This society-wide climax of deteriorating work attitudes seems to have set in during the late 1960s and thus corresponds with the narrative of stagnation (
zastoi).
The situation is therefore very close to the Brezhnevist
zastoi (literally, "stagnation"), the last period of Soviet history when high oil prices resulted in a lack of economic dynamism in the Soviet Union.
Recent travelers to Moscow and many Russia watchers have compared Putin to the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, whose name is synonymous with
zastoi, or stagnation.
(18) Medvedev, meanwhile, was still in his early twenties during perestroika andglasnost, and his values appear to be much more those of glasnost rather than the Brezhnev-era
zastoi (stagnation) that shaped Putin.
His axioms and methods provided useful clues about the cause of the Soviet Union's collapse, but were incomplete because his founding 'reliability and usable' assumptions excluded a host of plausible explanations consistent with Mikhail Gorbachev's claim that the Soviet economy and living standard had succumbed to '
zastoi,' (stagnation) by 1980 (Aganbegyan, 1988; Rosefielde, 1988).
That privacy is fashioned during a very Soviet decade, the seventies'
zastoi or "stagnation" of Brezhnev's term in office.
"It's the new
zastoi [stagnation]," a Russian friend notes, referring to the shorthand term used to describe Leonid Brezhnev's long rule from the mid-1960s to 1982.
Relying on memoirs by, and interviews he conducted with, a few dozen dramatis personae, he takes the reader on an excursion through the ups and downs of Soviet print journalism as practiced from the Thaw years through
zastoi and perestroika, before shifting in the second part of the book to what one of his heroes, Aleksandr Iakovlev (Alexander Yakovlev), called "the television whirlpool" of the post-Soviet decades (176).