary, once described by a colleague as someone who “would never get carried away,” gradually developed a personal commitment to preventing nuclear war rooted in his traumatic World War II experiences.
Brezhnev’s famous “sermon on the mount” anecdote – his father’s fantasy about hanging Hitler from the Eiffel Tower atop Everest – became a touchstone for his foreign policy outlook. Unlike his Politburo colleagues who viewed military might as an end in itself, Brezhnev came to see arms buildup as a means to achieve negotiated peace with the West.
The Road to Moscow: Building Consensus for Détente
Brezhnev’s path to the 1972 Moscow Summit required careful political maneuvering. By 1968, he had consolidated control over party machinery and begun sidelining hardliners like Alexander Shelepin. Crucially, he cultivated a cadre of relatively open-minded foreign policy experts including Georgy Arbatov and Anatoly Chernyaev who provided intellectual ballast for his détente initiatives.
The Soviet military-industrial complex, led by Brezhnev’s old friends Dmitry Ustinov and Andrei Grechko, remained skeptical of arms control but supported the massive strategic weapons buildup that gave Moscow negotiating leverage. Between 1965-1968, the USSR deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles at an astonishing rate – nearly 300 new silos annually – achieving rough nuclear parity with the United States.
The 1972 Summit: Triumph and Illusion
The May 1972 Moscow Summit marked the apogee of Brezhnev’s political career and Soviet international prestige during the Cold War. The signing of the SALT I agreements, the ABM Treaty, and the “Basic Principles of U.S.-Soviet Relations” represented a personal triumph for the Soviet leader and seemed to herald a new era of superpower cooperation.
The summit’s domestic impact was profound. Anti-American propaganda virtually disappeared from Soviet media, and jamming of Western radio broadcasts ceased temporarily. Ordinary citizens could suddenly access American popular culture through legal channels for the first time in decades. As Chernyaev enthusiastically noted, it seemed like “the beginning of a convergence era” between communism and capitalism.
The Limits of Détente: Structural Constraints
However, the foundations of Brezhnev’s détente were inherently unstable. The Soviet leader’s romantic belief in personal diplomacy with Western leaders overlooked fundamental ideological and geopolitical conflicts. The Politburo’s continued commitment to massive arms expenditures and support for revolutionary movements in the Third World undermined the spirit of cooperation.
Moreover, Brezhnev’s vision remained constrained by the Soviet system’s inherent contradictions. As Isaiah Berlin might have observed, the Soviet leader was ultimately a “hedgehog” who knew one big truth (avoid nuclear war) rather than a “fox” who understood the complex realities of international politics. His emotional commitment to peace coexisted uneasily with his regime’s ideological hostility toward the West and its addiction to military power.
Legacy: Brezhnev’s Paradoxical Place in History
Historians continue to debate Brezhnev’s complex legacy. Critics emphasize the stagnation of his later years and the ultimate failure of détente. Supporters argue that his efforts created essential guardrails during the most dangerous phase of the Cold War and established patterns of superpower dialogue that would eventually help end the conflict.
What remains undeniable is Brezhnev’s paradoxical role as both architect of the Soviet military buildup and sincere seeker of peace. His personal limitations – mediocre intellect, vanity, and poor health – ironically made him more open to pragmatic cooperation with the West than ideologically rigid colleagues like Suslov or Shelepin might have been. In this sense, as Egon Bahr observed, Brezhnev became a necessary transitional figure between Stalinist confrontation and Gorbachev’s “new thinking.”
The story of Soviet-American détente under Brezhnev ultimately reveals how personality, historical contingency, and structural factors intersected to produce one of the Cold War’s most surprising and consequential turning points. It stands as a reminder that even in rigid authoritarian systems, individual agency and unexpected personal transformations can shape the course of history.