Leonid Brezhnev

For more information on Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, visit Britannica.com.

(b. Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine, 19 Dec. 1906; d. Moscow, 10 Nov. 1982) Russian; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1964 – 82 Brezhnev was the son of working-class parents. He qualified first as a land surveyor then in 1935 graduated from the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Institute as a steel engineer. He joined the CPSU in 1931 and embarked on a party career in 1936. He worked in the Dneprodzerzhinsk region, joining the party apparatus in 1938 and benefiting from the patronage of Khrushchev. During the Second World War he served as a political commissar in the Red Army, attaining the rank of major-general.

In 1947 Brezhnev was made First Secretary of Dnepropetrovsk region, which was to be his power base, and in 1950 became First Secretary in Moldavia. In 1952 he entered the Central Committee as a secretary. In 1954 Khrushchev sent him to Kazakhstan as local party chief to supervise the cultivation of virgin lands. Returning to Moscow in 1956 he became full member of the Presidium of the Central Committee (later the Politburo) the next year. From 1960 to 1964 he was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet — the head of state. In 1963 he became secretary of the Central Committee with responsibility for day-to-day party organization, which gave him important powers of patronage. He played a major role in orchestrating Khrushchev's removal in October 1964, succeeding him as General Secretary of the CPSU. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Brezhnev ruled as first among equals in a collegiate leadership, while consolidating his power and became President in 1977.

In foreign policy Brezhnev initially allowed Kosygin to represent the Soviet Union abroad. In 1968 he played a mediating role between the factions for and against intervention in Czechoslovakia. Thereafter his name was linked to the "Brezhnev Doctrine" by which the Soviet Bloc states had the right to intervene in one another's internal affairs when the interests of "socialism" as a whole were threatened. During the 1970s he played a prominent role in the development of détente with the United States, which culminated in the Helsinki Agreements of 1975, by which the United States and its allies recognized the territorial division after the Second World War. In the same period he engaged in prolonged arms limitation talks and attempted to improve trade links with the West. Already by 1975 relations with the West were under strain since the USA and USSR remained rivals in Third World conflicts while Moscow continued to restrict human rights in the USSR and Eastern Europe and to build up its nuclear and conventional forces. The beginning of the "New Cold War" was marked by the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, which Brezhnev supported.

At home, Brezhnev's rule was marked by stability of personnel within the CPSU, by massive investments in armaments, and by the unbridled subsidizing of an inefficient agricultural sector. At the time of his death in 1982, the Soviet Union was in crisis, desperately in need of economic reform and unable to subsidize the arms race threatened by the revival of US power under Reagan.

Brezhnev, Leonid (Ilich) ˈbreʒܖnef; ˈbreʒnyif (1906-82) Soviet statesman. General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1966 to 1982 and President from 1977 to 1982. His period in power was marked by intensified persecution of dissidents at home and by attempted détente followed by renewed cold war in 1968; he was largely responsible for the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968).

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The Soviet political leader Leonid IIich Brezhnev (1906-1982) held a number of important government posts and was a major figure in the post-Stalinera.

Leonid Brezhnev was born on Dec. 12, 1906, in Kamenskoe (now Dneprodzerzhinsk), a metallurgical center in the Ukraine. A member of a working-class family, he was obliged to leave school at the age of 15 and go to work. But he continued to study as a part-time student of surveying at a vocational secondary school, and graduated at the age of 21. In the years immediately following, Brezhnev held a number of minor government posts and at that time also joined the Communist party. Then he enrolled in the Kamenskoe Metallurgical Institute, graduating in 1935 as a metallurgical engineer. The field of engineering engaged him only briefly, however, for he soon became involved in government and party work. By the beginning of World War II, he was an important party leader in his native region.

After the outbreak of the war, Brezhnev served in the branch of the Red Army responsible for political indoctrination. There he held increasingly responsible posts, eventually achieving the rank of major general. When Brezhnev returned to civilian life in 1946, he continued to move steadily ahead as a party official. In 1950, with his election as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Moldavian S.S.R., one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, he gained national prominence. Two years later he left Moldavia for Moscow to serve under Stalin in the powerful Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist party.

The progress of Brezhnev's career was temporarily interrupted by Stalin's death in 1953. He was removed from the Secretariat and assigned to lesser posts, first in the Ministry of Defense and later in the Central Committee of the Kazakh S.S.R. But because he proved to be such a successful administrator, he was recalled to Moscow in 1956 to serve again in the Secretariat. He worked closely with Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Secretariat and the most powerful man in the Soviet Union.

In 1960, with Khrushchev's support, Brezhnev was chosen chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. This post brought Brezhnev great prestige but not great power. After three years he returned to the Secretariat, where he allied himself with other leaders who were dissatisfied with Khrushchev's record. In 1964 this group succeeded in ousting Khrushchev from power, whereupon Brezhnev immediately took over the most important of Khrushchev's former positions, that of first secretary of the party's Central Committee, and became the major personage in the Soviet Union. In 1966 his title was changed from first secretary to general secretary, the title under which Stalin had served. But Brezhnev was not as powerful as either Stalin or Khrushchev had been. Instead, according to the informal arrangement that had followed Khrushchev's removal, he became the first among equals and shared power with the chairman of the Council of Ministers and the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

During the 1970s, Brezhnev oversaw the Soviet Union through a number of military interventions, beginning with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, now the Czech Republic, and warfare in the People's Republic of China in 1969. In order to maintain clout with the largely Communist Eastern European bloc, the Soviet Union turned to hostile enforcement of their political system. Perhaps the harshest such case was the Soviet attack launched on Afghanistan in 1979, which continued past Breshnev's life.

Although the end of the Brezhnev years saw the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalate, the two world powers still managed a high level of rapport. During the office of President Richard Nixon, the two leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union often visited each other, easing tensions enough to allow a cooperative space program in 1975, a massive purchase of American wheat by the Soviets, and other such liasons.

