Leonid Brezhnev

Biography

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born in 1906 in Kamenskoye, an industrial town in what is now Ukraine, to a metalworker's family. He joined the Komsomol in 1923, trained in land management, and became a full member of the Communist Party in 1931. After studying engineering at a metallurgical institute he rose quickly through the party in Dnipropetrovsk during the purges of the late 1930s, helped by his ties to Nikita Khrushchev.

In the Second World War he served as a political commissar on the southern fronts and reached the rank of major general. Afterwards he led party organisations in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk, then in Soviet Moldavia and Kazakhstan, where he ran the Virgin Lands campaign. He joined the Politburo in 1957 and in 1960 became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state.

In October 1964 Brezhnev was a leader of the group that removed Khrushchev, and he succeeded him as party leader. He governed by consensus within the leadership, built up Soviet military strength to parity with the United States, and pursued detente, signing the SALT I and Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties with Richard Nixon in 1972 and the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. He also sent Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Soviet forces into Afghanistan in 1979, and tightened censorship and repression at home.

His later years were marked by economic slowdown, later called the Era of Stagnation, and by his own failing health. He became head of state again in 1977 and died in office in November 1982, after the second-longest tenure of any Soviet leader.