What was Brezhnevs legacy?
I suggest we start with Ernest Gellners observation that, when it still existed, The Soviet Union was a moral order. In fact, says Gellner, it was a most marvelous specimen of [such. Its] answers formed a system which was endowed with coherence and mystery [that] held firm until it was willfully broken from within by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress.21 I agree. Gellner then asked: Why did Bolshevism collapse in a uniquely ignominious way? Being like a religion in so many ways, unlike other religions it had no staying power. There must be an explanation for the remarkable incapacity of this faith to retain any loyalty.22 Gellners answer was that Marxism ensured the inclusion of productive activities into the sphere of the sacred which meant that a Marxist society is left with no humdrum sphere of the profane into which to escape during periods of diminished zeal and enthusiasm.23 Almost, not quite. Gellner was right to argue that the vitality of a Leninist regime depend
