The man known to history as Leonid
Brezhnev was born on the 19th of December 1906 in the town of Kamenskoye in
Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His father was Ilya Brezhnev, a factory worker
who moved to Kamenskoye in 1894 from a village in the Kursk region in southwestern
Russia. At the time of Leonid’s birth, Kamenskoye would have had a population of around
50,000 people, and the local economy was dominated by an ironworks and railway track factory operated
by the South Russia Company. The rapid growth in the town’s population during Brezhnev’s childhood
reflected the fast-paced industrialisation of the imperial Russian economy which began in the
late 19th century. Ilya started working at the rolling mill factory, part of the ironworks,
in 1900, where working conditions were poor. Ilya worked twelve hours each day, but despite the
increasing influence of socialist ideas among workers in Russian factories demanding better
pay and conditions, he was not particularly interested in revolution and preferred to
climb the social ladder through hard work. Leonid’s mother Natalia Mazolova
was the daughter of Denis Mazolov, who had moved to Kamenskoye from Yenakiyevo
near the city of Yuzovka, modern-day Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Accordingly, Leonid
Brezhnev was half-Russian and half-Ukrainian, resulting in his ethnicity being given as
Ukrainian in some documents, and Russian in others. Natalia Brezhneva met her husband Ilya
while she was bringing lunch to her father at the rolling mill where the two men worked, and
after their marriage in 1901, the couple had four children. Their first child, a daughter named
Feoktista, was born in 1905 but died immediately. The birth of Leonid in 1906 was followed by
daughter Vera in 1910 and son Yakov in 1912. Leonid Brezhnev was born in a single room rented
by his parents and maternal grandparents from a furnace master in Kamenskoye, and in 1910 the
family moved into their own rented flat. With Ilya away at work for most of the day, Natalia
managed the household. During his childhood Leonid was an active boy who enjoyed swimming in
the river Dnieper and playing football, which at the time was considered a working-class sport.
Details of Brezhnev’s early education are limited, but in 1915 he enrolled in the local grammar
school where he studied Latin, German, French, Russian literature, history, biology, chemistry,
physics, mathematics, geography, and art. Leonid’s parents hoped that he would become
an engineer and a respected member of the middle class, but the Russian Revolution of 1917
disrupted the comfortable existence the Brezhnevs had aspired to. Since 1914, the Russian Empire had
been fighting against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
After some early setbacks, by 1916 the Russian army was performing more effectively on the field,
but the imperial government struggled to deal with the economic crisis that was engulfing the country
as prices of food and fuel skyrocketed in the cities. A series of workers’ demonstrations
in early March 1917 forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate from the throne, and political power
in the capital of Petrograd was inherited by the liberal Provisional Government and the socialist
Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. After a failed military offensive in the
summer, the Provisional Government struggled to assert its authority and faced pressure from both
left and right. This period saw an increase in support for Vladimir Lenin’s communist Bolshevik
Party. The Bolsheviks were Marxists who supported a workers’ revolution to overthrow the government
and build socialism through a communist government by taking control of the economy for the benefit
of the workers while eliminating social divisions. After building socialism, the Marxists believed
that the state could gradually disappear, leading to a society which valued social equality
and individual freedom. In the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the only major
political party to demand an end to the war, and in early November the Bolsheviks seized
power on behalf, in their view, of the people, in what was known as the October Revolution,
since Imperial Russia continued to use the Julian Calendar which was twelve days behind
the Gregorian Calendar. Soon after taking power, the Bolsheviks changed their official party name
to the Communist Party and moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, agreeing to hand over large parts of the
former empire including Belarus and Ukraine. In June 1917 the Ukrainian People’s Republic
declared independence from Russia, but by the end of the year the Bolsheviks
took over the government in Kiev, sacking Kamenskoye in the process. Over the
next three years the town changed hands over twenty times as competing factions vied for
control of Ukraine in the Russian Civil War. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Germans
established a right-wing government known as the Hetmanate until Germany’s defeat in the First
World War in November 1918. In 1919 Kamenskoye was occupied in turn by the Kuban Cossacks, General
Anton Denikin of the anti-Bolshevik White army, and the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno’s
Green army, before the Bolshevik Red Army finally established control. Under the Bolsheviks
the school Leonid attended was renamed the First Workers’ School, and many of his former teachers
lost their lives during the constant political upheavals. After surviving the typhus epidemic
in early 1921, the fourteen-year-old Brezhnev left school that summer. The factory in Kamenskoye
had stopped production in 1919, and in 1921 Ilya Brezhnev decided to take his family back to his
native village near Kursk. For the next two years Leonid may have worked as a porter to help his
family survive. During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks seized control of the rural economy
and requisitioned grain to feed its army and the cities, but in 1922 Lenin introduced his New
Economic Policy which reinstated a limited market economy in the countryside, improving economic
conditions in the country. That same year, the socialist republics of Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus, and the Caucasian states of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, formed the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union. In 1923 Brezhnev enrolled in the Technical College
of Land Management in Kursk to study agriculture. He later claimed to an aide that he financed
his studies by working as an extra at the local theatre, where he developed a talent for acting
and an interest in poetry. His favourite poet was Sergei Yesenin, and he also attended a reading
by the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in Kursk. Brezhnev wrote revolutionary poetry
of his own and in 1923 he joined the Komsomol, the Bolshevik youth organisation. His support
for the Bolsheviks seems to have been rooted in his desire for social advancement, and he
was not part of the wave of Komsomol members who joined the party on Lenin’s death in
1924. In 1925 he met Viktoria Denisova, a student at the Technical College of Medicine,
whom he married in March 1928. The couple had two children, a daughter named Galina
in 1929, and a son Yuri born in 1933. Brezhnev graduated from college in May 1927 and
became a land manager in Kursk oblast or province, but after a year he and his new wife moved
to the Urals near the city of Sverdlovsk, the former and future Ekaterinburg. The start
of Brezhnev’s career coincided with radical changes in agricultural policy introduced by
the Communist Party leadership in Moscow. The Communist Party had agreed to a system of
collective leadership after Lenin’s death, but the leaders disagreed about whether to
keep the New Economic Policy or to impose state control over agriculture and continue the
work of building a true communist state. By 1927, General Secretary Joseph Stalin and his ally
Nikolai Bukharin had outmanoeuvred their rivals by supporting the New Economic Policy. By
controlling the Communist Party apparatus, Stalin had become the most powerful leader
in the Soviet Union. In December 1927, Stalin abruptly changed course and abolished the
New Economic Policy by launching his campaign to collectivise Soviet agriculture. Alongside
