Developed Socialism

The concept

In official usage, developed socialism was a stage within the socialist mode of production, the first phase of the communist formation: a full, established socialism from which the gradual transition to communism begins. The doctrine held that a mature socialist society rests on highly developed productive forces, and that the growing of the dictatorship of the proletariat into a socialist state of all the people proceeded through the convergence of socialist forms of property and the blurring of the distinctions between town and country and mental and physical labour. These claims are the doctrine's self-description, not verified outcomes. Brezhnev proclaimed the building of a developed socialist society in the USSR in his report of 7 November 1967 on the fiftieth anniversary of October; the November 1967 formulation described a society governed by the principle from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.

History

The term's prehistory lies in the 1960 Moscow statement of communist and workers' parties, which held that some socialist countries had entered a period of building a developed socialist society. The formulation was reused in Brezhnev's speeches of the mid-to-late 1960s and was given prominence first in relation to the Eastern European states, not the USSR. The East German leadership under Walter Ulbricht pressed for postponing the construction of communism (communications to Brezhnev of September 1966 and September 1967); the GDR was the first bloc country to proclaim the building of developed socialism and adopted the first constitution of developed socialism in April 1968. That is a record of intra-bloc agency, not only Soviet imposition.

The first Soviet publication carrying the finally adopted name was F. M. Burlatsky's Pravda article of 21 December 1966, On the Building of a Developed Socialist Society. The documents of the 23rd Party Congress of March-April 1966 used the terms mature socialism and the full building of socialism, and Richard Kosolapov, editor-in-chief of Kommunist (1976-1986) and twice a full member of the CPSU Central Committee, produced standard reference works with Socialism: Questions of Theory (1975, 2nd ed. 1979) and Developed Socialism: Theory and Practice (1982). Leading Soviet philosophers and social scientists, among them A. P. Butenko, G. E. Glezerman, R. I. Kosolapov, P. N. Fedoseyev and G. Kh. Shakhnazarov, worked from the Academy of Social Sciences and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee, and Politburo member and chief party ideologist M. A. Suslov also played a role.

The 24th Party Congress (March-April 1971) entrenched the new ideological norm officially and preparation of a new party program began. Brezhnev's Central Committee report of 24 May 1977 on the draft constitution, published in Pravda on 5 June 1977, stated that a developed socialist society had been created in the USSR and that the state was a state of all the people, and became a founding document of the mature-stage claim. The concept began to be questioned after Brezhnev's death in 1982: Andropov indicated the USSR had reached only the beginning of a long historical stage of developed socialism, Andropov and Chernenko continued to treat it as an important theoretical concept through 1982-1984, and Gorbachev himself still supported it in December 1984. After Gorbachev replaced Chernenko, emphasis declined sharply: he did not mention the term in his March 1985 Central Committee speech or in his late-October 1985 speech presenting the draft party program. The CPSU program adopted by the 27th Congress in 1986 said only that the USSR had entered the stage of developed socialism in 1961, a compromise between those who wanted to discard the concept and those who wanted to expand it. After the 27th Congress Soviet sources continued to speak of developed socialism while increasingly shifting emphasis to a developing socialism.

Distinctions and assessments

In official usage developed socialism could be conflated with real socialism, and the Russian literature also gives real socialism as the Soviet official name for the period. Real socialism was a Brezhnev-era Eastern Bloc catchphrase referring to the Soviet-type planned economy of the time, with the argument from the 1960s on that policies represented what was feasible given productivity levels, and it was also picked up critically by dissidents such as Rudolf Bahro, so official euphemism and dissident critical use should be distinguished rather than merged. The concept underpinned anti-Western propaganda and was deployed against Maoist China: Soviet ideologues denounced the Maoist utopian leftist radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, opposing it to Soviet real socialism.

Most postulates of the doctrine had few links to reality; claims of a technological revolution looked absurd against the widening economic gap with the West in civil goods, and the thesis of flourishing socialist democracy was contradicted by harsh persecution of dissidents. Assessments range from an ideological trick serving to justify the new regime, and a laughing stock among liberal intellectuals, to a monument to the period many Russians later recalled as their happiest. The Russian article frames the notion as arising from the need for a positive explanation of a deep systemic economic, political and ideological crisis, and some researchers treat it as an ideological cliche or euphemism; such judgements are attributed to those sources rather than asserted here. Gorbachev charged that the concept became a facade of self-satisfaction concealing real problems of Soviet society, while orthodox Marxists saw the very introduction of the notion as a deviation from Marxist-Leninist principles.

Disputed dating

Sources disagree on when the stage was reached and when the name came into official use. The Russian article dates official use of the name to 1964 (in the narrow sense 1966-1967) through 1985 as the official designation of the period, replacing the 1959-1964 formula period of the extensive construction of communism, and calls it an intermediate phase between the complete victory of socialism and communism. English reference literature states that developed socialism is, in CPSU historiography, the stage of the socialist mode of production that the USSR claimed to have reached in 1961. This entry's start year of 1967 corresponds to Brezhnev's proclamation of 7 November 1967; other defensible points are the Burlatsky article of December 1966 and the 24th Congress of 1971. The end year of 1986 marks the 27th Congress program that demoted the doctrine to a compromise formula, not a clean termination. The Brezhnev period was known in Soviet ideology as the period of developed socialism, while in the perestroika and glasnost years of the late 1980s and early 1990s the same historical period received another name, the period of stagnation.