Background

Ethnicity: Brezhnev's ethnicity was specified as Ukrainian in main documents including his passport, and Russian in some others.

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoye, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk in 1936, now Kamianske, Ukraine) to the family of Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and Natalia Denisovna Mazalova. His father was from the village of Brezhnevo, Kursk region and his mother's ancestry was from Enakievo, Ukraine. Brezhnev's father was a technical worker at a metallurgical plant - a “fabricator.” He had younger brother Yakov and sister Vera. He was a witness of the civil war and famine during his childhood years.

Education

In 1915, Leonid Brezhnev was admitted to the Kamenskoye Male Gymnasium (since 1918 the First Labor School), which he graduated in 1921. In 1923-1927 he studied at the Kursk Land Management and Reclamation College. There he joined the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) in 1923. In September 1930 he entered the Kalinin Institute of Agricultural Engineering of Moscow, and in September 1931 transferred to the extramural faculty (labor department) of the Arsenichev Metallurgical Institute of Kamenskoye. On May 5, 1935, he received a diploma with the qualification of a thermal power engineer.

Career

At the time of collectivization, having trained in Kursk as a land surveyor, Brezhnev was working in the Urals where there were few peasant villages to collectivize. In 1931, he abruptly returned to his home city, 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, Brezhnev was recommended to Nikita Khrushchev, whom Josef Stalin had assigned to administer 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 political rival, Frol 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.

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 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 United States 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. The 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.

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 United States-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 United States 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.

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.

Achievements

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  Foremost amongst Brezhnev’s achievements would be the détente period in the early 1970s, when the Soviets and Americans came to a number of agreements that reduced Cold War pressures and the alarming threat of nuclear war. Brezhnev gave the Soviet Union a formidable military-industrial base capable of supplying large numbers of the most modern weapons. Among the obvious advantages of his period of power are the achievements in space exploration, science and technology, aviation, shipbuilding, metalworking, and energy. Roads were being built rapidly, the housing and public utilities sector was developing quickly and crime was being seriously combated. During the Brezhnev era, 1.6 billion square meters of housing was built with 161 million people receiving new houses during those years.
  
  In 1976 Brezhnev was made marshal of the Soviet Union, thus becoming the only other party leader after Stalin to hold the highest military rank. The system of collective leadership ended with his dismissal of Podgorny as a chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in May 1977 and Brezhnev’s election to that position the following month. He thus became the first person in Soviet history to hold both the leadership of the party and of the state. He was awarded with more than 100 orders and medals from the Soviet Union and other states.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Trilogy 1979
  • Our course: Peace and socialism: collection of speeches 1974
  • For greater unity of Communists, for a fresh upsurge of the anti-imperialist struggle 1969
  • Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the immediate tasks of the Party in home and foreign policy 1981
  • Soviet Youth 1973
  • Fifty years of great achievements of socialism 1970
  • The fiftieth anniversary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1972
  • On the Policy of the Soviet Union and the International Situation 1973
  • Reminiscences 1981
  • Soviet Peace Strategy: 1917 - 1977 1977
  • For a just, democratic peace, for the security of nations and international co-operation 1973
  • How It Was: The War and Postwar Reconstruction in the Soviet Union 1978
  • Fundamental law of the Socialist State of the whole people: On the draft constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 1978
  • Following Lenin's Course, Speeches and Articles 1972
  • The Soviet view of NATO: Speech by Leonid I. Brezhnev, April 24, 1967 1967
  • Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Twenty-third Congress of the CPSU 1966

Religion

In his youth, Brezhnev was an anti-churchman and a militant atheist, in his old age, in a conversation with Jimmy Carter, he used the phrase "God will not forgive us if we fail [with the continuation of the policy of détente and disarmament]" and appreciated some elements of traditional rites simply as part of Russian national customs. He also ordered the renovation of the Saviour's Transfiguration Cathedral in Dnipro. Nevertheless, he remained an atheist like the majority of the members of the Party.

Politics

Brezhnev joined the Communist Party on 24 October 1931. As members of the old intelligentsia were replaced by newly trained workers (the vydvizhentsy) and the purges took their toll on staff, Brezhnev was able to begin his political career.

The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet foreign policy outlined in 1968 which called for the use of Warsaw Pact (but Russian-dominated) troops to intervene in any Eastern Bloc nation which was seen to compromise communist rule and Soviet domination. It could be doing this either by trying to leave the Soviet sphere of influence or even moderate its policies rather than stay in the small parameters allowed to them by Russia. The Doctrine was seen clearly in the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring movement in Czechoslovakia which caused it to be first outlined.

