Leonid Brezhnev

• 1. Introduction

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  Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev died on the 10th of November 1982, and within days, leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and India had declared national mourning. He was buried in his Marshal's uniform, medals pinned to his chest, in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square. The man who had governed the Soviet Union for eighteen years left behind a country that, by his own government's figures, had slowed its economic growth to a crawl. Yet decades later, in a 2013 Levada Center poll, he beat both Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to claim the title of Russia's favourite leader of the 20th century, with 56% approval.

  How did a metalworker's son from a provincial Ukrainian town rise to command the world's largest country? How did the man who signed arms-control treaties with Washington simultaneously ship $450 million worth of weapons annually to North Vietnam? And how did a leader so associated with decay and corruption become, for many Russians, the face of a golden era? Those are the threads this documentary pulls on.

• 2. Working-Class Origins

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  Kamenskoye, the town now known as Kamianske in Ukraine, was the kind of industrial settlement the Russian Empire built to feed its steel mills. It was there, on the 19th of December 1906, that Leonid Brezhnev was born to Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev, a metalworker, and Natalia Denisovna Mazalova. His father's family had roots in Brezhnevo, Kursk Governorate, while his mother's parents came from Yenakiieve. His ethnic identity sat in ambiguity: some official documents, including his passport, recorded him as Ukrainian; others listed him as Russian.

  The family's world was upended by the famine of 1921-1923, which drove the young Brezhnev from Kamenskoye to Kursk, where he found work as a porter at a cooking fat factory. His biographer Paul J. Murphy concluded that when Brezhnev joined the Komsomol, the Bolshevik youth organization, in 1923, his motives were careerist rather than ideological. A degree in land management followed four years later, and he began working in the Byelorussian SSR as a trainee before moving through postings in the Kursk Governorate and the Ural Oblast.

  By 1930, Brezhnev had climbed to head of the land registry in Sverdlovsk. He held that post for just half a year before moving to Moscow to enroll at the Institute of Agricultural Machinery. Historian Susanne Schattenberg speculates he left Sverdlovsk partly to escape the brutal collectivization campaigns then convulsing the Soviet countryside. Moscow itself proved unwelcoming due to a housing shortage, and he soon ended up working as a fitter at a plant in Zaporozhye, then studied thermal engineering in the evenings while working at the Dnieper Metallurgical Combine. He was appointed director of the Workers' Faculty there in 1933 while still a student, graduated in 1935, and was drafted into the Red Army before he had worked as an engineer for even half a year.

  During his one year of military service in Chita, Brezhnev became a political commissar of a tank division. That experience would prove more consequential than any engineering certificate. Stalin's Great Purge, which began in 1936, cleared out layer after layer of Soviet officialdom, and Brezhnev was among those who moved rapidly into the vacated positions. By 1939, he was propaganda secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk party committee, already quietly assembling the circle of loyalists that would later be called the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia."

• 3. War and the Rise of a Commissar

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  Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 found Brezhnev managing mobilization plans and the evacuation of Soviet factories. He requested to be drafted in July and was assigned to the Southern Front. He remained in Dnepropetrovsk until the 25th of August, the day the city fell to German forces, then served as deputy of political administration for the Southern Front with the rank of Brigade-Commissar, equivalent to Colonel. During that posting, from July to October 1941, he worked directly under Nikita Khrushchev, deepening a relationship that would shape the next two decades of Soviet history.

  When the Germans occupied Ukraine in 1942, Brezhnev transferred 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, which later joined the 1st Ukrainian Front as Soviet forces pushed westward. By 1944, as the Red Army drove German units out of Transcarpathia, he earned promotion to major general. At the war's close in Europe, Brezhnev held the post of chief political commissar of the 4th Ukrainian Front, which entered Prague in May 1945 following Germany's surrender.

  After the war, Brezhnev oversaw the Sovietization of newly incorporated territories as head of the political administration of the Carpathian Military District. From that posting, he moved to first secretary of the Zaporizhzhia regional party committee, where his deputy was Andrei Kirilenko, a key figure in the Dnipropetrovsk network. A return to Dnipropetrovsk as regional first party secretary followed in November 1947, and in July 1950 he was sent to the Moldavian SSR, where he completed the introduction of collective agriculture. Two future Soviet figures were close at hand: Konstantin Chernenko ran the agitprop department, and Nikolai Shchelokov, whom Brezhnev brought from Dnipropetrovsk, would eventually become USSR Minister of the Interior.

• 4. The Khrushchev Connection

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  In 1952, a meeting with Stalin elevated Brezhnev to candidate member of the Presidium and the Secretariat of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Stalin's death the following March immediately reversed that gain; Brezhnev was demoted to first deputy head of the political directorate of the Army and Navy. He recovered quickly enough to participate in the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria in June 1953, and by August held the rank of lieutenant general.

