Leonid Brezhnev (1906–82) was the effective leader of the Soviet Union from the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 until his death. His fame depends on his being the last ruler of the country in the mode set by Lenin and Stalin, with complete autocratic power based on manipulation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The two leaders of the Soviet Union between his death and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, were both too weak, physically and politically, and too aware of the impending crisis in Soviet economics and politics, to assume the power Brezhnev had wielded. He was a classic apparatchik, too young to have taken part in the revolution itself, but already in the party and the party-controlled state apparatus less than ten years later. Like so many of his cohort, he rose through the party ranks on the coat-tails of a patron, in his case Khrushchev, for whom he first worked in 1938, after proving himself by taking part enthusiastically in Stalin’s destruction of the Russian peasantry. His career followed Khrushchev’s, including his wartime service as a political commissar, but ultimately he was responsible for engineering Khrushchev’s fall.
His rule over the Soviet Union was characterized by complete inertia in industrial and economic matters (his own practical experience was entirely in the agricultural sector), a return to cultural and human rights repression after Khrushchev’s mild liberalization, and an aggressive and adventurist foreign policy. Above all he was a militarist, increasing defence expenditure by 50% in his first five-year plan, and by even more later. In this context he fought an expensive and ultimately futile arms race with the USA, the costs of which the Soviet economy could not bear, and increased the threat of nuclear attack on the Eastern European countries of the Soviet bloc by using them as bases for nuclear missiles ranged against European NATO countries. He was responsible for Soviet intervention in the Third World, for support of Vietnam (see Vietnam War), for invading Afghanistan (see Afghan War), and above all for brutally suppressing the Czechoslovakian liberalization movement of 1968. It was after the 1968 intervention that he coined what was to be known as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, proclaiming that the Soviet Union and other communist countries were entitled to suppress anti-communist movements in other socialist societies because fraternal solidarity overcame any ‘bourgeois’ doctrines of national sovereignty. His complete refusal to modernize the Soviet economy, or to allow any freedom of expression, led to the economic and social collapse inherited by Gorbachev. His personal indifference to the increasingly widespread corruption of the Soviet élite, including several members of his own family, may have done as much as his economic and foreign policy failures to prepare the Soviet Union for the radical departure from tradition which followed so soon after his death, and indeed opened the cracks which led within a decade to the disintegration of the Union.
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