industrialisation, agricultural collectivisation formed a key part of the First Five Year
Plan introduced by Stalin in October 1928. Working in the land registry, Brezhnev
was involved in surveying and mapping the land before eliminating the boundaries between
individual strips of land and gathering them into agricultural collectives. The reorganisation
of the Soviet agricultural economy provoked opposition from farmers, especially those
with larger plots of land, known as kulaks, who were offered poor quality land often on
the edge of fields as compensation. Stalin denounced anyone who opposed collectivisation as
a kulak and ordered the secret police to carry out collectivisation by force, seizing grain and
deporting peasants who resisted. As he carried out his duties, Brezhnev’s political responsibilities
increased and on the 9th of October 1929 he joined the Communist Party as a full member. In
February 1930, he was promoted to chair the city of Sverdlovsk’s land management department, and
after spending three years in the fields, he was now behind a desk arbitrating disputes between the
remaining individual farmers and the collective farms. In November 1929 Stalin announced a push
for total collectivisation, but four months later he reversed course. Amidst the confusion and
the violence of the dekulakisation campaign, Brezhnev left his post as head of the Sverdlovsk
land registry after only six months in the role. In September 1930 Brezhnev moved to Moscow to
study at the Kalinin Institute of Agricultural Machinery but abandoned his studies after two
months and returned to his parents’ house in Kamenskoye. By 1931, he was working at the
ironworks, now renamed in honour of the late Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish founder of the
Soviet secret police who helped to reopen the closed factory in 1925. After finishing
work at the factory Brezhnev spent the evenings studying at the affiliated
Arsenichev Institute of Metallurgy, becoming secretary of the institute’s party
organisation by March 1932. He was involved in the party’s campaign to requisition grain from
Ukrainian peasants resisting collectivisation, leading to famine in Ukraine itself. The
following March he became director of the Workers’ Faculty, an educational institution
that prepared workers’ for higher education, and in January 1935 he graduated from the
Arsenichev Institute as a Thermal Power Engineer. After less than a year working as an
engineer in the Dzerzhinsky plant, in October 1935 Brezhnev was drafted into the army
and spent a year in Chita in Siberia, where he soon became the political head of a tank division.
By the time he returned home in November 1936, the city was renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk in honour
of Dzerzhinsky and the Dnieper River. In Moscow, Stalin was beginning his Great Purge led by
the secret police, now known as the NKVD, eliminating his former leadership rivals from
the 1920s whom he accused of being traitors to the communist cause. As Stalin warned
against internal enemies within the party, Brezhnev was appointed director of the
Dneprodzerzhinsk Technical College of Metallurgy. Though Brezhnev expected to continue his career
in industry and wasn’t an enthusiastic communist, the purges offered young party officials the
opportunity to quickly rise through the ranks, while subjecting them to the risk of being purged
themselves. By 1937 the purges had shifted to target Ukraine, and of the 15,000 employees in the
Dzerzhinsky metalworks over 700 were shot. While a succession of city party leaders were removed
and shot in 1937, Brezhnev was unscathed and became deputy chairman of the Dneprodzerzhinsk’s
city soviet, making him deputy mayor responsible for construction and public works. As the
arrests, expulsions, and executions continued, Brezhnev did not have any decision-making
responsibility, but nevertheless he voted to condemn officials who had been his benefactors
and friends to ensure his own survival. In January 1938 Stalin’s ally Nikita Khrushchev
was appointed First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and served in the post for
over a decade. A new clique of Ukrainian party leaders emerged under Khrushchev’s
protection, and in May 1938 Brezhnev moved to the provincial capital of Dnepropetrovsk,
now known by its Ukrainian name of Dnipro, where he would lead the department
of trade. The following February, Brezhnev was made propaganda secretary, owing
his promotion to Konstantin Grushevoy, a college friend from the Metallurgical Institute who had
become deputy head of the oblast party. Brezhnev managed a team of eighty propagandists supporting
Stalin’s campaign to eliminate the remnants of Ukrainian nationalism and promote the use of
the Russian language in schools and newspapers. The department’s work also involved spreading the
party’s message on foreign affairs. For most of 1939, it seemed that the Soviet Union was about
to go to war with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and Brezhnev dutifully denounced Hitler.
In late August 1939, after the Nazis and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact before
invading Poland to start the Second World War, Brezhnev’s propaganda machine immediately
reversed course and began to praise the German leader. Although Stalin had made a deal with
Hitler, he believed that it would only delay war between the Soviet Union and Germany, and
aimed to rebuild the Soviet Union’s military capacity so that it could compete with Germany
on equal terms. In September 1940 Brezhnev was promoted to third secretary of the oblast party
committee and was given responsibility for armaments. Dnepropetrovsk oblast produced
sixteen per cent of the country’s steel, and it was Brezhnev’s job to adapt
the factories for military production. On the 22nd of June 1941, Hitler launched
his invasion of the Soviet Union earlier than Stalin had anticipated, beginning a phase
in the Second World War which the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. Immediately after
the invasion, Brezhnev and the provincial party leadership attempted to mobilise
reinforcements from the army and continue military production in the factories, but a
couple of weeks later, as the German military juggernaut moved eastwards and overcame Soviet
defences, an order came through to dismantle and evacuate the factories. Brezhnev joined the
army on the 14th of July and was ordered to lead the evacuation of Dnepropetrovsk. When the
Germans captured the city on the 25th of August, Brezhnev remained with the military and political
leadership and was among the last to leave. Brezhnev worked as a political commissar at the
Southern Front, a task which involved informing soldiers of the ideological meaning of the war
and inspiring morale at the frontline. The role did not involve any military combat, and Brezhnev
spent much of his time organising supplies for the men behind the front lines. In November 1941
the Soviets recaptured the city of Rostov-on-Don, but a counteroffensive to retake the
then-Ukrainian capital of Kharkov in early 1942 proved a disaster, allowing the Germans
to strike back and advance as far as Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga River in an attempt to
seize the oilfields of the Caucasus. In August 1942 Brezhnev became deputy head of the political
administration of the Transcaucasian Front, but the following April he was demoted to head
of the 18th Army’s political department with the military rank of colonel. In early 1943, while the
Soviet armies bogged down the German offensive at Stalingrad, Brezhnev accompanied the 18th Army as
it advanced on the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, where in September he was wounded when his landing
craft hit a mine. As the victorious Soviet armies advanced westward, the 18th Army was reassigned
to the First Ukrainian Front which retook Kiev in November. In August 1944 the 18th was transferred
to the Fourth Ukrainian Front beyond the Carpathian mountains in western Ukraine, fighting
on land that had belonged to Czechoslovakia before the war. After being promoted to major
general, Brezhnev’s job was to present the Soviet army as liberators and establish
Communist party institutions in the region to prepare it for annexation by the Soviet Union.
