Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev[b][c] (19 December 1906 – 10 November 1982)[4] was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982, and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from 1960 to 1964 and again from 1977 to 1982. His 18-year term as General Secretary was second only to Joseph Stalin's in duration. To this day, the value of Brezhnev's tenure as General Secretary remains debated by historians.
"Brezhnev" redirects here. For other uses, see Brezhnev (disambiguation).
Leonid Brezhnev
Nikita Khrushchev
(as First Secretary)
Vasily Kuznetsov (acting)
Yuri Andropov
Ivan Yakovlev
19 December 1906
Kamenskoye, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire
(now Kamianske, Ukraine)
10 November 1982 (aged 75)
Zarechye, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow
CPSU (1929–1982)
Galina Brezhneva (daughter)
Yuri Brezhnev (son)
Zarechye, Moscow
- Metallurgical engineer
- civil servant
Soviet Union
1941–1982
Marshal of the Soviet Union
(1976–1982)
Brezhnev was born to a working-class family in Kamenskoye (now Kamianske, Ukraine) within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. After the results of the October Revolution were finalized with the creation of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev joined the 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. Following the war's end, Brezhnev was promoted to the party's Central Committee in 1952 and rose to become a full member of the Politburo by 1957. In 1964, he garnered enough power to replace Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the country.
Brezhnev's conservative, pragmatic approach to governance during the early years of his tenure improved the Soviet Union's international standing while stabilizing the position of its ruling party at home. Whereas Khrushchev often enacted policies without consulting the rest of the Politburo, Brezhnev was careful to minimize dissent among the party elite by reaching decisions through consensus thereby restoring collective leadership in the Kremlin. Additionally, while pushing for détente between the two Cold War superpowers, he achieved nuclear parity with the United States and strengthened the Soviet Union's dominion over Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the massive arms buildup and widespread military interventionism under Brezhnev's leadership substantially expanded the Soviet Union's influence abroad (particularly in the Middle East and Africa). Nevertheless, these endeavors, particularly the Soviet Union massive support to Marxist regimes in Africa during the 1970s and the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, proved to be highly costly and badly strained the Soviet economy in later years.
Conversely, Brezhnev's disregard for political reform ushered in an era of societal decline known as the Brezhnev Stagnation. In addition to pervasive corruption and falling economic growth, this period was characterized by an increasing technological gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. Upon coming to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev denounced Brezhnev's government for its inefficiency and inflexibility before implementing policies to liberalise the Soviet Union. However, Brezhnev has received consistently high approval ratings in the public polls.
After 1975, Brezhnev's health rapidly deteriorated and he increasingly withdrew from international affairs, while keeping his hold on power. He died on 10 November 1982 and was succeeded as general secretary by Yuri Andropov.
Rise to power[edit]
Promotion to the Central Committee[edit]
Brezhnev left the Soviet Army with the rank of major general in August 1946. He had spent the entire war as a political commissar rather than a military commander. In May 1946, he 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 January 1948 as regional first party secretary. In 1950 Brezhnev became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's highest legislative body. In July that year he was sent to the Moldavian SSR and appointed Party First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova,[15] 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 he had a meeting with Stalin, after which Stalin promoted Brezhnev to the Communist Party's Central Committee as a candidate member of the Presidium (formerly the Politburo)[16] and made him one of ten secretaries of the Central Committee. Stalin died in March 1953 and, in the reorganization that followed, Brezhnev was demoted to first deputy head of the political directorate of the Army and Navy.