The decline of Brezhnev's health was paralleled by the waning solidarity of Soviet power, as was evidenced by an increasing number of dissenting voices within the country such as Andrei Sakharov. Although countries such as Poland, which nearly broke free of Soviet control in 1981, were still no match for the might of Soviet armies, their mounting unrest foreshadowed the crumbling of the Communist Soviet Union in later years. Under Brezhnev, the Soviet economy had initially flourished, but by the mid-1970s it had reached a point of stagnation. After several years of serious ailment, Brezhnev died in Moscow on November 10, 1982, leaving the Soviet Union without coherent leadership until the regime of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Further Reading

Biographical information on Brezhnev is scanty. The best source in English is Grey Hodnett's article on Brezhnev in George W. Simmonds, ed., Soviet Leaders (1967). His career is also discussed in Robert Conquest, Russia after Khrushchev (1965), and in Myron Rush, Political Succession in the USSR (1965; 2d ed. 1968). For comprehensive discussions of the Brezhnev era, see The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente (1984) by Harry Gelman or Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983) by Robin Edmonds.

(1906 - 1982), leading political figure since the early 1960s, rising to Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and leader of the ruling Politburo.

Leonid Illich ("Lyonya") Brezhnev's rise in Soviet politics was slow but sure. He was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1964, and after April 1966 he took the office of General Secretary. His tenure as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet spanned 1961 to 1963 and from 1977 to 1982. Brezhnev led the ruling Politburo from October 1964, after organizing the ouster of Nikita S. Khushchev, until his death. Although Brezhnev's ultimate successor, the reformer Mikhail S. Gorbachev, would accuse him of presiding over an era of stagnation (zastoi, literally a standstill) in the Soviet Union's economic development and political progress, many Russians remember his era as a "golden age" (zolotoi vek) when living standards steadily improved. This was the result of his policy of borrowing from the West, combined with the twofold doubling of world oil prices and a deliberate decision after 1971 to real-locate production in favor of consumer products and foods. Together with Brezhnev's policy of vainly trying to achieve military superiority over every possible combination of foreign rivals and the growing corruption that he deliberately encouraged, the reallocation from industrial goods to consumption and agriculture did in fact lead to a slowing of the expansion of output that Soviet leaders deemed to constitute economic growth. It was this slowdown that lent credibility to Gorbachev's later charge of stagnation.

Early Career

Brezhnev was born on December 19, 1906, in the east Ukrainian steel town of Kamenskoe, later renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk. His grandfather and father had migrated there from an agricultural village in Kursk province, hoping to find work in the local steel mill. Unlike some of his later Politburo colleagues, who joined the Red Army at age fourteen, Brezhnev evidently played no role in the civil war. At the time of collectivization, having trained in Kursk as a land surveyor, he was working in the Urals where there were few peasant villages to collectivize. In 1931 he abruptly returned to his home city, where he enrolled in a metallurgical institute, joined the Communist Party, and accepted low-level political assignments. Completing his studies in 1935, he trained as a tank officer for one year in eastern Siberia, only to return again to Dneprodzerzhinsk. Often accounted a member of the generation whose political careers were launched when the purges of 1937 and 1938 vacated so many high posts in the Communist Party, Brezhnev received only minor appointments. By 1939 he was no more than a provincial official, supervising the press and party schooling, and he transferred the next year to oversee conversion of the province's industry to armaments production. The German invasion in June 1941 interrupted that uncompleted task, and within a month Brezhnev had been reassigned to the regular army as a political officer. With the rank of colonel, he was charged with keeping track of party enrollments and organizing the troops. Many years later, well into his tenure as General Secretary, efforts were made to glorify him as a war hero, primarily by praising him for regularly visiting the troops at the front; however, he never actually took much part in combat.

Following the war he was recommended to Nikita S. Khrushchev, whom Josef Stalin had assigned to administer the Ukraine as Communist Party chief. Khrushchev presumably approved Brezhnev's assignments, first as Party administrator of the minor Zaporozhe province and later of the more important Dnepropetrovsk province. Although Brezhnev would later claim that Stalin himself had found fault with his work in Dnepropetrovsk, Khrushchev seems to have regarded Brezhnev as an effective troubleshooter and persuaded Stalin to put Brezhnev in charge of the lagging party organization in neighboring Moldavia in 1950. Brezhnev did well enough that he was chosen for membership in the Central Committee, and then inducted into its Presidium, as the ruling Politburo was renamed when Stalin decided to greatly expand its membership. (This expansion, apparently, was the first move in a plan to purge its senior members). But Stalin's death in March 1953 canceled whatever plans he may have harbored. In that same month, Brezhnev was summarily transferred back to the armed forces, where he spent another year supervising political lectures, this time in the navy. Although his postwar political career was temporarily derailed, he had gained the opportunity to form bonds with a number of officials who would take over ranking posts when he became General Secretary. Moreover, his reassignment to the Ministry of Defense enabled him to make additional connections with top military commanders.

Khrushchev's success in the power struggle unleashed by Stalin's death enabled the First Secretary to recall Brezhnev from military duty in 1954. Brezhnev was sent to Kazakhstan to take charge of selecting the Communist Party officials who would execute Khrushchev's plan to turn the so-called Virgin Lands into a massive producer of grain crops. Within eighteen months Brezhnev took the place of his initial superior and successfully led the transformation of the Virgin Lands. This record, combined perhaps with Brezhnev's previous experience, moved Khrushchev to return Brezhnev to Moscow in June 1957 as the Communist Party's overseer of the new strategic missile program and other defense activities. While Brezhnev could claim some credit for the successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957, he had supervised only the last stages of that program. He did not manage to prevent the failure of the initial intercontinental ballistic missile program, on which Khrushchev had placed such high hopes. By 1960 Brezhnev had been shoved aside from overseer of defense matters to the ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, where for the first time he came into extensive contact with officials of foreign governments, particularly in what was then becoming known as the Third World. A stroke suffered by his rival, Frol R. Kozlov, enabled Brezhnev to return to the more powerful post of Secretary of the Central Committee, where Khrushchev regarded him as his informal number two man.