In early 1945 Brezhnev joined the 18th Army as it liberated Czechoslovakia alongside the
1st Czechoslovak Army Corps commanded by Ludvik Svoboda, taking the capital
of Prague on the 8th of May 1945, the same day Germany surrendered to the Allied
nations of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. After the war, the Soviet
Union incorporated the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Over the next few years,
supported by the presence of Soviet armies of occupation, the central European states of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary came under communist rule, while Germany was split between capitalist
West Germany and communist East Germany. After the end of the war, Brezhnev was promoted
to chief of political administration of the Fourth Ukrainian Front before going to Moscow
where he participated in the victory parade on Red Square on the 24th of June 1945. As he
marched across Red Square in his dress uniform, Colonel Leonid Brezhnev was thirty-eight
years old, a Communist Party bureaucrat with experience of agricultural and industrial
policy who had been a beneficiary of Stalin’s purges and was making his way up the
ranks of the Ukrainian party before the Nazi invasion. During the Great Patriotic War
his fortunes reflected those of the Red Army, beginning with despair and defeat and ending in
triumph as he helped to extend the projection of Soviet power westwards into central Europe. By the
time Brezhnev returned to Ukraine in August, the Fourth Ukrainian Front was renamed the Carpathian
Military District, incorporating territories annexed from Czechoslovakia and Romania. There
are few accounts of Brezhnev’s activities in the year following the war, but he was responsible
for fighting Ukrainian nationalist insurgents and imposing the Soviet system of political and
economic control on the formerly non-Soviet lands. Brezhnev’s work during the war caught
the attention of Nikita Khrushchev, who secured his transfer from the army back to the
Ukrainian Communist Party, where he soon developed a reputation as an effective administrator
implementing Stalin’s policies. In September 1946 he was appointed to lead the party organisation in
the city of Zaporozhye in southeast Ukraine, where he began the process of rebuilding the steelworks
and the hydroelectric dam after the destruction during the war. Brezhnev was assisted by second
secretary Andrei Kirilenko who had served in the political department of the 18th Army, and by the
beginning of March they managed to get one of the turbines of the hydroelectric plant running. The
devastation of the war led to another famine in Ukraine, which Stalin once again blamed on enemies
of the state. Brezhnev attempted to rein in the agitation and concentrated on finding practical
solutions to the problems. In March Khrushchev was removed as leader of the Ukrainian party, and the
demotion of his patron threatened Brezhnev’s own survival. Brezhnev focused on fulfilling Stalin’s
ambitious reconstruction objectives, and after the steel plant returned to operation in October 1947,
he was awarded the Order of Lenin by Stalin in December, and before the year was out Khrushchev
had been reappointed First Secretary in Ukraine. In November 1947 Brezhnev was transferred to take
over the party leadership at Dnepropetrovsk in order to manage the reconstruction work on
the damaged city and encourage agricultural production. During these years he built up a
network of political associates nicknamed the ‘Dnepropetrovsk Mafia, who would remain loyal
supporters as Brezhnev rose up the party ranks in the ensuing decades. Members of this group
included Nikolai Tikhonov, the Chief Engineer of the Lenin Metallurgical Plant, Vladimir
Semichastny, who led the Komsomol in Kiev, and Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the party’s deputy
leader in his home city of Dneprodzerzhinsk, who would become one of his closest friends.
In recognition for leading the reconstruction of Dnepropetrovsk, in January 1949 Brezhnev
was elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. He continued to
receive the favour of Stalin and Khrushchev, and after the latter was appointed
party boss in Moscow in December 1949, Brezhnev was given an appointment in Moscow.
Not long after, in July 1950 Stalin appointed him First Secretary of the Communist
Party in Moldavia, modern-day Moldova. Nestled between Soviet Ukraine in the northeast
and the independent Socialist Republic of Romania to the southwest, Moldavia had previously been an
autonomous republic within Ukraine but in 1940 it was enlarged by the annexation of the Romanian
regions of Bukovina and Bessarabia. It was the poorest of the Soviet republics in Europe and
suffered terribly during the post-war famine. As in Ukraine, Stalin responded with repression,
and in July 1949 35,000 people were deported by the NKVD. The crackdown did nothing to
improve conditions, and prompted Stalin to send Brezhnev to the Moldavian capital
of Kishinev. Stalin regarded Brezhnev as a reliable and effective party operative who would
implement orders from Moscow without complaint, but Brezhnev exercised control of his party
colleagues through collective-decision making rather than intimidation, and was prepared to
give subordinates second chances rather than dismissing them straight away. This approach
increased party discipline and motivated his colleagues to take action to meet the ambitious
agricultural quotas demanded by Moscow. In order to encourage peasants to join collective farms, he
promoted ideological education through propaganda, rather than threats or punishments, and by March
1951 he claimed that agricultural collectivisation in Moldavia was complete. During his stint in
Moldavia, Brezhnev also built a thermal power station and began work on a hydroelectric
dam on the Dniester River.
Brezhnev’s closest associates in
Moldavia were Nikolai Shchelokov, whom he brought from Dnepropetrovsk to serve
as his deputy, and Konstantin Chernenko, the propaganda chief of the Moldavian party who
would go on to serve as Brezhnev’s right-hand man at the summit of Soviet politics. Faced with
ambitious demands from Moscow and criticised by his superiors if he did not achieve them,
Brezhnev worked tirelessly and in May 1952 suffered a heart attack at the age of forty-five.
After taking a two-month break from work, he was attacked by delegates of the party plenum
in August for failing to deal effectively with nationalists and other ideological opponents and
for his lenient treatment of party officials. After this assessment was echoed in the party
newspaper Pravda, in September Brezhnev had an article published in the ideological magazine
Bolshevik defending his approach by quoting Stalin’s words on criticism and self-criticism.
