Leonid Brezhnev was born on December 19, 1906 in the village of Kamensky (in the years 1936-2016 - the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk, Dnipropetrovsk region) in a family of hereditary workers. His father was from Kursk, and his mother was from Donbass.

Leonid studied at the Kamensky classical gymnasium. During the Civil War, the Brezhnev family moved to the Kursk region. There Leonid got a job at an oil mill. In 1923, he became a Komsomol member and entered the land management and land reclamation technical school.

During his studies in the third year, Brezhnev met his future wife Victoria, a student at the medical college. At an evening in the hostel, he invited her neighbor to dance, but she refused him, because Leonid did not dance well. And Victoria agreed. A year later, they became husband and wife.

  • Family portrait of the Brezhnevs. In the second row, leftmost - Leonid Brezhnev
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After graduation, Brezhnev worked as a surveyor in the Kursk region, in Belarus and near Sverdlovsk. In the Urals, the first career rise of the future Soviet leader began. First, Brezhnev took the post of head of the regional land department, then became deputy chairman of the Bisert district executive committee, and then - head of the land management department of the Sverdlovsk district land administration. Living in the Urals, he became addicted to hunting and kept this hobby for life.

Brezhnev understood that for further growth he needed education, and in 1930 entered the Moscow Institute of Agricultural Engineering named after M.I. Kalinin. However, in the capital, the young family encountered difficulties - Brezhnev had nowhere to live. Leonid dropped out of school and moved with his wife to Kamenskoye, where his relatives had returned by this time. The former head of the land management department now worked as a mechanic at the F.E. Dneprovsky Metallurgical Plant. Dzerzhinsky and simultaneously studied at the evening department of the Kamensk Metallurgical Institute. In 1931, Brezhnev joined the CPSU (b), and four years later he received an engineering diploma and the post of shift manager at the power plant at the plant, but did not stay there long. In the fall of 1935 he was drafted into the army.

Army period

At that time, service in tank units was considered prestigious in the USSR, and Brezhnev got a referral to study at the Chita armored school, after which he became a political officer of a tank company.

In 1936, Leonid Brezhnev retired to the reserve and returned home. In civilian life, he was waiting for a new career rise - though not for long. After working for some time as the director of the metallurgical technical school and the engineer at the plant, he was elected deputy chairman of the Dneprodzerzhinsky city executive committee. In 1938 he was appointed head of the department of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee, and a year later - the third secretary. In 1941, he became secretary of the regional committee for the defense industry.

With the outbreak of war, Brezhnev put on his uniform again. June 26, 1941 he returned to the ranks of the Red Army. He served in the political posts of the Southern and then the North Caucasus Front with the rank of brigade commissar. In 1942, Leonid Brezhnev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for participating in battles in the Kharkiv region, and after the abolition of the institute of military commissars, he was re-certified as colonel.

  • Colonel Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev with his adjutant Ivan Pavlovich Kravchuk. Bridgehead Small Earth, 1943
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Brezhnev personally took part in the liberation of Novorossiysk, landing with a landing on the Malaya Zemlya bridgehead. Once the seiner, on board which was Brezhnev, ran into a mine. The colonel was thrown overboard by an explosion; he miraculously survived.

In 1944, Brezhnev was promoted to major general, and in June 1945 he was appointed head of the political department of the 4th Ukrainian Front. June 24, he participated in the Victory Parade on Red Square.

After the war, Brezhnev led the political department of the Carpathian Military District, from where in the summer of 1946 he was sent to the disposal of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) of Ukraine.

The path to political heights

In 1946, on the recommendation of Nikita Khrushchev, Brezhnev became the first secretary of the Zaporizhzhya regional committee. He successfully led the restoration of the Dnieper hydroelectric station and the industrial infrastructure of the region, for which he was awarded the Order of Lenin.

From Zaporozhye, Brezhnev was transferred to Dnepropetrovsk, where he led the city committee first and then the party regional committee. In his native region, young Brezhnev was particularly distinguished when restoring industry destroyed by the war.

In 1951, after a short tenure as an inspector of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Brezhnev received a new promotion - he was elected first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of the Moldavian SSR, and only six months later he became a member of the Central Committee, then secretary of the Central Committee and a candidate member of the presidium.

Immediately after the death of Stalin, Brezhnev received the post of head of the political department of the Naval Ministry, and then - deputy chief of the main political department of the USSR Ministry of Defense. According to a number of evidence, Brezhnev personally participated in the arrest of Lavrentiy Beria.

In 1954, at the suggestion of Khrushchev, Brezhnev was sent to the post of first second and then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. He personally oversaw the development of virgin lands and the construction of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

In 1956, having demonstrated productive work on all-Union projects in Kazakhstan, Brezhnev was appointed secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the defense industry, and in 1957 he became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee.

