/marx/ - Marxism

Gorby was Andropov's protégé. The latter called on Soviet economists to learn from the more market-oriented economies of Eastern Europe such as Hungary. Had Andropov lived it's unlikely he would have carried out Glasnost, but there would have been some scaled-down version of Perestroika.

Chernenko's politics were pretty much identical to Brezhnev's.

The economic problems the country was facing at the time, plus the fact that the Politburo had successfully elected two old sickly men who died within a relatively short time of each other, is what made both "reformers" and "hardliners" alike decide upon the young Gorbachev to succeed Chernenko. As you might imagine all the "hardliners" ended up regretting their decision over the next three (let alone subsequent) years.

>>2759

Brezhnev explicitly upheld the theses of the 20th and 22nd CPSU Congresses, including the attacks on Stalin, Khrushchev's conception of peaceful coexistence, the peaceful parliamentary transition to socialism (which the Chilean CP, with Brezhnev's approval, tried out so disastrously in that country), the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR as having "fulfilled its historical mission" and having given way to the "state of the whole people" (i.e. the state loses its class character under socialism), etc.

It was under Brezhnev that the Kosygin "reforms" of 1965 and other measures to consolidate the state-capitalist system were undertaken. Brezhnev's foreign policy was an anti-Marxist, opportunist and social-imperialist one. He was superficially more "hardline" than Khrushchev on certain issues, such as partially rehabilitating Stalin's role during WWII and calling for "anti-imperialist unity" (i.e. China, Albania, Cuba and Vietnam to give up any differences they had with the USSR on important questions of principle) but anti-revisionists back then correctly pointed out that Brezhnev's leadership constituted "Khrushchevism without Khrushchev."