In October 1952 Brezhnev was in Moscow for the Eleventh Party Congress, where he met Stalin in
person for the first time and was mistaken for being a Moldavian. Brezhnev was not only made a
member of the Central Committee but also became a candidate member of the Party Presidium, formerly
the Politburo, which Stalin had expanded to dilute the power of some of the more influential
members whom he suspected of plotting against him. In late 1952, Brezhnev and his family left for
Moscow, moving into a three-room apartment in western Moscow which became his permanent home
in the capital. He regularly attended Presidium meetings and was asked by Stalin to manage
propaganda within the army and the navy. When Stalin died on the 5th of March 1953, membership
of the Presidium was reduced to its original size of nine members, Brezhnev lost his seat in
the country’s supreme decision-making body and was demoted to deputy head of the Ministry
of Defence’s political administration. In the months after Stalin’s death Stalin’s secret police
chief Lavrenty Beria had assumed the leading role, but in late June Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov,
the chairman of the Council of Ministers, organised a coup to arrest Beria. The
operation was led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet
armies in the Great Patriotic War, and Brezhnev was among the armed men who subdued
Beria. Despite his demotion from the Presidium, Brezhnev’s relationship with Khrushchev meant that
he continued to be close to the centre of power, and in August 1953 he was promoted to the
rank of lieutenant general in the Soviet army. After the ousting of Beria, the Presidium
claimed to exercise collective leadership, but as with the years after Lenin’s death, this
masked a power struggle between Khrushchev, who was appointed First Secretary of the
Communist Party in September, and Malenkov, who as chairman of the Council of Ministers
was state premier and head of government. While Malenkov favoured the development of light
industry, Khrushchev continued the push for heavy industry and advocated the allocation of more
land for arable farming. Accordingly, Khrushchev launched the Virgin Lands campaign to develop 13
million hectares of previously uncultivated land, much of which was located in Kazakhstan. When
the incumbent native Kazakh party leaders were unwilling to implement the programme, in January
the Presidium sent a new leadership team to Kazakhstan, with Malenkov’s supporter Panteleimon
Ponomarenko serving as first secretary and Brezhnev as his deputy. After moving to the Kazakh
capital of Almaty, Brezhnev faced many of the same challenges that had confronted him in Moldavia.
He was working in a poor country which spoke a non-Slavic language and had to introduce Soviet
ideology and Russian culture while carrying out his main task of developing an agricultural system
which supplied grain, cotton, and corn to other parts of the Soviet Union. The main difference was
that while Moldavia was a narrow strip of land, Kazakhstan was the size of Western Europe
and had a population of seven million. Despite their competing loyalties,
Ponomarenko and Brezhnev worked well together, with the former remaining in the capital,
and the latter travelling around the country promoting the Virgin Lands campaign. The two
men restructured the party organisation but while Ponomarenko exercised authority by making
threats to subordinates, Brezhnev maintained his collegial and constructive approach. For 1954
and 1955 Moscow determined that 6.3 million hectares had to be cultivated in Kazakhstan.
The centre decided how much grain was needed and hence how much land had to be cultivated,
and it was up to Brezhnev in Kazakhstan to send out surveyors to identify suitable sites for
farms. In 1954 ninety state farms were built in convenient locations close to the railways and
rivers, but the following year the farms expanded into the more remote steppes. When the yield
on the farms were lower than expected, Brezhnev blamed the farm directors and party organisers
for their treatment of farmers, denying them pay, providing poor living conditions, and failing to
adequately supply the farms with drinking water. Despite these setbacks, Khrushchev continued to
expand the Virgin Lands programme, and in 1955 Brezhnev had to organise 250 new collective farms
and accommodate 170,000 farm workers. The material aid provided by Moscow in terms of supplies
and farm machinery was not enough, the newly arrived workers often had no farming experience
and seeds were often sown on unploughed fields. Ponomarenko and Brezhnev attempted to address the
problem of low yields by establishing academic institutions to study new planting methods, but
despite the unsuitable soil and the inexperienced farmers, Khrushchev insisted on planting corn for
livestock feed, and Brezhnev dutifully defended the policy in Kazakhstan, only for drought in
the summer of 1955 to threaten the entire 700,000 hectares planted. In the meantime, livestock farms
in Kazakhstan struggled due to a shortage of feed, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of animals in winter. While the failure to keep animals alive put pressure on the leadership of
the Kazakh party, Ponomarenko’s dismissal as First Secretary in May was the result of Khrushchev
gaining the upper hand in his power struggle with Malenkov and securing his dismissal as premier
in February. With Khrushchev firmly in charge, Brezhnev became First Secretary of Kazakhstan
in August 1955. In the absence of Ponomarenko, Brezhnev developed a close working
relationship with Dinmukhamed Kunyaev, who had been appointed Chairman of the
Council of Ministers in Kazakhstan in April. In February 1956 Brezhnev travelled to
Moscow for the Twentieth Party Congress, where he returned to the Presidium as a
candidate member. At a closed session on the 24th of February, Khrushchev delivered his
so-called ‘secret speech’ denouncing Stalin for his repressive rule and his mismanagement of
the Soviet economy. Although Brezhnev was not known to make long speeches in the Presidium, he
supported Khrushchev on most issues. In late 1956, when an uprising broke out in Hungary in support
of the reformist Communist leader Imre Nagy, Brezhnev was involved in compiling a list
of loyal Hungarian officials whom Moscow could rely on. When Soviet tanks suppressed the
uprising in early November and János Kádár emerged as Nagy’s successor, Brezhnev was one of three
Presidium members to go to Budapest to deliver Moscow’s blessing for the change in government.
In 1957, Khrushchev proposed devolving economic decision-making from the government ministries in
Moscow to the regions. This encouraged an attempt to depose Khrushchev by his former rival Malenkov,
supported by Stalin’s associates Lazar Kaganovich, former Foreign Minister Vyacheslav
Molotov, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, as well as Premier Nikolai Bulganin, whom
Khrushchev had appointed to succeed Malenkov two years earlier. At a Presidium meeting on the
18th of June, seven full Politburo members called for Khrushchev’s dismissal. As a candidate
member Brezhnev did not have voting rights, and when he spoke in defence of Khrushchev he
was shouted down by Kaganovich and collapsed unconscious. Though Khrushchev initially believed
that Brezhnev faked the illness and wanted to save his own skin, Brezhnev sent Khrushchev a letter
the following day assuring him of his support. As the denunciations continued in the Presidium
the following day, Central Committee members stormed the meeting and demanded a special plenum,
which was convened on the 22nd of June. During the plenum Brezhnev attacked Kaganovich, Malenkov and
Molotov and accused them of complicity in Stalin’s terror. Khrushchev survived the coup and Brezhnev
became a full member of the Presidium. Among Khrushchev’s defenders in June was Marshal Zhukov,
but when Khrushchev turned against him in October, Brezhnev joined in the attack, accusing
Zhukov of creating a cult of personality. Brezhnev also rallied behind Khrushchev when
he dismissed Bulganin as premier in 1958 and took the office himself, combining leadership in
the party with the leadership of the government. Brezhnev’s loyalty to Khrushchev continued
to be rewarded and in March 1958 he was given responsibility for heavy industry and
armaments, including the space programme. The space programme was a key part of Khrushchev’s
desire to demonstrate the superiority of Soviet science and technology during the Cold War, as
the Soviet Union and the United States found themselves locked in an ideological battle
between capitalism and communism for global influence. While in Kazakhstan Brezhnev had
overseen the construction of the rocket launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and in his
new role he also assumed responsibility for rocket construction. Brezhnev made a good
impression during his first meeting with the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov,
the ‘father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb’, and he frequently met with lead rocket engineer
Sergei Korolev. While the Soviet space programme had its fair share of tragedies during these
early days, Brezhnev took credit for the launch of satellites and basked in the glow of Yuri
Gagarin’s spaceflight on the 12th of April 1961. On the 7th of May 1960, Brezhnev was elected
chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s rubber-stamp legislature.
