Stagnation period
Stagnation period (застой - zastoy in Russian) refers to a period in the history of the Soviet Union largely coinciding with the Communist Party chairmanship of Leonid Brezhnev between 1964 and 1982.
On the one hand, this period was characterised by domestic peace, stability and relative wealth for the population of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Soviet society became fossil and static. Post-Stalinist reforms initiated under Nikita Khrushchev were discontinued. An oversized and inefficient bureaucratic apparatus headed by a club of incompetent geriatric Party leaders became the symbol of the stagnation period, and the target of political jokes. The stagnation effectively continued under Brezhnev's successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, until the Perestroika social reform programme was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
See also
