What was peak Soviet? Part II

 

My last post offered my reasons for believing that "peak Soviet" was on or about 1959.

This offers an angle to a question: how do empires fall?

How did that empire get from 1959 to 1991? 

What did NOT happen was a simple diagonal line decline. What did happen was a decline that was slow ... then still slow ... then again slow ... but then very fast. 

Several things happened in the decade 1959 - '69 that indicated the empire had reached a limit, but most of these developments did not seem at all like omens of impending collapse. 

There was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Khrushchev did get something for his trouble: the US did through back channels agree to withdraw missiles from Turkey. But the whole thing looked like Nikita K. had pushed too hard and had been forced to back down: never a good look for an Emperor. 

The year 1963 saw a very bad harvest in the grain-bearing parts of the country, resulting in breadlines, and in the face-losing decision to expend some of the country's hard currency to buy wheat from the west.    

In 1964, in part due to Cuba, in greater part due to the grain issue, Khrushchev was kicked out of his positions and replaced by Brezhnev. This was relatively peaceful, but it still had the look of a coup in an under-developed country, not normal processes of political rivalry and succession.

In 1965, the government announced what it called the Kosygin reforms. These essentially unraveled the preceding economic reform efforts -- Khrushchev had to some extent decentralized the process of economic planning, mitigating the top-heavy quality of Stalinistic central planning.  Brezhnev and Kosygn reversed this. Top-heaviness it would be!

You may get the idea. None of these was by itself all that big a deal -- none seemed a portent of disaster and demise.  Even the Apollo flights, (which gave us the lovely image I have used above) though they tended to relegate the memories of the glorious Sputnik launches to the history books, could not have seemed all that horrible. But that IS how empires meet their demise. Not in a gradual process, really, certainly not in a linear one, but by stagnation, then a slow build-up of troubles, then ... all at once ... apocalypse.