Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (19 December 190610 November 1982) was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982. He also held office as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from 1960 to 1964 and later from 1977 to 1982. His tenure as General Secretary was second only to Joseph Stalin's in duration.
Brezhnev was born to a working-class family in Kamenskoye within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. After the October Revolution created the Soviet Union, he joined the ruling Communist party's youth league in 1923 before becoming an official party member in 1929. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he joined the Red Army as a commissar and rose rapidly through the ranks to become a major general during World War II. After the war ended, Brezhnev was promoted to the party's Central Committee in 1952 and became a full member of the Politburo by 1957. In 1964, he took part in the removal of Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union and replaced him as First Secretary of the CPSU. When Khrushchev was ousted, Brezhnev formed a triumvirate alongside Premier Alexei Kosygin and CC Secretary Nikolai Podgorny that initially led the country in Khrushchev's place. By the end of the 1960s, he had successfully consolidated power to become the dominant figure within the Soviet leadership. "In October 1964, Brezhnev became First Secretary (renamed General Secretary in 1966) of the Party with Aleksei Kosygin taking over as USSR Prime Minister, and Nikolai Podgorny becoming Soviet President. Just as after Stalin's death there was a collective leadership but Brezhnev wanted to become boss. His opportunity came in 1968 when the Prague Spring developed to such an extent that it appeared that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia might lose power. In August 1968 the Soviet Union and several of its allies intervened and began the process of 'normalisation'. Brezhnev, as Party leader, took prime position during the conflict because Czechoslovakia was a socialist country and therefore under the supervision of the Soviet Communist Party. Kosygin who had launched some useful reforms, was pushed aside as economic orthodoxy became the order of the day. He lacked the political guts to fight for primacy. By 1969, one can regard Brezhnev as top dog." "...For several years after Khrushchev's demise [in 1964], power within the [Soviet] collective leadership remained both dispersed and balanced: Nikolai Podgorny, the hard-line head of state, dominated relations with Third World countries; Prime Minister Kosygin handled the economy and urged détente with the West; Brezhnev, the party secretary, looked after Eastern Europe, harping on the threat from Germany and the United States. Gradually, in the late 1960s, Brezhnev maneuvered his way into preeminence. Partly, like Stalin and Khrushchev before him, he used his control of the party apparatus to promote allies and topple enemies. But he also raised his profile by moving into the foreign-policy arena, stealing some of Kosygin's ideas while retaining his own reputation as a hard-liner on security. It was Brezhnev who put the new 'peace program' to the twenty-fourth party congress in April 1971. During the summer, Gromyko indicated that in future Nixon should write to Brezhnev, and not Kosygin, about foreign policy." "The record suggest that at least up to the late 1960s the power and authority of the new General Secretary were hardly adequate to ensure coherent and expeditious top-level decision-making. From about 1969 [Brezhnev's] primacy gradually became more evident and soon a 'cult' emerged embodying formulas that marked him out as clearly superordinated over the other party and state leaders. Gradually he succeeded in insinuating old cronies into high level posts and the first of them appeared in the top executive bodies. In 1977 Brezhnev was able to add to the General Secretaryship the post of President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a post whose importance had been builty up in the preceding years. In his last years in office the 'cult' intensified and several more of his old associates were added to the top executive."
In the short term, Brezhnev's governance improved the Soviet Union's international standing while stabilizing the position of its ruling party at home. Whereas Khrushchev regularly enacted policies without consulting the Politburo, Brezhnev was careful to minimize dissent among the party elite by reaching decisions through consensus, thereby restoring the semblance of collective leadership. Additionally, while pushing for détente between the two Cold War superpowers, he achieved nuclear parity with the United States and strengthened Moscow's dominion over Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the country's massive arms buildup and widespread military interventionism under Brezhnev's leadership served to substantially expand Soviet influence abroad, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. By the mid-1970s, numerous observers argued that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States to become the world's strongest military power.