  Khrushchev's ascent to General Secretary pulled Brezhnev along with it. In February 1954, Brezhnev arrived in the Kazakh SSR as second secretary, working under a rival protege of Khrushchev's opponent Georgy Malenkov. When Khrushchev defeated Malenkov, that superior was removed in May 1955 and Brezhnev was promoted to First Secretary of Kazakhstan in August. His time there encompassed two consequential projects: overseeing construction of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and running the Virgin Lands agricultural campaign. He was recalled to Moscow in 1956, before the campaign's disappointing results became fully apparent.

  Back in Moscow, Brezhnev took charge of Defense Industry as a candidate member of the Politburo, supervising the Soviet missile and nuclear arms programs. In June 1957, he backed Khrushchev decisively against the faction Khrushchev called the "Anti-Party Group" and became a full Politburo member as reward. By May 1960, he had been elevated to Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, nominal head of state, while Khrushchev retained the real power as First Secretary and Premier.

  Khrushchev's grip began to slip around 1962. Economic problems mounted, and his erratic decision-making alienated colleagues. Brezhnev maintained an outward loyalty while becoming involved in a plot to remove him in 1963, and in the same year succeeded Frol Kozlov as Secretary of the Central Committee, positioning himself as the likely heir. Khrushchev made him Second Secretary in 1964. The final move came in October of that year: while Khrushchev vacationed at Pitsunda on the Black Sea, conspirators orchestrated his recall. Mikhail Suslov phoned him on the 12th of October, citing Soviet agriculture as the pretext. Khrushchev understood what was happening and said to Anastas Mikoyan, "If it's me who is the question, I will not make a fight of it." On the 14th of October, the Politburo voted to remove him. Brezhnev was appointed First Secretary the same day, widely expected to be a mere caretaker.

• 5. Consolidating Power

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  Brezhnev entered the leadership as part of a Triumvirate with Premier Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, a Central Committee Secretary. A formal rule adopted in October 1964 barred any individual from simultaneously holding the posts of General Secretary and Premier, a direct response to Khrushchev's habit of combining both offices and ignoring his colleagues.

  The first serious rival to emerge was Alexander Shelepin, former KGB chairman and head of the Party-State Control Committee. In early 1965, Shelepin began calling publicly for the restoration of "obedience and order" in what amounted to a bid for supremacy. Brezhnev moved quickly, rallying the collective leadership to strip Shelepin of his committee and then dissolving the body entirely on the 6th of December 1965. By the end of that same year, Podgorny had been manoeuvred out of the Secretariat, cutting off his ability to build party support. His network was gradually dismantled over the following years, and by 1977 Brezhnev felt secure enough to remove Podgorny from the Politburo altogether and take his title as head of state.

  Kosygin posed a different kind of challenge. U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger initially read Kosygin as the dominant force in Soviet foreign policy. Kosygin launched a package of economic reforms in 1965 that introduced market principles to Soviet enterprises. The reforms ran into trouble when the Prague Spring broke out in 1968: the party's conservative wing, alarmed by any deviation from the Soviet model, rallied to Brezhnev. A clash with Second Secretary Mikhail Suslov and other officials in 1969 ended with them becoming firm Brezhnev supporters. Kosygin continued as Premier until shortly before his death in 1980, but by the early 1970s Brezhnev was unambiguously first among equals.

  Unlike Khrushchev, who regularly bypassed the Politburo when making decisions, Brezhnev built his authority through consultation and consensus. Political scientist George W. Breslauer has noted that whereas Khrushchev tried to decentralize and empower local leadership, Brezhnev pulled power toward the center, progressively weakening the roles of other Central Committee and Politburo members.

• 6. Superpower Rivalry and Détente

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  Brezhnev's memories of the Second World War, according to historian Melvyn P. Leffler, fundamentally shaped his foreign policy. In 1974, he confided to U.S. President Gerald Ford that he did not want to "inflict that on the people once again." The result was détente, a policy more comprehensive than anything Khrushchev had attempted, covering arms control, crisis prevention, East-West trade, European security, and human rights.

  Defense spending between 1965 and 1970 rose by 40%, with annual increases continuing thereafter. In the year of his death, military expenditure consumed 12% of Soviet GNP. The buildup paid one dividend that Brezhnev prized above others: at the 1972 Moscow Summit, he and President Richard Nixon signed the SALT I Treaty, setting limits on nuclear missiles for both sides. The companion Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty banned both countries from building systems to intercept incoming missiles, ensuring that neither side could launch a first strike without fear of retaliation. For the first time in the Cold War, the Soviet Union had achieved nuclear parity with the United States.

  Vietnam tested the limits of détente. Brezhnev's government shipped $450 million worth of arms annually to North Vietnam. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration explored a diplomatic exit and then an arms-control agreement with Moscow, but infighting in the Kremlin and North Vietnamese rejection of any settlement prevented progress. A summit at Glassboro in the U.S. produced a friendly atmosphere but no breakthroughs. Nixon's 1972 Moscow visit similarly yielded nothing concrete on Vietnam. Soviet military aid ultimately helped sustain North Vietnam until collapsing morale among U.S. forces produced their complete withdrawal from South Vietnam by 1973.

