The 1970s was a time of rapid development in the Soviet Union with hydro power stations mushrooming all over Siberia and Central Asia and nuclear energy progressing at an equally rapid pace. New industrial giants were springing up, including metal-working combines and car and machine-building plants.

The Baikal-Amur Railway was a major construction project of the second half of the 1970s. More than 1000 kilometers of rail track were laid through permafrost and highly seismic areas from Siberia to the Far East. The scope of the construction was massive beyond description - the railway has 8 tunnels, 142 bridges, and more than 200 stations. Over 60 settlements were built along the track.

It was no wonder that romantically-minded young people responded with readiness to the appeal from the Communist Party and the Young Communist League to build the railway. It was an endurance test in a challenging job that was well-paid and highly prestigious.

The newspapers published daily interviews, and radio and television carried daily news and reports about the BAM builders, who were in the limelight of public attention and were treated as heroes. Poets wrote verses in their honor and composers songs. The lyrics told of the heroic builders blazing the trail through the impassable taiga to make way for trains and of the joys and hardships in the harsh conditions of Siberia and the Far East.

Historian Leonid Katzva wrote: “The project to build the Baikal-Amur Railway pursued strategic rather than economic purposes - it was to run parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway, which ran in dangerous proximity to the border with China.”

Nowadays BAM and the surrounding areas attract business interests. One of the projects envisions connecting the mainland with Sakhalin Island in the Pacific, making the Baikal-Amur Railway the shortest route to carry transit cargoes from Japan to Europe. Such a costly project, however, is unlikely to be implemented within the next ten years.

In the 1970s, the country continued to explore outer space. The 2-month-long flight of Pyotr Klimuk and Vitaly Sevastianov aboard the Salyut-4 orbital station confirmed yet again that orbital research stations with rotating crew are crucial to promoting the scientific study of the universe and the Earth. Vitaly Sevastianov had this to say about the flight: “We’re taking the first steps to work in outer space and we were actually exploring outer space. And these steps, though the very first in terms of the future, are as important as the very first steps of a child.”

The 1970s saw intensive development of vast oil and gas reserves that had been discovered in Western Siberia in 1964.

Historian Leonid Katzva commented: “Oil and gas became a major Soviet commodity to be sold abroad. The rise in world oil prices from the second half of the 1970s brought more currency revenues into the public coffers, providing an opportunity to buy equipment, consumer goods, and food on the foreign markets. The inefficient Soviet economy was supported by oil dollars.”

Today, news media criticize Brezhnev’s leadership for weakening the state. The government did nothing to upgrade domestic industry and science. Historian Leonid Katzva wrote of the negative trends that pervaded the Soviet economy despite the achievements: “Capital productivity dropped, the expenditure on raw materials and energy increased, and the gap in product quality and technology level as compared to developed countries widened. Any attempts to implant market regulations broke against fierce resistance from ministry officials and conservative party ideologists. Though party resolutions repeatedly called for intensification of the economy, production grew more and more costly.”

The party seemed to acknowledge the flaws. Leonid Brezhnev in his report to the 26th Congress of the CPSU stated: “With due regard for the historical achievements of the Soviet people, the CPSU’s Central Committee is fully aware of the difficulties, the drawbacks, and the unresolved problems. Ministries and enterprises have yet to fulfill their plans, and there are still disproportions in the economy. The reasons include the influence of situational circumstances, flaws in planning and management, softness from a number of party structures and leaders, breaches of discipline.”

But the major reason was the inertia of those years and a tradition that valued quantity over quality. The CPSU Central Committee’s plenary sessions addressed this matter at length and passed specific resolutions: “Now it is time to remove the obstacles to economic growth in a more radical way on the basis of accumulated experience. To this end, we have to learn to work with maximum efficiency, which is not easy. But the Communists are persevering and ambitious and won’t drive off the track.”

However, the intention to work efficiently failed to materialize. And still, there were obvious positive shifts in the social development of the country.

The 1970s witnessed an impressive growth of the population in Soviet Union’s towns, coupled by a boost in living standards. The majority of citizens were improving their housing conditions at the expense of the state. Flats were provided to workers for free. Some well-to-do citizens joined housing associations and were able to buy flats at their own expense. More people were acquiring furniture, household appliances, and other consumer products.