Conversely, Brezhnev's leadership also witnessed a significant increase in repression and censorship throughout the Soviet Union compared with the relatively liberal years of the Khrushchev Thaw. "Both Stalinists and anti-Stalinists approved of Khrushchev's removal in October 1964. People who supported the Thaw and de-Stalinization believed that Khrushchev was a spent force and any future leadership would be better than his. Soon, however, they realized how wrong they were. The new guard in the Kremlin quickly terminated de-Stalinization from above. The majority of party leaders and ideologists did not like what they saw in the educated strata of society; growing individualism, creeping Westernism, popularity of American music and mass culture, growing pacifism, and pluralistic attitudes. Where the party ideologists failed, the KGB began to step in: a special division of Soviet secret police had the task of 'guiding' Soviet cultural and intellectual elites and 'shielding' them from 'harmful influences'...[¶]The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 substantiated the fears of the Soviet anti-Stalinist intelligentsia that the post-Khrushchev leadership might take the country in a neo-Stalinist direction. The crushing of the Prague Spring and its 'socialism with a human face' dashed the hopes of many educated Soviet patriots that the existing system could be reformed...[¶] Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leadership abandoned reformist projects. It was content to live with the fossilized ideology and sought to repress cultural dissent and force its participants into exile and immigration." Ultimately, Brezhnev's hostility towards political and economic reform ushered in an era of socioeconomic decline referred to as the Era of Stagnation. In addition to pervasive corruption within the country, this period was characterized by the shrinking availability of consumer goods and declining economic growth.
After 1975, Brezhnev's health rapidly deteriorated and he increasingly withdrew himself from governing the country despite remaining its highest authority. He eventually died on 10 November 1982 and was succeeded as General Secretary by Yuri Andropov. Upon coming to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev denounced Brezhnev's government for its inefficiency and inflexibility before launching a campaign to liberalize the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding the backlash to his regime's policies in the mid-1980s, Brezhnev's rule has received consistently high approval ratings in public polls conducted in post-Soviet Russia.
Early life and early career 1906–1939: Origins Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamenskoye (now Kamianske, Ukraine) within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev (1874–1934) and his wife, Natalia Denisovna Mazalova (1886–1975). His father lived in Brezhnevo, Kursk Governorate, before moving to Kamenskoye. The parents of Brezhnev's mother came from Yenakiieve. Brezhnev's ethnicity was given as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport, and Russian in others.
Brezhnev's niece wrote that in 1913, Brezhnev enrolled in a parish school. Two years later, he was admitted to a grammar school. Brezhnev left Kamenskoe for Kursk due to the famine of 1921–1923 and got employment as a porter at a cooking fat factory.
In 1923, Brezhnev joined the Komsomol, the Bolshevik youth organization. His biographer Paul J. Murphy believed he did it for careerist reasons. In the same year, Brezhnev enrolled at a college and four years later got a degree in land management. He started to work a year before graduation, first as a trainee in the Byelorussian SSR and, after receiving the diploma, in the Kursk Governorate and later in the Ural Oblast. During his work there, Brezhnev applied for Communist Party membership in 1929, spending two years as a candidate before becoming a full Party member two years later. Brezhnev reached the position of head of the land registry of Sverdlovsk in 1930, but relinquished it just half a year later to move to Moscow to enroll at the Institute of Agricultural Machinery. Historian Susanne Schattenberg speculates that he did so to avoid the excesses of collectivization that the Soviet Union was undergoing at that time.
Brezhnev did not stay in Moscow for long and left only two months later due to a housing shortage. Initially, he worked as a fitter at a plant in Zaporozhye. A year later, he enrolled in an evening program to study thermal engineering, while simultaneously working at the Dnieper Metallurgical Combine. While still a student, Brezhnev was appointed as the director of the Workers’ Faculty in 1933. He graduated from the institute in 1935, but worked as an engineer for less than half a year before being drafted into the Red Army. During his one-year service, Brezhnev received military training in Chita and became a political commissar of a tank division.
During Stalin's Great Purge, Brezhnev was one of many apparatchiks who exploited the resulting openings in the government and the party to advance rapidly in the regime's ranks. In 1936, he was appointed director of the Dniprodzerzhynsk Technical College and a year later he became Deputy Chairman of the Kamenskoye City Soviet. In May 1938, he obtained a position in Dnepropetrovsk and met Nikita Khrushchev, who had just taken control of the Ukrainian Communist Party. This relationship would be decisive for Brezhnev's future career. In 1939, he was appointed propaganda secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk party committee. During this time, Brezhnev took the first steps toward building a network of supporters which came to be known as the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" that would greatly aid his rise to power.
1941–1945: World War II
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Brezhnev was tasked with overseeing mobilization plans and the evacuation of Soviet factories. In July, he requested to be drafted into the military and was assigned to the Southern Front. During the retreat of Soviet forces, he returned to Dnepropetrovsk and remained in the city up to 25 August, the day it fell. In Autumn, Brezhnev was made deputy of political administration for the Southern Front, with the rank of Brigade-Commissar (equivalent to Colonel). During this period, Brezhnev developed his contacts with Khrushchev further, directly serving under his leadership from July to October 1941.