  The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shattered what remained of détente. President Jimmy Carter, advised by Zbigniew Brzezinski, called it the "most serious danger to peace since 1945." The U.S. halted all grain exports to the Soviet Union and boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The Soviet Union responded by boycotting the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. German historian Susanne Schattenberg argues that by the time the Politburo voted unanimously to invade in December 1979, Brezhnev's failing health had left him no longer in real command of foreign policy, with other Politburo members steering the decision.

• 7. Stagnation and the Economy

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  Before 1973, Soviet economic output was expanding at a marginally faster rate than that of the United States. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was the world's second largest industrial economy, producing more steel, oil, pig-iron, cement, and tractors than any other country. Between 1964 and 1973, Soviet output per head stood at roughly half that of Western Europe and a little more than one third that of the U.S. Then came the turning point.

  The term "Era of Stagnation" was coined by Mikhail Gorbachev to describe what followed. The CIA estimated that the Soviet economy peaked in the early 1970s. GNP growth fell to between 1% and 2% per year, dropping below the American rate. Heavy industry and military spending consumed investment that might have modernized consumer production. The Soviet Union had almost no access to microcomputers. Cars and phones per capita lagged behind the country's Eastern satellites. By 1978, every satellite state surpassed the Soviet Union in meat and egg production per capita, and Hungary alone produced more wheat.

  Brezhnev acknowledged in 1971 that vast military expenditure was slowing economic growth. His workaround was selling oil to Western Europe and arms to the Arab World, which deferred but did not prevent decline. In agriculture, private plots that cultivated only 4% of the land yielded 30% of national agricultural output, a figure that some economists read as an indictment of collective farming, but which Soviet politicians declined to act on for ideological reasons. State subsidies to agriculture reached an all-time high of 27% of all state investment in the 1970s, yet bankrupted farms continued operating at a loss as rising fuel costs offset any gains from higher food prices.

  For ordinary citizens, the picture was mixed. Over Brezhnev's eighteen years, average income per head increased by half, and consumption per head rose an estimated 70%. The state provided education, medical care, housing, and paid leave at no charge; the retirement age was lowered to 55 for women and 60 for men with full benefits. Yet the average Soviet person lived on 13.4 square metres of space, alcoholism and divorce rates rose, and those holding management positions faced no effective mechanism for removal regardless of performance.

• 8. Personality, Decline, and Legacy

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  Brezhnev received over 100 medals during his lifetime, a fact that became fodder for political jokes across the Soviet Union. Nikolai Podgorny warned him about this; Brezhnev replied, "If they are poking fun at me, it means they like me." On his 60th birthday in December 1966, he received the Hero of the Soviet Union, and the award came three more times in conjunction with subsequent birthdays. On his 70th birthday he received the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union, the country's highest military honour. At an 18th Army Veterans meeting afterward, he arrived in a long coat and announced, "Attention, the Marshal is coming!" He conferred on himself the rare Order of Victory in 1978; it was posthumously revoked in 1989 for not meeting the criteria.

  His passion for foreign cars given by visiting heads of state was notorious. When he visited the United States for a 1973 summit with Nixon, he received a Lincoln Continental from the President and immediately wanted to drive it around Washington. Told the Secret Service would not allow it, he said he would remove the flag from the car, put on dark glasses "so they can't see my eyebrows" and drive like any American. Kissinger replied, "I have driven with you and I don't think you drive like an American." Kissinger also claimed that Brezhnev once postponed a meeting on nuclear weapons rather than miss a football match, supporting CSKA Moscow in ice hockey and Spartak Moscow in football.

  From 1973 until his death, Brezhnev experienced chronic deterioration of his central nervous system along with several minor strokes. He had been a heavy smoker until the 1970s and had become dependent on sleeping pills and tranquilizers. In 1975 he suffered his first heart attack, and later that year a stroke significantly impaired his ability to govern. In 1976, he suffered a near-fatal stroke that left him clinically dead before doctors revived him. American intelligence officials suggested publicly in 1977 that he was also suffering from gout, leukemia, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.

  By March 1982, while touring a factory in Tashkent, a metal balustrade collapsed under the weight of factory workers and fell on Brezhnev and his security detail, fracturing his right clavicle and causing a concussion. His final public appearance came on the 7th of November 1982, standing on Lenin's Mausoleum's balcony for the 65th anniversary of the October Revolution. Three days later, he died of a heart attack.

  Yuri Andropov succeeded him. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev denounced Brezhnev's government for its inefficiency and inflexibility. Yet in a 1999 poll, Russians ranked Brezhnev the best Russian leader of the 20th century. A 2007 VTsIOM survey found the majority of Russians would prefer to have lived during the Brezhnev era over any other period of 20th-century Soviet history. His mural kiss with East German leader Erich Honecker, depicted in the Berlin Wall painting "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love," became one of the most reproduced political images of the late Cold War.