The position made Brezhnev head of state and had previously been regarded as an honorary role
for an elder statesmen, but unlike his predecessor Marshal Voroshilov, Brezhnev’s prestige was
enhanced by being able to represent the Soviet Union abroad, supporting Khrushchev’s efforts to
seek a peaceful accommodation with the capitalist West, a process known as détente. While Brezhnev
had plenty of experience with agriculture, industry, and defence, this was the first time
he was seriously involved in foreign policy. He supported Khrushchev’s vision of promoting the
superiority of the Soviet system, making fifteen foreign trips between 1961 and 1964. Khrushchev
took a greater interest in Africa, offering to work alongside nationalist anti-colonial movements
while also reminding the African nations that Russia never had any African colonies. During his
first foreign trip in early 1961 Brezhnev visited Morocco, Guinea, and Ghana, where he signed trade
agreements and called for the withdrawal of French troops from Algeria and the Belgians from Congo.
He continued to spread the anti-colonial message in India and Afghanistan, and on a visit to Iran
in 1963 he welcomed increased economic cooperation even as he recognised that the Shah was dependent
on the United States. Brezhnev did not neglect fellow communist states in Europe, establishing a
close relationship with Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia and appealing to locals by recalling his wartime
experiences during a visit to Czechoslovakia. Brezhnev continued to work closely with
Khrushchev on the space programme and also with him on his efforts to de-Stalinize
the Soviet Union. To achieve the latter goal Brezhnev assisted Khrushchev in
his project to rewrite Stalin’s 1936 constitution by devolving greater power to
the people and introducing term limits for party officials. Within the space of twenty
years after the end of the Second World War, Brezhnev had helped to rebuild Ukrainian
industry, strengthened Soviet rule in Moldavia, initiated the Virgin Lands programme in Ukraine,
and contributed to the Soviet Union gaining an early lead over the United States in the
space race. By 1964, he was Khrushchev’s right hand man and enjoyed a similar degree of
international recognition as the First Secretary. However, by 1964, Brezhnev was losing patience
with Khrushchev’s tendency to transfer party leaders to new posts without prior consultation,
undermining his own patronage networks in Ukraine, Moldavia, and Kazakhstan. While Khrushchev
was developing his own personality cult, Brezhnev and his Presidium colleagues were feeling
increasingly insecure and were regularly subjected to insults from the First Secretary. In July
1964 Khrushchev appointed Anastas Mikoyan to replace Brezhnev, who was demoted to joint
Central Committee secretary alongside Nikolai Podgorny. Throughout the year Brezhnev was
recruiting plotters to oust Khrushchev, including Ukrainian party boss Pavlo Shelest
and secret police chief Vladimir Semichastny. The stakes increased when Khrushchev
told the Presidium in September that he would disband it after returning from his
holiday with Mikoyan at Pitsunda in Georgia. After securing the support of Defence
Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, on the 12th of October Brezhnev summoned
Khrushchev to Moscow for an urgent meeting. After Khrushchev and Mikoyan returned to Moscow on
the 13th of October, Brezhnev summoned a meeting of the Presidium where over two days all the
members of the body joined in the denunciations of Khrushchev’s cult of personality, his failed
economic policies, and his party reorganisation, which involved splitting the party into separate
branches with responsibility for agriculture and industry respectively. Even Mikoyan admitted that
Khrushchev had made mistakes, though he suggested a face-saving arrangement for the First Secretary.
When he was finally given a chance to respond, Khrushchev conceded defeat and a plenum of
the Central Committee that evening endorsed Khrushchev’s dismissal. The plenum decided to
separate the posts of First Secretary and Premier, with Brezhnev becoming First Secretary and Deputy
Premier Alexei Kosygin becoming Premier. Mikoyan remained as head of state for another year before
being replaced by Podgorny. After assuming control of the party apparatus, Brezhnev placed his
ally Dmitry Ustinov in charge of defence, with Fyodor Kulakov as secretary of agriculture,
while responsibility for industry went to his old friend Andrei Kirilenko. He hoped to bring
his friend Vladimir Shcherbitsky to Moscow, but the latter was happy to lead the
party organisation in Ukraine. The deposed Khrushchev was given a dacha and put
under house arrest until his death in 1971. In order to consolidate his power and avoid
Khrushchev’s fate, Brezhnev led the party by assuring his Presidium colleagues that both
their lives and their jobs would be secured, and in 1966 he overturned Khrushchev’s
term limits and rotation of office policy, renaming the Presidium the Politburo and his
office of First Secretary to General Secretary. The Politburo members saw the General Secretary as
their protector, and Brezhnev maintained friendly relations by inviting them to football matches at
the CSKA Moscow stadium and traveling with them to their neighbouring dachas in the Crimea. Brezhnev
used social events not only to encourage a sense of camaraderie but also to assert his dominance
among the all-male Politburo. He enjoyed hunting at Zavidovo to the west of Moscow and proved to be
the best shot among his Politburo colleagues until his health began to fail in the mid-1970s. He
was passionate about fast cars and was personally behind the wheel driving to his hunting trips or
his Crimean holidays, and his private collection included a Rolls-Royce, two Mercedes, and a
Cadillac gifted by foreign leaders. Brezhnev also continued to indulge in his passion for the
arts, charming the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya.
