Leonid Brezhnev was born on December 19, 1906 in Kamenskoye, later renamed Dniprodzerzhinsk, a large industrial center located on the Dnieper. He studied at the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Institute. Then he worked as an engineer in metallurgical plants.
He began his political career in 1931 by joining the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). He became a professional employee of the party apparatus in 1938 after a wave of Stalinist repressions, in which the previous political and economic leadership was almost completely
During World War II, he served as a political officer on the Ukrainian front, from 1943 as a brigadier general. In 1946, he took up the position of secretary of the Zaporozhye regional committee. Three years later, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
In 1950, Brezhnev became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova. In this capacity, he supervised a large manhunt against “hostile and class-alien elements.” The target of this action were Moldovans who were reluctant towards Soviet power and collectivization. In a report prepared for Stalin in February 1950, the number of deported Moldovans was estimated at nearly 95,000. exiled “forever” as “special settlers”. Nicolas Werth, co-author of “The Black Book of Communism”, states that taking into account the very high mortality rate among all exiles during transport, it can be assumed that the entire deportation action could have covered up to about 120,000 people. people, i.e. 7 percent population of the republic.
In 1952-1954, Brezhnev served as deputy head of the Main Political Directorate of the Ministry of Defense. Then he was transferred to Kazakhstan, where from 1955 he was the First Secretary of the Central Committee.
Since the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in 1956, Brezhnev has been a member of the party’s highest authorities. In 1964, at the head of the group that removed Nikita Khrushchev from the government, he took up the position of first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (in 1966, the name of the office was changed to “general secretary”).
For the next eighteen years, Leonid Brezhnev exercised undivided power in the Soviet Union. He was supported by, among others: the head of the government Alexei Kosygin, the head of diplomacy Andrei Gromyko and the main ideologist of the Brezhnev era, Mikhail Suslov.
In the international arena, Brezhnev pursued imperial policy, involving Soviet forces, among others. in Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Yemen and Ethiopia. During his rule, the USSR expanded its political, military, ideological and even economic influence in the Third World.
In foreign policy during Brezhnev’s rule, the so-called the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, which assumed limited sovereignty of “states of the socialist community” and allowed armed interference of other countries of people’s democracy in the internal affairs of this state, in which, according to Moscow, the “foundations of socialism” were threatened. The “Brezhnev Doctrine” was a reaction to the Prague Spring and in the future it was supposed to legalize similar actions of the Warsaw Pact as those that took place in 1968 in Czechoslovakia.
The effect of Brezhnev’s military policy was to gain an advantage over the United States in the late 1970s not only in conventional weapons, where the advantage of the USSR was already clear at the end of World War II, but also in the arsenal of nuclear weapons. By 1980, the Soviet arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles was almost a third greater than the American arsenal. However, the number of Red Army soldiers was more than twice as high as the number of American soldiers.
The West’s decisive opposition to Brezhnev’s policy was brought only by the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. US President Jimmy Carter described the Kremlin’s action as “the greatest threat to world peace since World War II” and announced a “right price” for this step.
The UN General Assembly, by a large majority, condemned the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan and called on the Kremlin to withdraw its troops from there.
In the fall of 1980, the threat of Soviet intervention in Poland appeared. On December 5, 1980, a meeting of the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries was held in Moscow to discuss the situation in Poland. At the same time, American intelligence reported the concentration of 18 Soviet divisions on the border with Poland.
What decided that Brezhnev did not undertake an armed intervention in Poland in December 1980? According to Zbigniew Brzeziński , who was then national security adviser to US President Jimmy Carter, American actions played a huge role here, the aim of which was to publicize the situation as much as possible. On December 3, Jimmy Carter pointed to the “unprecedented buildup of Soviet forces along the Polish border” and warned Moscow that a possible military intervention in Poland would have a negative impact on Soviet-American relations.