Leader of the Politburo, 1964 - 1982

It was Brezhnev who organized the insider coup against his longtime patron, Khrushchev, spending some six months calling party officials from his country seat at Zavidovo and delicately sounding them out on their attitudes toward the removal of the First Secretary. Khrushchev quickly learned about the brewing conspiracy; but the failures of his strategic rocketry, agricultural, and ambitious housing programs, as well as dissatisfaction with his reorganizations of Party and government, had undermined Khrushchev's authority among Soviet officials. The Leningrad official, Kozlov, on whom Khrushchev had relied as a counterweight to Brezhnev, did not recover from his illness. Khrushchev was thus unable to mount any effective resistance when Brezhnev decided to convene the Central Committee in October 1964 to endorse Khrushchev's removal. Brezhnev did not overplay his own hand, taking only the post of First Secretary for himself and gaining rival Alexei N. Kosygin's consent to Khrushchev's ouster by allowing him to assume Khrushchev's post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers (head of the economy).

The contest between Brezhnev and Kosygin for ascendancy dominated Soviet politics over the next period. As a dictatorship, the Soviet regime could not engender the loyalty of the general populace by allowing citizens to reject candidates for the exercise of power; in other words, it could not let them vote meaningfully. Thus, how to sustain popular allegiance was a recurrent topic of discussion among Soviet leaders, both in public and in private. In the public discussion, Brezhnev took the conventional Soviet stance that the Communist Party could count on the allegiance of workers if it continued its record of heroic accomplishment manifested in the past by the overthrow of tsarism, the industrialization of a backward country, and victory over Germany. He proposed two new heroic accomplishments that the leadership under his guidance should pursue: the transformation of Soviet agriculture through investment in modern technology, and the building of a military power second to none. Kosygin, by contrast, argued that workers would respond to individual incentives in the form of rewards for hard work. These incentives were to be made available by an increase in the production of consumer goods, to be achieved by economic reforms that would decentralize the decision-making process from Moscow ministries to local enterprises, and, not coincidentally, freeing those enterprises from the control of local party secretaries assigned to supervise industrial activity, as Brezhnev had done in his early career.

The contest between these competing visions took almost four years to resolve. Although Kosygin blundered early by interpreting the outcome of the 1964 U.S. presidential election as a sign of American restraint in the Vietnam conflict, Brezhnev equally blundered by underestimating the difficulty, or more likely impossibility, of resolving the Sino-Soviet split. Kosygin sought to protect economic reforms similar to the one he proposed for the Soviet Union, then in progress in the five East European states controlled by the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia, economic reforms suddenly brought about political changes at the top of the Communist Party, impelling its new leader, Alexander Dubcek, to begin retreating from the party's monopoly of power. Brezhnev took advantage of this emergency to align himself with military commanders pressing for the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the restoration of an orthodox communist dictatorship. Introduction of a large Soviet army enabled Czechoslovak communists, working under Brezhnev's personal direction, to remove reformers from power, and the replacement of leaders in Poland and East Germany ended economic reforms there as well. By 1971 proponents of economic reform in Moscow became discouraged by the evident signs of Kosygin's inability to protect adherents of their views, and Brezhnev emerged for the first time as the clear victor in the Soviet power struggle.

According to George Breslauer (1982), Brezhnev used his victory not only to assert his own policy priorities but to incorporate selected variants of Kosygin's proposals into his own programs, both at home and abroad. At home he emerged as a champion of improving standards of living not only by increasing food supplies but also by expanding the assortment and availability of consumer goods. Abroad he now emerged as the architect of U.S.-Soviet cooperation under the name of relaxation of international tensions, known in the West as the policy of détente. Yet Brezhnev represented each of these new initiatives as compatible with sustaining his earlier commitments to a vast expansion of agricultural output and military might, as well as to continuing support for Third World governments hostile to the United States. His rejection of Kosygin's decentralization proposals did nothing to address the growing complexity of managing an expanding economy from a single central office.

Although the policy of détente and the doubling of world oil prices in 1973 and again by the end of the decade made it financially possible for Brezhnev to juggle the competing demands of agriculture, defense, and the consumer sector, there was not enough left over to sustain industrial expansion, which slowed markedly in the last years of his leadership. As the crucial criterion by which communist officials had become accustomed to judging their own success, the slowdown in industrial expansion undermined the self-confidence of the Soviet elite. Brezhnev's policy of cadre stability - gaining support from Communist Party officials by securing them in their positions - developed a gerontocracy that blocked the upward career mobility by which the loyalty of officials had been purchased since Stalin instituted this arrangement in the 1930s. Brezhnev therefore made opportunities available for corruption, bribe-taking, and misuse of official position at all levels of the government, appointing his son-in-law as chief of the national criminal police to assure that these activities would not be investigated. His encouragement of corruption rewarded officials during his lifetime, but it also further sapped their collective morale, and made some of them responsive to the proposals for change by his ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev.

In foreign policy his initially successful policy of détente foundered as his military buildup lent persuasiveness to objections from American conservatives. Soviet backing for the 1973 attack on Israel and for armed takeovers in Africa discredited the U.S. public's faith in the sincerity of the Soviet Union's peaceful intentions. By 1979 the effort to occupy Afghanistan, in a reprise of the Czechoslovak action, landed the Soviet army in a war it proved incapable of winning while compelling President Jimmy Carter to abandon arms control negotiations and to withdraw from the Moscow Olympics. In the summer of 1980 Polish strikers formed the movement known as Solidarity, demonstrating to Soviet officials that Brezhnev had bet wrongly on the combination of military expansion, improved food supplies, and increases in the availability of consumer goods to secure the allegiance of workers in communist-ruled states.

Under the strain of personal responsibility for preserving the Soviet order, Brezhnev's health deteriorated rapidly after the middle 1970s. In 1976 he briefly suffered actual clinical death before being resuscitated; as a result, he was constantly accompanied by modern resuscitation technology bought from the West (which had to be used more than once). Ill health made Brezhnev lethargic; it is unclear, however, what even a more energetic leader could have done to solve the Soviet Union's problems. Despite Brezhnev's torpor, his colleagues within the Politburo and his loyalists, whom he had placed in key posts throughout the apex of the Soviet party and state, continued to see their personal fortunes tied to his leadership. He remained in power until a final illness, which is thought to have been brought on by exposure to inclement weather during the 1982 celebration of the October Revolution anniversary.