In Politburo meetings Brezhnev rarely spoke first and allowed his fellow leaders to give
their views before making the closing speech himself. Brezhnev instituted the practice
of collective speech-writing to give his comrades the sense that they were involved in the
decision-making process. He had been an effective propagandist and preferred to speak simply and
directly to the people rather than litter his speeches with Lenin quotes on the grounds that
no-one would believe he had read Lenin’s works anyway. While Brezhnev’s emphasis on collective
leadership threatened to elevate potential rivals, he kept them in check by appointing his protégés
from Dnepropetrovsk to keep an eye on them. In December 1965, Brezhnev and Podgorny secured the
dismissal of the ambitious Alexander Shelepin, who as Deputy Premier and chairman of the Party
and State Control Committee had hopes of leading the party himself. Despite his dismissal, Shelepin
continued to exercise his influence via his friend Vladimir Semichastny, but in 1966 Brezhnev managed
to appoint his protégé Nikolai Shchelokov as Minister of the Interior to counter Semichastny’s
KGB. In 1967, while Shelepin was in hospital, Brezhnev summoned the Politburo and proposed
replacing Semichastny with Yuri Andropov as the head of the secret police. When Semichastny
protested, Brezhnev assured him that he was not being punished and his new role as Deputy
Premier of Ukraine was not a demotion. Brezhnev’s desire to bring stability and security
to party leaders and members was also reflected in his mission to improve the livelihoods of the
Soviet people. In 1964 he formulated his plans “to create the material and technological foundations
of communism and to increase our people’s standard of living.” Having already helped Khrushchev
institute a minimum wage for workers of forty roubles a month, in the Five-Year Plan introduced
in 1966 Brezhnev proposed increasing this to sixty roubles a month while reducing prices and taxes.
In September 1967, the fiftieth anniversary year of the October Revolution, Brezhnev introduced
a package of social reforms which included the increase in the minimum wage, an increase in
holiday entitlement from twelve to fifteen days, a uniform retirement age of sixty for men and
fifty-five for women, and a five-day working week. Within ten years average real wages had
increased by twenty-five per cent and much of the Soviet population lived more comfortable
lives than they did under Stalin or Khrushchev. In addition to improving lives in the cities,
Brezhnev was also determined to improve conditions in the countryside. Artificially low prices for
food in the cities meant that the farms did not receive enough money to pay collective farmers
a sufficient wage, and Brezhnev decided that the central government should pay the farms enough
to cover their production costs and pay their workers a decent wage. Recognising that Soviet
farms were far less productive than those in Western Europe or the United States, Brezhnev’s
priorities were to develop irrigation, increase the adoption of agricultural technology, and
encourage the production and use of fertilizers. Droughts in 1971 and 1972 worsened the situation
in the countryside, forcing the Soviet Union to import 25.4 million tons of grain from abroad.
A bumper harvest in 1973 created a new problem as there were not enough trucks to transport
all the crops before they spoiled. Brezhnev was even more worried about meat shortages and was
horrified to hear that in the winter of 1968 to 1969 twelve million animals had died. In a blow
to his efforts to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system, Brezhnev was forced to
import animal feed from the United States, buying 750 million dollars’ worth in 1972 alone.
Brezhnev favoured decentralising economic policymaking and in 1965 he tasked Premier
Alexei Kosygin with introducing economic reforms. These reforms weakened Gosplan, the
state planning directorate, and made company directors responsible for setting targets, while
reintroducing central ministries to coordinate economic policy. As part of the general
policy to improve the standard of living, Brezhnev championed the production of consumer
industrial products including household appliances and furniture. This was accompanied by
a housing construction campaign to move families from communal apartments to new housing
with their own kitchens and bathrooms. By 1980, Brezhnev claimed that eighty per cent of the urban
population lived in their own homes, thus further parting with decades of Soviet policy.
In a further attempt to inspire Soviet individualism, Brezhnev encouraged the
production of cars and in August 1966 the Soviet Union entered an agreement with
Italian manufacturer Fiat to build 600,000 cars a year in the city of Togliatti on the Volga,
renamed after the leader of the Italian Communist Party. In spite of the focus on consumer
products, while workers’ wages increased, Soviet production was unable to keep up with the
demand, leading to shortages in shops. For all of Brezhnev’s promises of economic prosperity, while
economic growth stood at 5 per cent in the 1960s, by the 1970s it had fallen below 3 per cent, later
labelled as the era of stagnation. Unwilling to restrict wage growth to cut demand and restore
the economic balance, Brezhnev attempted to fill the gap with imports from abroad. The Soviet
leadership naturally preferred to buy from fellow socialist countries but were eventually
forced to buy from the capitalist West. While Brezhnev and Kosygin worked together on
the economy, as head of the party and head of the government they were faced by growing political
rivals. By delegating responsibility for economic affairs to Kosygin, Brezhnev gave himself the
opportunity to criticise the premier when the economy was not performing as well as expected.
In a speech to the Central Committee plenum in December 1969, Brezhnev attacked Kosygin for
failures to meet the targets of the Five-Year Plan. He referred to inefficiencies in economic
management, giving the example of four cranes imported from East Germany being transported
to the Far East port of Vladivostok rather than going directly to the Black Sea. Brezhnev was
so convinced of the superiority of the Soviet economic system that he blamed Kosygin and his
ministers for sabotaging the economy, attacking the implementation of the reforms rather than the
reforms themselves. Acknowledging a shortage of labour in the country, Brezhnev pushed for greater
efficiency and improved economic management to increase productivity. While rejecting Stalin’s
methods of control, Brezhnev also believed that the economic productivity challenges were down to
party officials not working hard enough to achieve their targets, as Brezhnev had done earlier in
his career in Ukraine, Moldavia, and Kazakhstan. While he severely reprimanded Kosygin and
other individuals he considered responsible for the country’s poor economic performance, in
accordance with his leadership style he preferred encouragement to threats. As the shortages
worsened in the 1970s and black markets sprang up to enrich corrupt officials,
Brezhnev refrained from investigating his subordinates. As his power struggle
with Kosygin continued through the 1970s, Brezhnev strengthened his authority in 1971 by
expanding Politburo membership from eleven to fifteen, allowing him to appoint four allies to
the supreme decision-making body. In July 1976, after Kosygin suffered a boating accident
resulting in a hospital stay of more than two months, Brezhnev appointed his Dnepropetrovsk
friend Nikolai Tikhonov as first deputy premier to Kosygin. The premier’s health continued to fail
and in October 1980, two months before his death, he submitted his resignation and was
replaced by Tikhonov. In the meantime, Brezhnev also worked to push aside Podgorny. After
Khrushchev’s constitutional reform had been set aside following his removal from power in 1964,
Brezhnev introduced a new constitution in 1977 based in part on the work he did for Khrushchev.