However, the acquisition of all these goods was not easy. The reasons for the difficulties, according to historians Sokolov and Tyazhelnikov, were that the authors of all plans pertaining to the development of the economy - “Gosplan”, or Sate Plan - were unable to distribute resources correctly and efficiently. At a time when the technological revolution was spreading like wildfire all over the world, spawning new branches of the economy that aspired to a dominating position, the U.S.S.R. continued to invest in heavy industry. Investments outpaced industrial growth. This negatively impacted the economy and resulted in the shortage of goods.

Historian Leonid Katzva remarked in his writings: “In order to buy furniture, a washing machine, a fridge, not to mention a car, one had to subscribe to a waiting list in a store, or more often at a plant, and be ready to wait for several months or even years. At the same time, if one somehow fell on the wrong side of the authorities, one could just as easily lose one’s place on the list.”

Domestic light industry was cramped with numerous departmental instructions, and as such was unwieldy. It was slow in responding to changes in demand and offered the public goods that were outdated. For a majority of soviet people the acquisition of fashionable and top-quality clothes and footwear was a laborsome task. If imported shoes or clothes appeared in some department store, a huge line would form quickly.

Many food products and even books also were in short supply. As for printed matter, literature was coming off the press in vast editions, yet most of the counters were inundated with useless propagandist rubbish, while the public was finding it increasingly difficult to obtain ordinary books.

A lack of consumer goods forced people to put their savings in the state savings bank. By the end of the 1970s the people’s deposits there grew three times faster than the sale of consumer goods.

People also became used to stashing away at home a large part of their savings. This was for the most part money that the owners were prepared to spend the moment the goods they needed fell into their line of vision.

According to historian Leonid Katzva, “a shortage of goods sparked a wild demand for them, a fact that many retailers and ‘black market’ dealers made clever use of. Official propaganda inculcated contempt for these profiteers; however few of the rank-and-file citizens could do without their services. So-called spivs emerged in the youth environment. They didn’t see anything wrong in making a fast profit through the resale of, say, trendy jeans brought from abroad or bought at the Beriozka chain of currency stores. Most people had no access to the latter, since people didn’t have any foreign currency.”

These conditions led to the flourishing of the black market that was detrimental to the state. There emerged underground industrial facilities that used raw materials stolen from state enterprises. Corruption took on terrifying proportions. The flourishing of the black economy, in the words of economist Tatiana Grigorova, had substantial ramifications for the country. “The manageability of the economy fell to a new low; there was an increased differentiation in living standards; morals plummeted since there was a growing conviction that one can escape with anything, and that one can exist quite happily outside the boundaries of official economy.”

The moral repercussions of the shadow economy were deplorable. The shortage of goods and low earnings forced morally unstable people to acquire what they needed by bribes or simply by stealing. These people grabbed all they could lay their hands on at enterprises and government offices.

As for the upper echelons of power, they were chiefly far removed from the everyday problems plaguing the major part of the population. Historian Oleg Platonov compared the elite of the society at the time with ‘a secret order isolated from the people’. Inside this unique order there was a hierarchy and rigid discipline. The historian quoted in one of his books the words of former prime minister of the U.S.S.R. Nikolai Ryzhkov, who passed through this ‘order’ and described the three steps of its hierarchy. “At the top were members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. At the middle stage candidates for membership in the Central Committee of the CPSU. At the third level the Secretaries of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Everything pertaining to them was clearly defined: who sits alongside whom in different presidiums, who follows whom when ascending the Mausoleum rostrum, who conducts which meetings, and who has the right to be stamped on which photograph. Not to mention the fact what country residence, or ‘dacha’ they get, how many bodyguards, and what make of car they drive in.”

Oleg Platonov noted that back in 1966 the political leadership of the country by special decree of the Politburo established for themselves a 7-hour work day and two vacations a year lasting 2.5 months. There emerged whole blocks of houses, separated from the rest of the residential buildings, where families of top and medium rank party and functionaries lived.

There gradually emerged an elite environment providing sanctuary for the top-echelon party members and state functionaries and their families. They lived surrounded by luxury, concerned entirely with their own well-being and isolated from the rest of the country and its national interests.

It is hardly surprising that these conditions gradually corroded both the upper crust and the Soviet society in general.