Later Reappraisal

For Gorbachev and his adherents, Brezhnev came to personify everything that was wrong with the Soviet regime. The popularity of Gorbachev's program among Western specialists, and the interest generated by the new leader's dynamism after the boring stasis of Brezhnev's later years, precluded a reappraisal of Brezhnev's career until 2002, when a group of younger scholars picked up on Brezhnev's growing popularity among certain members of the Russian population. These people remembered with fondness Brezhnev's alleviation of their or their parents' poverty, a relief made all the more striking by the extreme impoverishment experienced by many in the post-Soviet era. This reassessment may appear unwarranted to those who prize political liberty above marginal increments in material consumption.

Bibliography

Anderson, Richard D., Jr. (1993). Public Politics in an Authoritarian State: Making Foreign Policy in the Brezhnev Politburo. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Bacon, Edwin, and Sandle, Mark, eds. (2002). Brezhnev Reconsidered. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London: George Allen and Unwin, Publishers.

Brezhneva, Luba. (1995). The World I Left Behind, tr. by Geoffrey Polk. New York: Random House.

Dawisha, Karen. (1984). The Kremlin and the Prague Spring. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dornberg, John. (1974). Brezhnev: The Masks of Power. New York: Basic Books.

Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. (1982). Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev: A Short Biography. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press.

—RICHARD D. ANDERSON JR.

1906 - 1982

Soviet politician; president of the USSR, 1960 - 1964 and 1977 - 1982; premier, 1964 - 1982.

Son of a Russian metalworker in the Ukraine and a factory worker himself, Brezhnev went on to study land management and reclamation. He joined the Communist Party (CPSU) in 1931 and was appointed secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk (industrial center in Ukraine) regional party committee in 1939. After World War II, Brezhnev became first secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk Party organization and, subsequently, of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1954, he was promoted to the leadership of the Kazakhstan party organization and placed in charge of Nikita Khrushchev's "virgin land" campaign. Recalled to Moscow in 1956, Brezhnev was appointed Central Committee secretary in charge of heavy industry and capital construction and, in 1957, was graduated to full membership in the Politburo. In 1964, having led the group that ousted Khrushchev, he became secretary-general of the CPSU, remaining in that position until his death in 1982.

In his foreign relations, Brezhnev adhered to many of the policies initiated by Khrushchev while introducing some changes of his own. Thus, he rejected the notion of superpower conflict and insisted that differences between Moscow and Washington be settled by peaceful means. Brezhnev did, however, allocate considerable resources to achieving relative nuclear parity with the United States. In this task he was successful. Like Khrushchev, Brezhnev insisted on superpower competition in developing countries. While Khrushchev distributed Soviet largesse virtually for the asking, however, Brezhnev picked his clients with care. The determining factor was their ability to provide the USSR with tangible benefits (such as naval and air bases) or political advantages in its global competition with the United States. In the Middle East, in particular, the Soviets required naval and air bases to counter the U.S. Sixth Fleet and Polaris submarines. Khrushchev's efforts to obtain the bases failed. Brezhnev succeeded, but only temporarily. Gamal Abdel Nasser's "war of attrition," waged against the Israeli positions along the Suez Canal, led to Israeli deep-penetration raids against Egyptian targets. In desperation, Cairo asked Moscow for help. Brezhnev obliged but on the condition that Soviet naval and air bases be established on Egyptian territory. These important gains, made in 1970, did not last. In 1972, Anwar Sadat ordered the Soviet military advisers and the air force to leave Egypt; the navy followed in 1976. Nevertheless, the USSR had stood by its clients: Moscow backed the Arabs during the wars of 1967 and 1973. In the late 1970s, however, relations with Egypt and Iraq deteriorated sharply. Syria and South Yemen (or the PDRY) remained friendly but, by 1980, the Soviet position in the Middle East had grown much weaker than it had been a decade earlier.

In 1968, upset by the Communist reform movement in Prague, Brezhnev ordered Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. The move was subsequently explained by Moscow's obligation to "protect socialism" in countries where it was being endangered by "anti-Communist elements." This Brezhnev Doctrine was invoked only once in the Middle East: In 1979, Soviet troops crossed into Afghanistan to back its Communist regime against powerful anti-government rebels (mujahidin). A quick victory did not materialize and, by 1982, Soviet forces were bogged down in a stalemated conflict with the anti-Communist opposition, finally withdrawing in 1989.

Bibliography

Dawisha, Karen. Soviet Foreign Policy towards Egypt. New York: St. Martin's, 1979.

Freedman, Robert O. Soviet Policy toward the Middle East since1970, 3d edition. New York: Praeger, 1982.

— OLES M. SMOLANSKY

A Soviet political leader of the twentieth century. He seized the leadership of the Soviet Communist party from Nikita Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev eventually became the head of government of the Soviet Union and served until his death in 1982. Brezhnev had the Soviet army invade Afghanistan in 1979 to keep a government friendly to the Soviets in power. He also sent soldiers into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to depose a government he considered unacceptable. He reached agreements with the United States on reducing the two nations' stock of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union under Brezhnev was marked by a stagnating economy and widespread corruption.

"Brezhnev" redirects here. For other uses, see Brezhnev (disambiguation).

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Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev Леонид Ильич Брежнев Леонід Ілліч Брежнєв
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
In office 14 October 1964 – 10 November 1982
Preceded by	Nikita Khrushchev
Succeeded by	Yuri Andropov
Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
In office 7 May 1960 – 15 July 1964
Preceded by	Kliment Voroshilov
Succeeded by	Anastas Mikoyan
In office 16 June 1977 – 10 November 1982
Preceded by	Nikolai Podgorny
Succeeded by	Yuri Andropov (1983) Vasily Kuznetsov (acting)
Born	19 December 1906(1906-12-19) Kamenskoe, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	10 November 1982 (aged 75) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian/Ukrainian
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Spouse(s)	Viktoria Brezhneva
Profession	Metallurgical Engineer, Civil servant
Signature

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (Russian: Леони́д Ильи́ч Бре́жнев​ (help·info), Ukrainian: Леоні́д Іллі́ч Бре́жнєв, 19 December [O.S. 6 December] 1906 – 10 November 1982) was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and thus political leader of the Soviet Union) from 1964 to 1982, serving in that position longer than anyone except Joseph Stalin. He was twice Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state), from 7 May 1960 to 15 July 1964, then from 16 June 1977 to his death on 10 November 1982.

