A Mix of Caution and Opportunism

By Patricia Blake

Leonid Brezhnev: 1906-1982

In his 76th year, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev possessed more power than any other individual on earth. He held undisputed authority as President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and General Secretary of the Communist Party. In the twilight of a political career that virtually spanned the history of the Soviet Union, he accumulated extraordinary honors. Although his contributions to the Red Army's wartime efforts were largely limited to political propagandizing, he gained the exalted rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He was the only Russian in history to have been decorated with five gold stars as a Hero of the Soviet Union and of Socialist Labor, his country's equivalent of both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Brezhnev's colleagues in the Politburo had even been known to refer to him as vozhd (roughly, great leader), a title previously given only to Lenin and Stalin. Privately, Soviets joked about the cult of personality that gradually surrounded their President as he fought against the inexorable frailties of old age. It was said, for example, that he had even outdone Stalin in the matter of mustaches by cultivating two of them, a reference to the bushy eyebrows that dominated his face.

There were other similarities. As in Stalin's last years, Kremlin iconographers labored to hide the ravages of age and disease. His portraits were meticulously airbrushed to darken his gray hair, to erase his wrinkles, to sharpen his jawline. Sound engineers who monitored his broadcasts used electronic magic to mask his slurred speech, possibly the result of a stroke. The disguises fell through when Brezhnev was placed in the harsh glare of cameras that could not be controlled by party discipline. At his meeting with President Carter in Vienna in June 1979, he stumbled and nearly fell while descending a flight of stairs. On his trip to West Germany in November 1981, he was followed everywhere by two ambulances. His jaw was seen to hang slackly, and his breathing was labored. When he wearied during discussions with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, he retired with a doctor to an adjoining room, presumably for an injection. He was even denied his favorite pick-me-up. Offered liquor at a state banquet, he dutifully refused it in favor of a medicinal concoction proffered by an aide.

Brezhnev had been plagued by illness since 1974. He suffered from heart disease. The list of maladies he was suspected of having included leukemia, cancer of the jaw, gout, emphysema and circulatory ailments. Several times during the past eight years, rumors of his death had swept through Western capitals after a faltering appearance or an unexpected absence from a meeting demanded by protocol. But in recent months he kept to a rigorous schedule of events. He even braved freezing temperatures for two hours early last week to review a Red Square parade. Thus the official announcement of his death three days later took Kremlin watchers by surprise.

As far as the Soviet people were concerned, Brezhnev probably did deserve the title vozhd. In numerous respects, he compared favorably with his predecessors, even though his virtues were perhaps best expressed in negative terms. He was not a cold-blooded fanatic like Lenin. He was not a bloodthirsty tyrant like Stalin. He was not a capricious, mercurial improviser like Khrushchev. To his credit, Brezhnev gave his nation almost two decades of relative stability without resorting to the insane bloodletting and midnight terror of the Stalin era.

To be sure, he saw to it that dissidence was stifled, and there was no dilution of the power of the secret police. But the average Soviet citizen no longer had to fear that his life would be destroyed by arbitrary condemnation to inhuman Gulags.

To the tens of thousands of apparatchiks in the enormous, tentacular Soviet bureaucracies, Brezhnev's long reign provided much desired security, so much so that the Communist Party has come under the rule of a gerontocracy.

On the international scene, Brezhnev presided over the realization of his country's most cherished hope: the achievement of strategic parity with the U.S. Having emerged as a nuclear superpower under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union was in a position to wield considerably greater influence in foreign relations. Leading from strength, Brezhnev was able to guide his country into an unprecedented era of detente with the West, and he espoused U.S.-Soviet talks on nuclear arms limitations. A cornerstone of Soviet strategy, detente held out the promise of great trade benefits and the opportunity to extend Soviet influence farther with little risk of confrontation with the U.S. or its allies. At the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Brezhnev obtained long-sought legitimization of Soviet rule over its empire. Under his aegis, Moscow ruthlessly reinforced its hegemony over Eastern Europe. But nearly three years before his death, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan dealt an apparently mortal blow to the detente he had once fostered.