The constitution increased the powers of the head of state and Brezhnev successfully engineered
his election to the post at Podgorny’s expense. In the 1977 constitution, Brezhnev announced
that the Soviet Union had successfully become “a developed socialist society” and the next stage
was to build communism, anticipating a greater role for the people. While Brezhnev’s rule is
associated with the return to Stalinist political repression following a period of relatively
liberal rule under Khrushchev, Brezhnev’s biographer Susanne Schattenberg claims that fewer
people were imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities under Brezhnev than under Khrushchev. Brezhnev
left the task of dealing with political dissidents to the KGB under Semichastny and Andropov. In
1966, the show trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who were sentenced to five and
seven years in labour camps, led to comparisons to the Stalinist era. In an effort to maintain
Soviet prestige abroad, Brezhnev and Andropov preferred to move against dissidents quietly,
such as by negotiating dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exile to West Germany in 1974.
Brezhnev could not understand why writers and academics opposed the Soviet system, and
when Andrei Sakharov began to complain about human rights, Brezhnev initially sought to
negotiate with him to understand his grievances, and it was only when Sakharov openly sided with
the West in 1973 that Brezhnev considered him a political opponent and a traitor to the Soviet
cause. While Brezhnev did not allow Sakharov to collect the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded
in 1975, it was not until 1980 that Sakharov was exiled to the closed city of Gorky, now Nizhny
Novgorod. Brezhnev’s attitude towards dissidents and political opponents was one of indifference
and disappointment rather than anger or outrage, and he continued to reject Stalinist violence,
though he compromised with hardline Stalinists in the party and encouraged a balanced appraisal
of Stalin which praised him for the country’s economic development while continuing to
hold him responsible for the Great Terror. As a means of consolidating his rule, Brezhnev
developed a cult of the Great Patriotic War which focused on the sacrifice of over twenty million
people rather than on the veneration of Stalin. On the 9th of May 1965, the twentieth anniversary
of victory over Nazi Germany, Brezhnev declared Victory Day a public holiday. The same year, the
Supreme Soviet awarded the title of Hero City to seven cities including Moscow, Leningrad,
Kiev, and Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. In 1973 two more hero cities were added, Kerch
and Novorossiysk, where Brezhnev had served, further indicating his desire to enhance his own
personality cult. In 1967 a memorial complex was built at the foot of the Kremlin Wall including
the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier protected by an eternal flame, alongside marble blocks with
the names of the hero cities. That same year, Brezhnev inaugurated the monumental The
Motherland Calls statue in Volgograd which had been commissioned by Khrushchev.
As General Secretary of the Communist Party, Brezhnev had no formal role in foreign policy,
which was the responsibility of Podgorny, Kosygin, and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko. Brezhnev
did have a role in relations with the leaders of fellow communist states, including Poland,
East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and other members of the Warsaw Pact alliance of
communist states. In December 1967, when invited to intervene in the leadership crisis facing the
Czechoslovak Communist Party, Brezhnev supported the young and dynamic Alexander Dubček over the
unpopular incumbent Antonín Novotný. When Dubček introduced reforms to liberalise the party’s
economic and political control in the Prague Spring, the more hardline members of the Warsaw
Pact were afraid that they would be facing similar demands for reform. Brezhnev initially allowed
Dubček a free hand, but by the beginning of May, the General Secretary began to lose faith in
Dubček’s ability to hold the party together. The Politburo was afraid that Dubček was seeking
to abolish communism altogether, and after failed negotiations at the end of July the tanks of
the Warsaw Pact rolled into Prague on the 21st of August. Dubček and several other reformers were
taken to Moscow where Brezhnev forced them to sign a document reversing the reforms. The Czechoslovak
leader returned to Prague on the 27th of August, but was removed from power the following April.
The intervention in Prague was followed by a statement from Brezhnev that the Soviet Union
was prepared to defend socialist rule in the Eastern Bloc, known in the West as the Brezhnev
Doctrine. Like his predecessor Khrushchev, who was scarred by the experience of the Second
World War, Brezhnev supported a policy of détente, seeking a peaceful relationship with the West.
Brezhnev sought to establish direct channels of communication with western leaders, both
to go around the Foreign Ministry under the hardline Gromyko, and to present himself as
a pragmatic European statesman rather than a communist ideologue. In 1970 Brezhnev set up a
channel with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, winning his trust by informing him about
internal rivalries in the Politburo. On the 12th of August 1970 Brezhnev invited Brandt to
the Soviet capital to sign the Treaty of Moscow, which recognised the borders of the two Germanies.
While Gromyko and Kosygin signed the document on behalf of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev was present
for the ceremony. The occasion allowed Brezhnev and Brandt to meet for the first time,
and the two men became close friends, and in 1971 Brandt would join Brezhnev
on his holiday in the Crimea. Brezhnev closely followed Brandt’s struggle to ratify
the treaty, which passed by one vote in 1972. Brezhnev was also keen on seeking a closer
diplomatic relationship with France, and in October 1970 French President Georges
Pompidou visited the Soviet Union for talks, and the two leaders agreed to have an open dialogue.
In 1971 Brezhnev paid a return visit to France, where he admitted to Pompidou that the Soviet
economy was struggling and proposed closer trade relations. In addition to Brandt and Pompidou,
Brezhnev’s ultimate aim was to open a dialogue with President Richard Nixon of the United States.