Contents 1 Rise to power 2 Brezhnev and Khrushchev 3 Party leader 4 Flight incident 5 Stagnation of the economy 6 Last years 7 Death and legacy 8 In Popular Culture 9 References 10 External links

Rise to power

Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoe (now Dniprodzerzhynsk) in Ukraine, to Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and his wife Natalia Denisovna.^{[citation needed]} Like many youths in the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, he received a technical education, at first in land management where he started as a land surveyor and then in metallurgy. He graduated from the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum and became a metallurgical engineer in the iron and steel industries of eastern Ukraine. He joined the Communist Party youth organization, the Komsomol in 1923 and the Party itself in 1931.^[1] At different times he would describe himself as Ukrainian, or later on as he moved through party lines as a Russian.^[2] During his rule there was Russification in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldavia^[3]: the percentage of children taught their native languages in those countries dropped^[4], native-language media was restricted and "nationalists" were jailed.

A 1936 photo of Leonid Brezhnev.

In 1935-36, Brezhnev was drafted for obligatory army service, and after taking courses at a tank school, he served as a political commissar in a tank factory. Later in 1936, he became director of the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum (technical college). In 1936, he was transferred to the regional center of Dnipropetrovsk and, in 1939, he became Party Secretary in Dnipropetrovsk, in charge of the city's important defense industries.

Brezhnev belonged to the first generation of Soviet Communists who had no adult memories of Russia before the revolution, and who were too young to have participated in the leadership struggles in the Communist Party which followed Lenin's death in 1924. By the time Brezhnev joined the party, Joseph Stalin was its undisputed leader. Those who survived Stalin's Great Purge of 1937-39 could gain rapid promotions, since the purges opened up many positions in the senior and middle ranks of the Party and state.

Brezhnev as political commissar in the Great Patriotic War

In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and, like most middle-ranking Party officials, Brezhnev was immediately drafted. He worked to evacuate Dnipropetrovsk's industries to the east of the Soviet Union before the city fell to the Germans on 26 August and then was assigned as a political commissar. In October, Brezhnev was made deputy of political administration for the Southern Front, with the rank of Brigade-Commissar.

In 1942, when Ukraine was occupied by the Germans, Brezhnev was sent to the Caucasus as deputy head of political administration of the Transcaucasian Front. In April 1943, he became head of the Political Department of the 18th Army. Later that year, the 18th Army became part of the 1st Ukrainian Front, as the Red Army regained the initiative and advanced westwards through Ukraine. The Front's senior political commissar was Nikita Khrushchev, who became an important patron of Brezhnev's career. At the end of the war in Europe Brezhnev was chief political commissar of the 4th Ukrainian Front which entered Prague after the German surrender. In August 1946, Brezhnev left the Red Army with the rank of Major General. He had spent the entire war as a commissar rather than a military commander. After working on reconstruction projects in Ukraine he again became First Secretary in Dnipropetrovsk. In 1950, he became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's highest legislative body. Later that year he was appointed Party First Secretary in Moldavia. In 1952, he became a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee and was introduced as a candidate member into the Presidium (formerly the Politburo).

Brezhnev and Khrushchev

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v • d • e

Brezhnev met Nikita Khrushchev in 1931, shortly after joining the party. Before long, he became Khrushchev's protégé as he continued his rise through the ranks. He was Party First Secretary of the Moldavian SSR from 3 November 1950 to 16 April 1952. As first secretary of Communist Party of Moldavia, Brezhnev liquidated and deported thousands of ethnic Romanians from Moldavian SSR and instituted forced collectivization. During Brezhnev's time there, he was responsible for the removal of as many as 250,000 people from Moldavian SSR to other parts of the Soviet Union.

Stalin died in March 1953, and in the reorganization that followed the Presidium was abolished and a smaller Politburo reconstituted. Although Brezhnev was not made a Politburo member, he was instead appointed head of the Political Directorate of the Army and the Navy, with rank of Lieutenant-General, a very senior position. This was probably due to the new power of his patron Khrushchev, who had succeeded Stalin as Party General Secretary. On 7 May 1955, he was made Party First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR, also an important post.

In February 1956, Brezhnev was recalled to Moscow, promoted to candidate member of the Politburo and assigned control of the defense industry, the space program, heavy industry, and capital construction. He was now a senior member of Khrushchev's entourage, and, in June 1957, he backed Khrushchev in his struggle with the Stalinist old guard in the Party leadership, the so-called "Anti-Party Group" led by Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich as well as Dmitri Shepilov. Following the defeat of the old guard, Brezhnev became a full member of the Politburo. In 1959, Brezhnev became Second Secretary of the Central Committee and, in May 1960, was promoted to the post of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, making him nominal head of state although real power resided with Khrushchev as Party Secretary.

Until about 1962, Khrushchev's position as Party leader was secure, but as the leader aged he grew more erratic and his performance undermined the confidence of his fellow leaders. The Soviet Union's mounting economic problems also increased the pressure on Khrushchev's leadership. Outwardly, Brezhnev remained conspicuously loyal to Khrushchev, but, in 1963, he became involved in the plot to remove the leader from power, possibly leading the plot by some accounts, like Gennadii Voronov's^[5]. Alexey Kosygin, Nikolay Podgorny, Alexander Shelepin and some other high officials were also involved in the plan. In that year Brezhnev succeeded Frol Kozlov, Khrushchev's protege, as Secretary of the Central Committee, making him Khrushchev's likely successor.

