Leonid Brezhnev (1906 - 1982) was a Soviet politician who led the Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1964 until his death, the second-longest tenure after Stalin. [1] His rule combined arms-control agreements and détente with the West with the forcible suppression of reform in Czechoslovakia, the persecution of domestic dissidents and, from 1979, the war in Afghanistan. [2] The later years of his leadership are commonly described as an era of stagnation.
Early life and wartime service
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamenskoye, a steel town in the Ukrainian part of the Russian Empire, into a worker's family. [1] He trained as a land surveyor and then as a metallurgical engineer, joined the Communist Party in 1931, and by 1939 was a regional party secretary in Dnipropetrovsk.
During the Second World War he served as a political commissar, reaching the rank of major general on the Southern Front and taking part in the landings near Novorossiysk that he later made the subject of a much-publicised memoir. [3] After the war he headed party organisations in Ukraine and then Moldavia, and in 1954 was sent to Kazakhstan to oversee Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign to expand grain cultivation.
Rise to power
Brezhnev joined the Presidium of the Central Committee and in 1960 became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a largely ceremonial headship of state. In October 1964 he was central to the coordinated removal of Khrushchev by his colleagues, emerging as First Secretary — the title reverted to General Secretary in 1966 — with Alexei Kosygin as head of government. [1] He consolidated authority over his rivals in the following years.
Rule
His domestic programme favoured stability and the security of the party bureaucracy. Living standards rose in the 1960s, but growth slowed steadily through the 1970s; investment flowed to heavy industry and the military while consumer goods, housing and agriculture lagged. [3] A new constitution was adopted in 1977, and Brezhnev resumed the headship of state alongside his party post.
Political control tightened. The prosecution of writers, the use of psychiatric detention against critics, the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 and the internal exile of the physicist Andrei Sakharov in 1980 marked a sustained campaign against dissent. [2] In August 1968 Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring, and the justification advanced afterwards — that socialist states had a duty to intervene where socialism was threatened — became known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Foreign policy
A sustained military build-up brought the Soviet Union to rough strategic parity with the United States, and Brezhnev used that position to negotiate. The period produced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the SALT I agreement in 1972, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and the SALT II treaty of 1979. [1] Relations with China remained hostile, culminating in border fighting in 1969.
In December 1979 Soviet forces entered Afghanistan to support the communist government there, beginning a war that lasted nine years, cost roughly fifteen thousand Soviet lives and far more Afghan lives, and ended détente. [2]
Decline and legacy
Brezhnev's health deteriorated badly from the mid-1970s, and his visibly frail public appearances came to symbolise the immobility of the leadership. He accumulated an extraordinary number of decorations, including four awards of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Victory, the last annulled after his death as improperly conferred. [3] He died on 10 November 1982 and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov. Within a decade the accumulated problems of his long tenure were central to the reform programme of Mikhail Gorbachev and to the dissolution of the Soviet state.
