Brezhnev's steady rule brought the Soviet Union nuclear parity and then stagnation
Leonid Brezhnev, a metalworker's son trained in land surveying, helped push Khrushchev out in 1964 and led the Soviet Union for 18 years. He matched America's nuclear arsenal and calmed the party elite, but refused reform. His era earned a lasting nickname, the Era of Stagnation, and yet Russians still rate it highly in polls.
Kamenskoye, the town now called Kamianske in Ukraine, was where Brezhnev entered the world on 19 December 1906; documents list his ethnicity sometimes as Ukrainian, sometimes as Russian. Famine in the early 1920s sent him to Kursk as a factory porter. He joined the Komsomol in 1923, which his biographer Paul Murphy attributes to careerism, qualified in land management, and later studied thermal engineering at night while working in a steel plant. After a year in the Red Army as a tank division commissar, he rose fast as Stalin's purges emptied posts, and in 1938 he met Nikita Khrushchev, the patron who made his career. Allies from this period became known as the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia.
In the Second World War he served as a political officer, ending it as a major general; in May 1945 he was the top political officer of a front whose troops rolled into Prague. He then ran party organisations in Ukraine, Moldavia and Kazakhstan, where he oversaw construction of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Virgin Lands farming campaign, leaving before its disappointments became clear. Back in Moscow he supervised missile and nuclear programmes and backed Khrushchev against the Anti-Party Group in 1957. By 1963 he was involved in a plot against his patron, and in 1964 he replaced him as First Secretary.
Where Khrushchev acted alone, Brezhnev governed by consensus, restoring the look of collective leadership. He pursued détente with the United States while reaching nuclear parity, tightened Moscow's grip on Eastern Europe and expanded Soviet influence through a huge arms build-up and military interventions abroad. At home, repression and censorship returned after the relative openness of the Khrushchev Thaw, corruption spread, consumer goods grew scarce and growth slowed.
His health declined sharply after 1975 and he withdrew from day-to-day governing while keeping supreme authority. He died on 10 November 1982 and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov. Mikhail Gorbachev later condemned his government as inefficient and rigid, but in post-Soviet Russia his rule has consistently scored well in opinion polls.
Source: Leonid Brezhnev