On 14 October 1964, while Khrushchev was on holiday, the conspirators struck. Brezhnev and Podgorny appealed to the Central Committee, blaming Khrushchev for economic failures, and accusing him of voluntarism and immodest behavior. Influenced by the Brezhnev allies, Politburo members voted to remove Khrushchev from office. Brezhnev was appointed Party First Secretary; Aleksey Kosygin was appointed Prime Minister, and Anastas Mikoyan became head of state (In 1965 Mikoyan retired and was succeeded by Podgorny).

Party leader

Richard Nixon and Brezhnev meeting at the White House, 19 June 1973

Gerald Ford and Brezhnev meeting in Vladivostok, November, 1974

During the Khrushchev years Brezhnev had supported the leader's denunciations of Stalin's arbitrary rule, the rehabilitation of many of the victims of Stalin's purges, and the cautious liberalization of Soviet intellectual and cultural policy. But as soon as he became leader, Brezhnev began to reverse this process, and developed an increasingly conservative and regressive attitude. In a May 1965 speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of the victory over Germany, Brezhnev mentioned Stalin positively for the first time. In April 1966, he took the title General Secretary, which had been Stalin's title until 1952. The trial of the writers Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966—the first such trials since Stalin's day—marked the reversion to a repressive cultural policy. Under Yuri Andropov the state security service (the KGB) regained much of the power it had enjoyed under Stalin, although there was no return to the purges of the 1930s and 1940s.

The first crisis of Brezhnev's regime came in 1968, with the attempt by the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia, under Alexander Dubček, to liberalize the Communist system (see Prague Spring). In July, Brezhnev publicly criticized the Czech leadership as "revisionist" and "anti-Soviet" and, in August, he orchestrated the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the removal of the Dubček leadership. The invasion led to public protests by dissidents in the Soviet Union. Brezhnev's assertion that the Soviet Union had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of its satellites to "safeguard socialism" became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, although it was really a restatement of existing Soviet policy, as Khrushchev had shown in Hungary in 1956.

Under Brezhnev, relations with China continued to deteriorate, following the Sino-Soviet split which had broken out in the early 1960s. In 1965, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Moscow for discussions, but there was no resolution of the conflict. In 1969, Soviet and Chinese troops fought a series of clashes along their border on the Ussuri River. Brezhnev also continued Soviet support for North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. In 1962, Brezhnev became an honorary citizen of Belgrade.^[6] On 22 January 1969, a Soviet Army officer, Viktor Ilyin, tried to assassinate Brezhnev.^[7]

The thawing of Sino-American relations beginning in 1971, however, marked a new phase in international relations. To prevent the formation of an anti-Soviet U.S.-China alliance, Brezhnev opened a new round of negotiations with the U.S. In May 1972, President Richard Nixon visited Moscow, and the two leaders signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), marking the beginning of the "détente" era. He received the Lenin Peace Prize as a result. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 officially ended the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, removing a major obstacle to Soviet-U.S. relations. In May, Brezhnev visited West Germany, and, in June, he made a state visit to the U.S.

The high point of the Brezhnev "détente" era was the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, which recognized the postwar frontiers in eastern and central Europe and, in effect, legitimized Soviet hegemony over the region. In exchange, the Soviet Union agreed that "participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion." But these undertakings were never honoured, and political opposition to the détente process mounted in the U.S. as optimistic rhetoric about the "relaxation of tensions" was not matched by any internal liberalization in the Soviet Union or its satellites. The issue of the right to emigrate for Soviet Jews became an increasing irritant in Soviet relations with the U.S. A summit between Brezhnev and President Gerald Ford in Vladivostok in November 1974 failed to resolve these issues. (See Jackson-Vanik amendment)

Leonid Brezhnev and Gerald Ford are signing joint communiqué on the SALT treaty in Vladivostok

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union reached the peak of its political and strategic power in relation to the U.S. The SALT I treaty effectively established parity in nuclear weapons between the two superpowers, the Helsinki Treaty legitimized Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe, and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal weakened the prestige of the U.S. Under Admiral Sergei Gorshkov the Soviet Union also became a global naval power for the first time. The Soviet Union extended its diplomatic and political influence in the Middle East and Africa. Soviet ally Cuba successfully intervened militarily in the 1975 civil war in Angola and then in the 1977-78 Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia. USSR military intervention was minimal, but Soviet arms and advisers entered these conflicts along with Cuban forces.

During this period, Brezhnev consolidated his domestic position. In June 1977, he forced the retirement of Podgorny and became once again Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, making this position equivalent to that of an executive president. While Kosygin remained Prime Minister until shortly before his death in 1980, Brezhnev was clearly dominant in the leadership from 1977 onwards. In May 1976, he made himself a Marshal of the Soviet Union, the first "political Marshal" since the Stalin era. Since Brezhnev had never held a military command, this step aroused resentment among professional officers, but their power and prestige under Brezhnev's regime ensured their continuing support. It was also during this time when his health showed signs of decline.

Flight incident

At 9 February 1961 when Brezhnev (then Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR) was en route to Guinea Republic on a state visit, his IL-18 plane was attacked by a number of French fighters which opened fire. The pilot Boris Bugaev managed to successfully evade the attack.^[8]

Stagnation of the economy

Main article: Brezhnev stagnation

Both Soviet power internationally and Brezhnev's power domestically rested on a strong Soviet economy. But Soviet agriculture increasingly could not feed the urban population, let alone provide the rising standard of living which the government promised as the fruits of "mature socialism", and on which industrial productivity depended.

These factors combined and reinforced each other through the second half of the 1970s. The enormous expenditure on the armed forces and on prestige projects such as the space program or the Baikal Amur Mainline, aggravated by the need to import food grains at high market prices, reduced the scope for investment in industrial modernization or improving standards of living. The response was a huge "informal economy" (see Black Market) to provide a market for limited consumer goods and services. This, along with unsolved problem of corruption among regional officials, decreased Brezhnev's popular support during his rule. Several high regional officials were put under trial on corruption issues as soon as Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev.

