Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (born December 19th 1906) is the current President of the USSR and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Early Life[]
Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoe in Ukraine though he now denotes his ethnicity as Russian. He joined the Communist Party youth organisation, the Komsomol in 1923 and the Party itself in 1931. In 1935-36, Brezhnev was drafted for obligatory army service, and after taking courses at a tank school, he served as a political commissar in a tank factory. Later in 1936, he became director of the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Technicum (technical college). In 1936, he was transferred to the regional centre of Dnepropetrovsk and, in 1939, he became Party Secretary in Dnepropetrovsk, in charge of the city's important defense industries. Brezhnev met Nikita Khrushchev in 1931, shortly after joining the party. Before long, he became Khrushchev's protégé as he continued his rise through the ranks. He was Party First Secretary of the Moldavian SSR from November 3, 1950 to April 16, 1952.
Career[]
During the Khrushchev years Brezhnev had supported the leader's denunciations of Stalin's arbitrary rule, the rehabilitation of many of the victims of Stalin's purges, and the cautious liberalization of Soviet intellectual and cultural policy. But as soon as he became leader, Brezhnev began to reverse this process, and developed an increasingly conservative and regressive attitude. In a May 1965 speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of defeat of Germany, Brezhnev mentioned Stalin positively for the first time. In April 1966, he took the title General Secretary, which had been Stalin's title until 1952. The trial of the writers Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966—the first such trials since Stalin's day—marked the reversion to a repressive cultural policy. Under Yuri Andropov the state security service (the KGB) regained much of the power it had enjoyed under Stalin, although there was no return to the purges of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union reached the peak of its political and strategic power in relation to the U.S. The SALT I treaty effectively established parity in nuclear weapons between the two superpowers, the Helsinki Treaty legitimised Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe, and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal weakened the prestige of the U.S. Under Admiral Sergei Gorshkov the Soviet Union also became a global naval power for the first time. The Soviet Union extended its diplomatic and political influence in the Middle East and Africa, and, through its proxy Cuba, successfully intervened militarily in the 1975 civil war in Angola and the 1977-78 Ethiopia-Somalia War.
Meanwhile Brezhnev consolidated his domestic position. In June 1977, he forced the retirement of Podgorny and became once again Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, making this position equivalent to that of an executive president. Although Kosygin remained as Prime Minister until shortly before his death in 1980, Brezhnev was clearly dominant in the leadership from 1977 onwards. In May 1976, he made himself a Marshal of the Soviet Union, the first "political Marshal" since the Stalin era. Since Brezhnev had never held a military command, this step aroused resentment among professional officers, but their power and prestige under Brezhnev's regime ensured their continuing support. His health is known to be in decline.