In recent scholarship, Soviet society during the long reign (1964–1982) of Leonid Brezhnev has been transformed into something that previous generations of Sovietologists could scarcely have imagined—a happening place. Decidedly postrevolutionary in outlook, acquisitive at its core, riven with corruption and unofficial economies that provided everything from narcotics to rock-and-roll records, yet suffused with the familiar iconography, exhortations, and eschatology of Marxism-Leninism, Soviet society under Brezhnev defies easy categorization. That “stagnation” is a mostly inadequate description of its complexity is the central premise that Dina Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky put forth in their introduction to the anthology Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange.
Even though Fainberg and Kalinovsky claim that the idea of a Brezhnev-era stagnation is “by now well-established” (p. vii), few historians are likely to bicker with their revisionism. They show that despite a few references to “stagnation”—particularly on the economic front—in private...