Carter and Brezhnev sign the SALT II treaty, 18 June 1979, in Vienna

Last years

The last years of Brezhnev's rule were marked by a growing personality cult. He was well known for his love of medals (he received a total of 114), so in December 1976, for his 70th birthday, he was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union. The award, the highest order of the Soviet Union, is normally given for heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society. Brezhnev received the award, which comes with the order of Lenin and the Gold Star, three more times in celebration of his birthdays. Brezhnev also received the Order of Victory, the highest Soviet military award, in 1978, becoming the only recipient receiving the order after the end of World War II. Brezhnev's controversial award was, however, revoked posthumously in 1989 for not meeting the requirements for the award.

This slew of military awards was justified by his participation in the comparatively little-known WWII episode, when a group of Soviet marines beat off a series of German attempts to destroy the Soviets' beachhead, nicknamed Malaya Zemlya, on the Black Sea coast near Novorossiysk. By the early 1980s, Brezhnev's book on the subject, followed by his other books, one on the Virgin Lands Campaign^[9] and another on the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine's industries, were translated into scores of languages (including such an unlikely choice as Yiddish^[10]) and became (at least on paper) compulsory study material in every Soviet school. It is now believed^{[by whom?]} that the books were written by some of his "court writers". At the urging of Brezhnev - or to flatter the elder leader - the Malaya Zemlya episode was tremendously hyped up: a movie was filmed, featuring a song by Aleksandra Pakhmutova.

Unlike the cult of Stalin, however, the Brezhnev cult was widely seen^{[by whom?]} as hollow and cynical^{[citation needed]}, and, in the absence of the purge, could command neither respect nor fear, resulting in a lack of reception and apathy^{[citation needed]}. How much of this Brezhnev was aware of is unclear, since he often occupied himself with international summitry (such as the SALT II treaty, signed with Jimmy Carter in June 1979), and frequently overlooked important domestic matters. These were left to his subordinates, some of whom, like his agriculture chief Mikhail Gorbachev, became increasingly convinced that fundamental reform was needed. There was, however, no plotting in the leadership against Brezhnev, and he was allowed to grow increasingly feeble and isolated in power as his health declined. His declining health was rarely – if ever  – mentioned in the Soviet newspapers, but it was practically evident at his public appearances and with the declining political and economic situation.

Among Brezhnev's legacy to his successors was the December 1979 decision to intervene in Afghanistan, where a communist regime was struggling with the US-sponsored Islamist insurrection and other forces to hold power. This decision was not taken by the Politburo, but by Brezhnev's inner circle at an informal meeting. It led to the sudden end of the détente era, with the imposition of a grain embargo by the U.S., exacerbating the Soviet economic problems.

In March 1982, Brezhnev suffered a major stroke, and, thereafter, increasingly struggled to retain control.

Death and legacy

By the mid-1970s "one of his closest companions was a KGB nurse, who fed him a steady stream of pills without consulting his doctors"^[11]. He had developed narcotic dependence on sleeping pill nembutal^[12] and died of a heart attack on 10 November 1982. He was honoured with one of the largest and most impressive funerals in the world. A four-day period of nationwide mourning was announced. His body was placed in an open coffin in House of Trade Unions in Moscow. Inside the hall, mourners shuffled up a marble staircase beneath chandeliers draped in black gauze. On the stage, amid a veritable garden of flowers, a complete symphony orchestra in black tailcoats played classical music. Brezhnev's embalmed body, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black-and-red tie, laid in an open coffin banked with carnations, red roses and tulips, faced the long queue of mourners. At the right side of the hall, in the front row of seats reserved for the dead leader's family, his wife Viktoria, sat along with their two children, Galina and Yuri.

Then, on 15 November the day of the funeral, classes in schools and universities were cancelled and all roads into Moscow were closed. The ceremony was broadcast on every television channel. The coffin was taken by an armoured vehicle to Red Square. As the coffin reached the middle of the Red Square it was taken out of the carriage it was placed on, and with its lid removed, it was placed on a red-draped bier facing the Lenin Mausoleum. At the top of the Lenin Mausoleum lavish eulogies were delivered by General Secretary Andropov, Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, Academy of Sciences President Anatoli Alexandrov and a factory worker. Then, the politburo members descended from the mausoleum and the most important of them, Andropov, Chernenko and Gromyko on the left and by Premier Nikolai Tikhonov, Defense Minister Dimitry Ustinov and Moscow party leader Grishin on the right, carried the open coffin to another bier behind the mausoleum, in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. At exactly 12:45 p.m Brezhnev's coffin was lowered to the grave as foghorns blared, joining with sirens, factory whistles, and gunfire.

Following Brezhnev's death, the Volga River valley city of Naberezhnye Chelny was renamed "Brezhnev" in his honor.^[13] In less than five years, however, the original name was restored. ^[14] An outlying area of Moscow, the Cherry Tree District (Cheryomushky Rayon), was returned to its former name, as was Red Guards Square.^[14].

Commemorative plaque of Brezhnev, donated to the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, Germany

Brezhnev presided over the Soviet Union for longer than any man except Stalin. He is criticized for a prolonged era of stagnation called the 'Brezhnev Stagnation', in which fundamental economic problems were ignored and the Soviet political system was allowed to decline. Intervention in Afghanistan, which was one of the major decisions of his career, also significantly undermined both international standing and internal strength of the Soviet Union. In Brezhnev's defense, it may be said that the Soviet Union reached unprecedented and never-repeated levels of power, prestige, and internal calm under his rule. A Public Opinion Foundation poll conducted in 2006 showed that 61% of the Russian people viewed Brezhnev's era as good for the country.^[15] A research by VTsIOM in 2007 showed that most of the Russian people would like to live during Brezhnev's era rather than any other period of Russian history during the 20th century^[16]. Furthermore, unlike his predecessor Khrushchev, he was a skillful negotiator on the diplomatic stage. The task of attempting to reform that system following his rule would be left to wait three years later to the reformist Gorbachev.