In 1960, he headed the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Brezhnev played an important role in leading the process of preparing the first manned flight into space, for which in 1961 he was awarded the golden star of the Hero of Socialist Labor.

In 1964, he turned out to be one of the key members of the group of party and state leaders dissatisfied with the activities of Nikita Khrushchev. On October 12, 1964, a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee was held, at which Brezhnev presided. Khrushchev at that time was on vacation. On that day, talk of the removal of the first secretary began to be open. Under the pretext of the need to resolve technical issues, Brezhnev summoned the head of state to Moscow. On October 14, Khrushchev was removed from the post of first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. On the same day, the plenum elected Leonid Brezhnev to this post.

Golden age

Leonid Brezhnev remained at the head of the USSR for 18 years. On April 8, 1966, his post was officially renamed - from the first, he became the Secretary General of the Central Committee.

Reforms carried out in the 1960s aimed at increasing the independence of enterprises and developing levers to stimulate economic development, according to experts, gave a good result.

Although the growth rate of the economy compared to the post-war period decreased slightly, the volume of GDP and labor productivity continued to grow. By 1980, the USSR ranked first in Europe and second in the world in terms of industrial and agricultural production. Moreover, if in 1960 the volume of industrial production in the USSR compared to the United States amounted to 55%, then in 1980 it was already over 80%.

During Brezhnev’s stay in power, the income of Soviet citizens grew by about 1.5 times. The country's population increased by 12 million people. 162 million Soviet citizens were provided with housing. All this happened against the background of the dynamic development of the social sphere. In 1967, the country switched to a five-day work week.

“The peak of their power under Brezhnev reached the Soviet armed forces, in which conventional weapons were balanced with weapons of mass destruction. Brezhnev, as the only post-Stalin leader who personally took part in the war, understood well how to develop the army and navy, ”said Academician of the Academy of Political Sciences of the Russian Federation, head of the department of REU named after G.V. in an interview with RT. Plekhanova Andrey Koshkin.

In 1972, US President Richard Nixon made the first official visit to the USSR.

  • Official visit of US President Richard Nixon to the USSR
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  • © Yuri Abramochkin

“Due to the fact that there was an awareness of the deadlock of the endless buildup of strategic weapons, a temporary detente occurred in bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington, which, however, was nullified by American hawks in the late 1970s,” the expert noted.

In the 1970s, Brezhnev’s health began to deteriorate sharply. He suffered from problems with the nervous and cardiovascular systems. He had thoughts of resignation, but his entourage persuaded him to remain in office. According to the doctors treating the general secretary, unscrupulous representatives of the inner circle secretly gave the Soviet leader sleeping pills and other drugs that created the illusion of better health, but negatively affecting his state of health.

In 1982, when Brezhnev examined the aircraft factory in Tashkent, a beam fell on him. He received serious injuries, including a broken rib and collarbone. He was offered immediate hospitalization, but instead the secretary general remained at the factory to take part in official events, during which he lost consciousness. The general health of the head of the USSR began to deteriorate before our eyes, and on November 10, 1982, he died in a dream.

  • Bust of Leonid Brezhnev on the Alley of the Rulers of the 20th Century in Moscow
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  • © Sergey Pyatakov

Brezhnev was buried in the Necropolis near the Kremlin wall. A number of settlements, enterprises and military units were named in his honor. However, Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s canceled most of these renames.

“The Brezhnev period cannot be unambiguously assessed. There were pros and cons, ”said Vladimir Shapovalov, deputy director of the Institute of History and Politics of the Moscow State Pedagogical University, in a conversation with RT.

According to him, on the one hand, in the 1960s and 1970s, the level and quality of life of the population of the USSR sharply increased, therefore this period is deservedly called the golden age in the history of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, economic growth in the country slowed down, problems began to accumulate, due to which the last years of the Secretary General’s in power have been called stagnation.

“In order to appropriately evaluate the results of Brezhnev’s activities, it must be remembered that a number of large-scale infrastructure and scientific projects were implemented under him, the fruits of which we use to this day,” the expert emphasized.

According to Andrei Koshkin, we must not forget about the social component of the Brezhnev era - free education and health care, payments to socially vulnerable groups of the population.

“The era of Brezhnev is a time of stability and prosperity. But, unfortunately, the Soviet leadership did not take advantage of this to conduct timely modernization of the economy and the system of government, the country got hooked on an oil needle. And a few years after Brezhnev’s death, all this led to a terrible crisis that resulted in the collapse of the USSR, ”Andrei Koshkin summed up.