After a border conflict between the Soviet Union and China along the Ussuri River in 1969, Nixon
sought to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split by initiating talks with both countries,
and after his visit to China in February 1972, Nixon went to Moscow in May. Brezhnev and Nixon
agreed to put aside their ideological differences, and the General Secretary reminded the President
of the wartime cooperation between Stalin and President Roosevelt. The Soviets and the Americans
had begun the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in 1969 and following the end of the
first round of talks Brezhnev and Nixon signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In 1973 Nixon
invited Brezhnev to the United States, and while at Camp David the President presented the Soviet
leader with a Lincoln Continental. While Nixon sat in the passenger seat, Brezhnev drove down
a steep slope at fifty miles an hour approaching a sharp turn, ignoring Nixon’s protests to slow
down, before slamming the brakes and making the turn. Brezhnev hoped that demonstrations like
these would persuade western political leaders that he was just like them, but the Americans
considered such behaviour unstatesmanlike. In 1974, the three men with whom Brezhnev
had built personal relationships, all departed from the political scene. At the
beginning of April, Pompidou died unexpectedly, and at the beginning of May Brandt was forced to
resign after an aide was exposed as an East German spy. In the United States, Nixon was fighting for
his political life in the midst of the Watergate Scandal. Brezhnev offered his American counterpart
moral support and hoped he would stay on, but Nixon eventually resigned from the presidency
on the 8th of August. The stress resulting from the unravelling of his foreign policy caused
Brezhnev to become addicted to sleeping pills, and from late 1974 his health began to collapse. As
a result of his tendency to be late for meetings after falling asleep for several hours, Brezhnev’s
meetings with foreign leaders were now attended by Gromyko and Konstantin Chernenko, fatally
undermining his personal diplomacy approach. Brezhnev nevertheless managed to bring together
the leaders of thirty-three European states and the United States and Canada to agree the
Helsinki Accords on the 1st of August 1975, whose provisions included the territorial integrity
of European states, a commitment to refrain from military force, economic cooperation between
signatories, an acknowledgement of human rights, and the creation of the Conference on Security
and Co-Operation in Europe to promote peace, mutual support and respect. However, relations
between the United States and the Soviet Union worsened after the election of Jimmy Carter as
President. The idealistic Carter’s insistence that the Soviets act on their Helsinki commitments
and improve their record on human rights irritated Brezhnev, who had agreed with Carter’s
predecessors to set ideology aside. Despite their disagreements and Brezhnev’s failing health,
a further arms reduction treaty was signed by Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna in June 1979, but
the agreement was not ratified by either side. In light of Brezhnev’s illness, by the late
1970s Soviet foreign policy was in the hands of KGB chief Andropov, Premier Kosygin, and
Defence minister Dmitri Ustinov. In April 1978 the socialist People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan under Nur Muhammad Taraki seized power in a violent coup. Brezhnev and the Politburo had
enjoyed cordial relationships with the previous Afghan government and refused calls for aid from
Taraki when faced with the outbreak of internal rebellion in March 1979. In September, foreign
minister Hafisullah Amin overthrew Taraki, and it was only after the former initiated contact with
the United States that the Politburo authorised an invasion which began on the 25th of December.
Brezhnev hoped that the intervention would be over in a few days, but the Soviets were unable to
pacify the country and withdrew nine years later. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan fatally
undermined Brezhnev’s détente policy, and the West’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics dealt
a significant blow to Soviet prestige. In order to prevent another Afghan quagmire, when the Polish
communist leadership in Warsaw requested Soviet intervention to crush Lech Wałęsa’s democratic
Solidarity movement, the Politburo ruled out military force. Despite his ill health, Brezhnev
played an active role in the Polish crisis in 1980 and 1981, as he urged Polish leaders Stanisław
Kania and General Wojciech Jaruzelski not to offer further concessions to Solidarity. In December
1981, after securing a promise from Brezhnev to provide generous economic support, Jaruzelski
declared martial law and banned Solidarity. The image of the sick and frail Brezhnev after
1975 surrounded by his ageing Politburo mirrored the Soviet Union’s economic decline and the
failure of détente. Brezhnev’s fondness for medals and his frequent absences due to ill health
gave rise to the joke that he was having chest expansion surgery. He was awarded the highest
accolade of Hero of the Soviet Union four times, on his 60th, 70th, 72nd and 75th birthdays. In
1973 he was given the Lenin Peace Prize for his diplomacy with France, Germany, and the United
States. For his 70th birthday in 1976 he was awarded the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union,
following which he received the majority of his military medals as party propagandists made him
appear more influential than he was during the Second World War. Brezhnev’s glorification
in propaganda stood in stark contrast to his physical frailty, and attempts by Politburo
colleagues to encourage Brezhnev to look after his health and get rid of the pills met with
limited success. Brezhnev’s poor health obliged the Politburo to look around for a successor,
but the likely candidates were in poor health themselves. In 1978 the relatively young Fyodor
Kulakov died at the age of sixty, leading to his replacement by his forty-seven-year-old protégé
Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who would ultimately lead the Soviet Union to its collapse. By 1982 the
leading candidates were the seventy-one-year-old Konstantin Chernenko and the sixty-eight-year-old
Yuri Andropov, whom Brezhnev appointed his second secretary in May. On the 7th of November Brezhnev
attended the Red Square parade on the sixty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. Three days
later, Leonid Ilych Brezhnev died from a heart attack in the early hours of the 10th of November
at the age of seventy-five. After his death was announced on the 12th of November, Yuri Andropov
assumed office as General Secretary. On the 15th, Brezhnev was buried at the Kremlin
Wall Necropolis near Lenin’s Mausoleum. Leonid Brezhnev’s eighteen-year rule as leader
of the Soviet Union is usually associated with political and economic stagnation presided over
by a group of old decrepit and senile men. Yet for most of his life, Brezhnev was a charismatic
and dynamic figure who enjoyed football, drove fast cars, and had a passion for acting.
Like his predecessor and patron Khrushchev, Brezhnev was not a particularly enthusiastic
communist and joined the party to advance his career. During the collectivisation campaign and
Stalin’s purges in the 1920s and 1930s, he carried out his instructions from Moscow to ensure his
own survival. As he rose through the party ranks, he rejected Stalin’s violent methods and preferred
to exercise leadership by encouragement and persuasion. Brezhnev’s experience of the Second
World War reflected that of the Soviet army as it turned the tide of defeat to victory,
joining the 18th Army as it reconquered Ukraine and liberated Czechoslovakia. While
he enjoyed Khrushchev’s patronage in Ukraine, Brezhnev built up his own network in
Dnepropetrovsk, where he helped to rebuild Ukrainian industry after the war before moving
to Moldavia. After Khrushchev came to power, Brezhnev began to implement the Virgin Lands
programme in Kazakhstan before returning to Moscow in 1956 as Khrushchev’s right-hand man, defending
him from his enemies in 1957, supervising the Soviet space programme, and representing
the Soviet Union abroad as head of state. After overthrowing Khrushchev and assuming the
party leadership in 1964, Brezhnev maintained his power by promising stability and continuity in the
Politburo, gradually promoting his allies to keep an eye on potential rivals. He promised the Soviet
people higher living standards, but while wages increased the Soviet economy was unable to supply
the necessary agricultural and consumer products required, forcing Brezhnev to turn to foreign
imports. In both his economic management and his attitude towards political dissidents, Brezhnev
struggled to understand why the Soviet system was not working and continued to believe that it
was a question of motivating his fellow comrades to do better. In the realm of foreign policy,
during the early 1970s Brezhnev was successful in building special channels to western leaders,
but political changes in the west and his own failing health undermined his personal diplomacy
and reintroduced an atmosphere of mistrust. By the end of his life, relations with the West had
deteriorated once again following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union
itself would only survive for another decade. What do you think of Leonid Brezhnev?
Was he an unimaginative Communist ideologue who presided over an era
of economic stagnation and decline, or did he lead the country through a
rare era of political stability during which arrest and deportation was the
exception rather than the rule? Please let us know in the comment section and in the
meantime, thank you very much for watching.