Brezhnev lived in 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, Moscow. During vacations, he also lived in his Gosdacha in Zavidovo. He was married to Viktoria Petrovna (1912-1995). Her final four years she lived virtually alone, abandoned by everybody. She had suffered for a long time from diabetes and was nearly blind in her last years. He had a daughter, Galina Brezhneva (officially, a press agent) (1929-1998), and a son, Yuri (born 1933) (a trade official). Yuri's son, Andrei Brezhnev (born 1961), has accused the Communist Party of the Russian Federation of deviating from communist ideology and launched the unsuccessful All-Russian Communist Movement in the late 1990s. ^[17]

In Popular Culture

• Brezhnev was famously depicted passionately kissing GDR leader Erich Honecker in a satirical mural entitled "Brotherhood Kiss" on the Berlin Wall, painted by artist Dmitri Vrubel.

References

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2009)

1. ^ "Leonid Brezhnev". Travel and History. Online Highways. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1883.html. Retrieved 7 September 2009. 
2. ^ Bacon, Edwin; Mark Sandle (2003). Brezhnev reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 033379463X. http://books.google.ca/books?id=fPZPP6Jv58sC&dq=brezhnev+ukrainian&lr=&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0. ^{[Full citation needed]}
3. ^ Bacon, Edwin; Mark Sandle (2003). Brezhnev reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 72. ISBN 033379463X. http://books.google.ca/books?id=fPZPP6Jv58sC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA72. 
4. ^ Bacon, Edwin; Mark Sandle (2003). Brezhnev reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 73. ISBN 033379463X. http://books.google.ca/books?id=fPZPP6Jv58sC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA73. 
5. ^ Gennadii Vornov, "Ot ottepeli do zastoya", Izvestiya 18. November, 1988, p. 3. (in Polish)
6. ^ Korlat, N (18 November 2008). "Đilas podržao predlog Đilas podržao predlog" (in Serbian). Blic. http://blic.rs/beograd.php?id=66015 Đilas podržao predlog. Retrieved 7 September 2009. ^{[verification needed]}
7. ^ А.Железняков. Энциклопедия "Космонавтика". Выстрелы у Боровицких
8. ^ Medvedev R.A. Personality and Epoch. Political portrait of L.I.Brezhnev. Moscow, 1991 vol.1
9. ^ Nabi Abdullaev. "Brezhnev Remembered Fondly 100 Years Since Birth". St. Petersburg Times. http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=19803. 
10. ^ "Yiddish Terminology and Subject Textbooks: Agriculture". http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/library/term-yi.htm.  The three Brezhnev's "masterpieces" were published in Yiddish by the Sovetskiy Pisatel Publishers in 1979 in one volume, under the titles Di Klayner erd; Vidergeburt; Tselina. See also the bibliography entry.
11. ^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2000). The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-14-028487-7. page 266
12. ^ Russian: Валерий Болдин, Виктор Голиков Генсек Брежнев Газета «Завтра», 48(471), 26.11.2002
13. ^ Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the Twentieth Century, Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Vic., 2006.
14. ^ ^{a b} "World Notes-- Soviet Union: What's in A Name?". TIME. Jan. 18, 1988. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,966503,00.html. Retrieved 7 September 2009. 
15. ^ Angus Reid Strategies. Russians Satisfied with Brezhnev’s Tenure
16. ^ "Best leaders:Brezhnev and Putin" (in Russian). Rosbalt. 25 April 2007. http://www.rosbalt.ru/2007/04/25/294470.html. Retrieved 7 September 2009. 
17. ^ Myers, Steven Lee (10 August 2002). "THE SATURDAY PROFILE; A Different Kind of Brezhnev in the Making". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/world/the-saturday-profile-a-different-kind-of-brezhnev-in-the-making.html?pagewanted=all. Retrieved 7 September 2009. 

• Yuri Shapoval, "The General Secretary of "stagnation". 19th of December is the centennial anniversary of Leonid Brezhnev", Zerkalo Nedeli (The Mirror Weekly), 16 - 22 December 2006.
• http://www.wpb.be/doc/doc/breznjev.htm

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Leonid Brezhnev

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Leonid Brezhnev

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Leonid Brezhnev

• Brezhnev Rap by Notorische Reflexe, 1983
• Our Course: Peace and Socialism Collection of Brezhnev's 1973 speeches
• Leonid Brezhnev at Find a Grave

Party political offices
Preceded by Nicolae Coval	First Secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party 1950–1952	Succeeded by Dimitri Gladki
Preceded by Panteleimon Ponomarenko	First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party 1955–1956	Succeeded by Ivan Yakovlev
Preceded by Nikita Khrushchev	General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1964–1982	Succeeded by Yuri Andropov
Political offices
Preceded by Kliment Voroshilov	Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 1960–1964	Succeeded by Anastas Mikoyan
Preceded by Nikolai Podgorny	Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 1977–1982	Succeeded by Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov

Links to related articles v • d • e Leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin · Joseph Stalin · Nikita Khrushchev · Leonid Brezhnev · Yuri Andropov · Konstantin Chernenko · Mikhail Gorbachev v • d • e Heads of state of the Soviet Union Chairman of the Central Executive Committee 1922–38 Kalinin Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 1938-89 Kalinin · Shvernik · Voroshilov · Brezhnev · Mikoyan · Podgorny · Brezhnev · Kuznetsov · Andropov · Kuznetsov · Chernenko · Kuznetsov · Gromyko · Gorbachev Chairman of the Supreme Soviet 1989–91 Gorbachev President 1990–91 Gorbachev · Yanayev · Gorbachev Italics indicates Acting Chairman v • d • e Leaders of Moldova Moldavian SSR First Secretaries Piotr Borodin • Nikita Salogor (acting) • Nicolae Coval • Leonid Brezhnev • Dimitri Gladki • Zinovie Serdiuk • Ivan Bodiul • Semion Grossu • Petru Lucinschi • Grigore Eremei Moldova Presidents Mircea Snegur • Petru Lucinschi • Vladimir Voronin • Mihai Ghimpu (acting) 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Persondata
NAME	Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Брежнев, Леонид Ильич
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Soviet politician
DATE OF BIRTH	19 December 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH	Kamenskoe, Imperial Russia
DATE OF DEATH	10 November 1982
PLACE OF DEATH	Moscow, Russian SFSR

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