Leonid Brezhnev

Born on 19 December 1906 in what is now Kamianske in Ukraine (which was part of the Russian Empire at that time), Leonid Brezhnev attended a parish school in 1913 before being admitted to a grammar school and when Kamianske (then known as Kamenskoe) for Kurst during the famine of 1921-1923, he was employed at a cooking fat factory as a porter. During that time, he joined Komsolmol, the youth division of the Communist Party and later on the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in 1929. Like many middle-ranking Party officials, he was immediately drafted following Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. By the time the Second World War was over, he had the rank of major general. A protege of Nikita Khrushchev, Brezhnev become a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union in 1950 and that rank was the highest in the Soviet Union’s legislative body. He became a member of the Secretariat by Joseph Stalin in 1952.

Brezhnev left Moscow for a time when he became involved in the development of the Soviet missile and nuclear arms programmes like the Baykonur Cosmodrom before returning in 1956. While he had sided with Khruschev against Malenkov, that changed in 1963 when he became involved in a plot to remove him from power. All the while taking up the position of Secretary of the Central Committee. His assumption of his predecessor’s role as Leader of the Soviet Union, he seemed to be a transitional leader, only to take on the position for the rest of his life.

In 1968, he crushed a political uprising in Prague which was the capital of Czechoslovakia at that time (Czechoslovakia split up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993) as he saw the student protests as a threat to their leader Antonín Novotný. He initially aided the communist resistance in North Vietnam during The Vietnam War by shipping $450 million worth of arms annually, much to the dismay of US Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, who later had a fruitless negotiation with Brezhnev regarding the war. However, he was able to come to an agreement over the use of nuclear weapons via the SALT I Treaty (1972) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (also 1972). Relations between the Soviet Union and China deteriorated during his time and while he did call for normalisation of Sino-Soviet relations in March 1982 in Tashkent, it was Mikhail Gorbachev who managed to fully restore the relations to normality during his 1985-1991 tenure. Brezhnev was also responsible for the Brezhnev Doctrine that saw economic stagnation in the Soviet Union that saw the central government fixing prices to prevent losses and that saw corruption being rampant too since the living conditions worsened.

Other than attending the funeral of Yugoslavia’s Communist leader Josip Broz Tito’s funeral in 1980, Brezhnev’s last major contribution in history was sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan to help prop up the troubled nation’s local communist party as the country came under siege from Islamist forces. Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982 of a heart attack after suffering with ill health for many years. As he was being lowered into his grave, the pallbearers struggled with the weight of the metal plated coffin which caused the coffin to tumble into the grave at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. He was survived by his wife Viktoria and his two children, Galina and Yuri. Yuri Andropov succeeded him as Leader of the Soviet Union and General Secretary of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union.

Brezhnev’s presence in history is still felt by many people in former Soviet states as well as those from former Eastern Bloc nations. In 1977, a young Genndy Tartakovsky (creator of Cartoon Network classic Dexter’s Laboratory and director of animated film Hotel Transylvania) and his family left the Soviet Union to escape antisemitism that his parents were concerned about within Moscow.