Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union for eighteen years and left it looking stable and rotting underneath. Born in 1906 in Ukraine to a Russian steelworker's family, he trained as a land surveyor and then a metallurgical engineer, joined the party in 1931, and rose through the purge vacancies of the late 1930s. He served as a political commissar in the war, reaching major general, and was later awarded medals for it with a generosity that became a national joke. He was Khrushchev's protégé, and led the plot that removed him in October 1964, on charges of erratic administration and hare-brained schemes. He governed by consensus with the party bureaucracy, and the bargain was security of tenure: officials were no longer shot or removed, and stayed in post until they died. The result was a gerontocracy and an economy that stopped adapting. Living standards did rise in the 1960s, and the oil price rise of the 1970s postponed the reckoning by paying for imports. Abroad he crushed the Prague Spring in August 1968 and articulated the Brezhnev Doctrine — that socialist states had limited sovereignty and that the bloc could intervene to preserve socialism. He also pursued détente seriously, signing SALT I, the ABM Treaty and the Helsinki Accords, whose human rights provisions were used against him. He reached strategic parity with the United States, and then invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and ended détente. He was visibly ill for his last years and died in 1982. The period is called the era of stagnation.

• Lived: 1906 CE – 1982 CE
• Nationality: Soviet
• Roles: head_of_state, party_leader

Related

• The Cold War
• Prague Spring and Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia
• SALT I and the Era of Détente
• Helsinki Accords
• Soviet Military Invasion of Afghanistan — December 1979