• 3) Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982) emerged with a team of party leaders like Krushchev had. Under his leadership the government of the U.S.S.R. turned from a personal dictatorship into an oligarchy (collective rule of a privileged minority). This period of the Soviet-American relationship was characterized as the age of détente or limited phase of peaceful cooperation. "An appropriate symbol of détente was the Antiballistic Missiles (ABM) Treaty in 1972. Despite some lessening of tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the Soviet Union and the United States had continued to expand their nuclear arsenals.  In the 1960s, both nations sought to extend the destructive power of their missiles by arming them with multiple warheads.  By 1970, Americans had developed the capacity to arm their intercontinental ballistic missles (ICBMs) with 'multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles' (MIRVs) that enabled one missile to hit ten different targets. The Soviet Union soon followed suit. Between 1968 and 1972, both sides had also developed antiballistic missiles (ABMs), whose purpose was to hit and destroy incoming missiles.  In the 1972 ABM Treaty, the two nations agreed to limit their antiballistic missile systems" (Spiel.4^th Ed. 880).
• Some openness allowed access to Western styles of music and dress for young people; public debate opened to more issues of state policy; there was more latitude in artistic expression; and there was a revival of interest in religion). Bur repression was still a reality in the Soviet Union:  (1) mental hospitals were used for critics of regime; (2) Andrei Sakharov was exiled from Moscow and placed under house arrest (this would end in 1986 and in 1989 he took a seat in the new Soviet legislature only to die at the end of 1989.); (3) adamant critics, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn were expelled or allowed to emigrate.
• "Two problems bedeviled the Soviet economy.  The government's insistence on vigorous central planning led to a huge, complex bureaucracy that discouraged efficiency and reduced productivity. Moreover, the Soviet system, based on guaranteed employment and a lack of incentives, bred apathy, complacency, absenteeism, and drunkenness. . . .

• conditions all gave impetus to a decline in morale and a growing perception that the system was floundering” (Spiel.4^th Ed. 882).
• Brezhnev's immediate successors, chosen by agreement among top party officials, were old men who survived in office only for a short time (Andropov, Cernenko).

Eastern Europe

      Puppet regimes were installed in Eastern Europe by the Soviets who ruled by:         

• (policies of Eastern block countries to control their populations)
•     1) leveling the formerly privileged classes
•     2) curtailing or abolishing private enterprise
•     3) implementing hasty plans for industrialization and the collectivization  of agriculture
•     4) repressing religion and the churches
•     5) stamping out political liberty and free speech 
• [exceptions = Albania, Yugoslavia, and Rumania that had their own indigenous styles of communism] 

• Resistance in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia
•       Krushchev's attack on Stalin in 1956 was crucial.  "It set off a political earthquake throughout the bloc, discrediting Stalinists and encouraging moderates in the communist parties, reviving cautious discussion among intellectuals, and even arousing visions of national self-determination (Perry 4th ed.,842)."
•       *1st in Poland, the largest and most troublesome of the satellite countries, in 1956 where the Soviets eased control in return for a Polish pledge of continued loyalty to the Soviet Union.
•       *An uprising in Budapest led to Soviet troop withdrawal only to have the Red army re-enter the country and crush all opposition when the moderate Communist government called for Western-style political democracy and Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. But Hungary was allowed to grant its citizens considerable opportunity to private enterprise with a relaxation and decentralization of planning.
•       *When a group of Czech Communists, led by Alexander Dubcek sought to liberalize their regime to include non-Communists, to allow greater freedom of speech, and to rid the economy of frigidities, on August 21, 1968, Czechoslovakia was occupied by Warsaw Pact troops from East Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union.  Moral outrage was expressed around the world.