And Putin just revived one of them - the Mother Heroine award.
I agree. Pretty much everything after the Cuban Missile Crisis was Soviet decline to one degree or another. They pulled missiles out of Cuba, Khrushchev gets deposed in 1964, they weren’t able to really subdue the Czechs during the Prague Spring in 1968, got involved in Afghanistan, etc…
In fact, the 1964-1985 period of Brezhnev’s, Andropov’s & Chernenko’s tenures as General Secretary was referred to as the “Age of Stagnation” by Mikhail Gorbachev.
And the six years after 1985 were tumultuous to say the least, with the Berlin Wall failing, German reunification becoming a thing, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union.