Views

Brezhnev believed that no reforms were necessary and did not take much interest in what Kosygin was trying to do. Eventually, his attitude let the reforms fade away, and by 1968, a period of economic and political frost had set in: Soviet tanks in Prague; massive trials of dissidents; attempts at re-Stalinization; and the beginning of the end of Alexander Tvardovsky's magazine Novy Mir, a mouthpiece of the liberal intelligentsia.

Brezhnev had an intention to unite a "new historical entity - the Soviet people." The main asset Brezhnev used to unite the nation was intangible: the memory of the war, sacred and immutable with its own ironclad mythology. The first thing he did upon coming to power was turned Victory Day on May 9 into the nation's main holiday (and a day off) in 1965. This holiday had a patriotic rather than Marxist-Leninist connotation. Leonid Brezhnev believed in the influence of the war mythology, which rested on a package of legends. In 1967, Brezhnev's liberal-minded speechwriters invited popular writer Konstantin Simonov to take part in writing a speech devoted to the inauguration of a monument on the Mamayev Hill in Stalingrad.

The two war veterans - Brezhnev, a former political instructor, and Simonov, a legendary war correspondent, talked through the whole night. "What a man!" the elated Brezhnev exclaimed. But when Simonov complained that the publication of his wartime diaries was prohibited for ideological reasons, Brezhnev told him: "Who needs your truth? It's still too early for it." The nation-uniting mythology required a package of ideologically impeccable legends rather than the truth about the war, which could have undermined the very foundations of Brezhnev's system.

Quotations: "Today progress is so swift in all fields that the education received by young people is only a foundation that requires the constant acquisition of knowledge."

"The substance of socialist democracy lies in efficient socialist organization of all society for the sake of every individual, and in the socialist discipline of every individual for the sake of all society."

"As you know, I am not a writer but a Party functionary. But like every Communist I consider myself to have been mobilized by Party propaganda and deem it my duty to participate actively in the work of our press."

"It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war."

"Modern science and technology have reached a level where there is the grave danger that a weapon even more terrible than nuclear weapons may be developed. The reason and conscience of mankind dictate the need to erect an insuperable barrier to the development of such a weapon."

Membership

Brezhnev joined the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (the Komsomol) in 1923.

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  All-Union Leninist Young Communist League , Soviet Union

  1923 - 1930

Personality

In his memoirs, former President Richard Nixon alleged that Brezhnev was a "ladies man," and had appeared at Camp David with his own personal masseuse. Brezhnev had a reputation as a lover of good food and drink, fast cars - which he collected - and hunting. Brezhnev talked extensively about his weight, which he sought vainly to keep under control, and often joked about his excessive cigarette smoking, which was thought to have aggravated his health problems. Brezhnev often greeted other leaders with the centuries-old Russian tradition of triple kisses, but not everybody enjoyed it, and some did their best to escape. For example, Cuban leader Fidel Castro decided to emerge from his plane at Moscow’s airport with a cigar in his mouth. The kiss between Brezhnev and Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito was allegedly so strong that Tito’s lip began bleeding.

Physical Characteristics: 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.

Quotes from others about the person

• One of the world's most important figures for nearly two decades." - Ronald Reagan, President of the United States
  
  "When the Soviet Union came to be run by a valetudinarian mafioso like Brezhnev, the thing itself had fallen into self-contempt." - Edward Pearce, English political journalist and writer
  
  "All ideological differences set apart, I cannot help having a sincere admiration for Mr Brezhnev. He is to all appearances an outstanding diplomat. He abides by the policy of peaceful co-existence as laid down by the Helsinki agreement. And he has succeeded in making his country as powerful as it is today: the first nuclear power in the world, soon to be he first maritime power; as for the land and air forces, their superiority is so great that it bears no comparison." - Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of the Imperial State of Iran

Interests

• hunting, domino, fast driving

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels

• Politicians

  Vladimir Lenin

• Writers

  Dmitry Merezhkovsky

• Artists

  Dmitry Nalbandyan

• Sport & Clubs

  soccer

• Music & Bands

  Klavdiya Shulzhenko

Connections

Leonid Brezhnev married Victoria Petrovna Denisova in 1928. They had two children, Yuri and Galina.

Father:

Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev

Mother:

Natalia Denisovna Mazalova

Brother:

Yakov Ilyich Brezhne

Sister:

Vera Ilyinichna Brezhneva

Wife:

Victoria Petrovna Denisova

Daughter:

Galina Leonidovna Brezhneva

Son:

Yuri Leonidovich Brezhnev

Co-worker:

Alexei Kosygin

Acquaintance:

Richard Nixon

Acquaintance:

Jimmy Carter

Acquaintance:

Nicolae Ceaușescu

Acquaintance:

Muammar Gaddafi

Acquaintance:

Fidel Castro Ruz

References

• Leonid I. Brezhnev Pages From His Life
• Time Magazine February 21 1964 Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev
• The World I Left Behind: Pieces of a Past