Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev 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 from 1960 to 1964 and later from 1977 to 1982. His tenure as General Secretary and leader of the Soviet Union 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, Brezhnev 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.
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 massive arms buildup and widespread military interventionism under Brezhnev's leadership substantially expanded Soviet influence abroad, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. By the mid-1970s, numerous observers argued 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. 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 within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and his wife, Natalia Denisovna Mazalova. 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 a position of the head of 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. During this period, Brezhnev developed his contacts with Khrushchev further, directly serving under his leadership from July to October 1941.When the Germans occupied Ukraine in 1942, Brezhnev was sent to the Caucasus as deputy head of political administration of the North Caucasus 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 westward through Ukraine. In 1944, Brezhnev was promoted to the rank of major general as Soviets successfully pushed German forces out of Transcarpathia. At the end of the war in Europe, Brezhnev was chief political commissar of the 4th Ukrainian Front, which entered Prague in May 1945, after the German surrender.
Rise to power
Promotion to the Central Committee
At the end of the war, Brezhnev was the head of the political administration of the Carpathian Military District and oversaw the Sovietization of newly incorporated territories. He left the position in June 1946, and a few months later was appointed the first secretary of the Zaporizhzhia regional party committee, where his deputy was Andrei Kirilenko, one of the most important members of the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia. After working on reconstruction projects in Ukraine, he returned to Dnipropetrovsk in November 1947 as regional first party secretary. In 1950 Brezhnev became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's supreme state organ of power. In July that year he was sent to the Moldavian SSR and appointed Party First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova, where he was responsible for completing the introduction of collective agriculture. Konstantin Chernenko, a loyal addition to the "mafia", was working in Moldova as head of the agitprop department, and one of the officials Brezhnev brought with him from Dnipropetrovsk was the future USSR Minister of the Interior, Nikolai Shchelokov.In 1952, Brezhnev met with Stalin who subsequently promoted him to the Communist Party's Central Committee as a candidate member of the Presidium and made him a member of the Secretariat. Following Stalin's death in March 1953, Brezhnev was demoted to first deputy head of the political directorate of the Army and Navy. He remained close to the main events, as he participated in the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria in June. In August, he was promoted to lieutenant general.
Advancement under Khrushchev
Brezhnev's patron Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as General Secretary, while Khrushchev's rival Georgy Malenkov succeeded Stalin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. In February 1954, Brezhnev was appointed second secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR, where he worked under Panteleimon Ponomarenko who was Malenkov's protege. Following Khrushchev's victory over Malenkov, Ponomarenko was removed in May 1955 and Brezhnev was promoted to First Secretary in August. In Kazakhstan, Brezhnev oversaw the construction of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and conducted the Virgin Lands campaign. He was recalled to Moscow in 1956, before it became clear that the campaign would turn out to be disappointing.In Moscow, Brezhnev became a candidate member of the Politburo and was appointed secretary of Defense Industry. In this position, he oversaw the development of the Soviet missile and nuclear arms programs. In June 1957, he backed Khrushchev in his struggle with Malenkov's Stalinist old guard in the Party leadership, the so-called "Anti-Party Group". Following the Stalinists' defeat, Brezhnev became a full member of the Politburo. In May 1960, he was promoted to the post of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, making him the nominal head of state, although the real power resided with Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and Premier.