At home, Brezhnev proved to be an ultracautious administrator who was reluctant to undertake any fundamental economic reforms, no matter how urgently needed. Because of his conservatism and his diversion of vast resources to the military, the Soviet people have been denied the full social and economic benefits that are enjoyed in other modern industrial societies. During his iong tenure, the country's finest natural and human resources were thrown into the development and deployment of weapons. Until the late 1970s, the Brezhnev regime was also able to raise the standard of living of the Soviet people at a rapid rate. But though Brezhnev substantially improved the quality and quantity of consumer goods, he failed to supply the national economy with the large-scale in vestment needed for long-term growth. The slowdown in the growth of the gross national product that began in Brezhnev's last years is expected to continue for the rest of the 1980s.

Ironically, Brezhnev's most conspicuous failure was in agriculture, where he tried hardest. In spite of an outsize 33% share of total Soviet investment--far higher than the figure for any other industrial country--agriculture has become such a fiasco that the embarrassed Soviets have ceased publishing figures on grain production. During Brezhnev's final years of rule, the country was bedeviled by acute shortages of meat, butter and cheese. Of course, Brezhnev cannot be blamed for the Soviet Union's periodic bouts of bad weather. But other problems plaguing the country's farms proved endemic under his rule: poor distribution, widespread mismanagement, inefficiency and waste, and a woeful lack of incentives for collective farmers to work harder.

"He seemed somber and dull," wrote a Western journalist about Brezhnev in 1963, a year before he took power. But in fact, until his exuberant style was curbed by age and infirmity, Brezhnev was a man somewhat larger than life: he projected a physical magnetism that fairly overwhelmed many of his fellow statesmen in the West. In his second volume of memoirs, Henry Kissinger described Brezhnev's "split personality": he was "alternatively boastful and insecure, belligerent and mellow." Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt thought that Brezhnev was "quasi-Mediterranean in his movements when he warmed to a conversation." Unquestionably, he had a zest for life. Until illness intervened, he smoked incessantly and drank vodka toast after vodka toast without showing so much as a sign of weakness. Richard Nixon was impressed, unfavorably, by Brezhnev's love of dirty jokes and his earthy humor, characteristics that Brezhnev shared with Khrushchev.

Brezhnev enjoyed entertaining foreign visitors at his dacha outside Moscow, where he could display his prowess as a hunter, and at his luxurious summer home in Yalta, where the Olympic-size swimming pool was shielded from the wind by thick glass walls that glided back and forth at the press of a button. Early on, he spoke to state visitors of his interest in splashy automobiles. Taking the hint, they plied him with examples of the motorized best that Western technology could offer. Brezhnev was a notoriously bad driver; yet at one time his stable included a Rolls-Royce, a Citroen-Maserati and a Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC. And Nixon remembers giving a Lincoln Continental to Brezhnev at Camp David. Brezhnev's eyes shone when he saw the car. Without warning, he waved Nixon into the front seat, took the wheel and roared off as Secret Service men looked on aghast. He and Nixon hurtled down a narrow, twisting Catoctin

Mountain road at high speed, ran a STOP sign at the bottom of the hill and careened out onto a highway, Brezhnev looking neither right nor left. "That," said a shaken Nixon afterward, "was something."

Brezhnev loved gifts and gadgets of all kinds. When he took a particular shine to a gold Rolex, word was given to its Swiss makers, and before long the watch found its way to his thick wrist. Gerald Ford remembers how, on his way to Vladivostok for a meeting on strategic arms limitations in 1974, he was given a wolfskin coat during a stop in Alaska. When Ford stepped off Air Force One in the frozen remoteness of Vladivostok, a waiting Brezhnev immediately spied the coat. He pulled it off the President, tried it on and walked away with it at the end of the talks after jamming a fur hat down over Ford's ears. It was, by Brezhnev's standards, a fair trade.

"He likes beautiful cars," Nixon once told Television Interviewer David Frost, "and he likes beautiful women." Nixon vividly recalls the procession of women who followed in Brezhnev's wake when he visited the summer White House at San Clemente, Calif., in 1973. Women often appreciated his bantering flattery.

After dining with the Soviet leader, Norwegian Actress Liv Ullmann gushed that "Brezhnev looks a little vain, but I feel an immediate liking for him when he takes my hand and tells me that he loved The Emigrants [her 1972 film]." Brandt's wife Rut was also taken by his gallantry. On his first state visit to West Germany, in 1973, Brezhnev kissed her hand and said, "You are the first person I am going to invite to Moscow." Cozying up beside her on a sofa, he promised that "all Moscow will lie at your feet," as a gaggle of diplomats listened with fascination. In spite of his flirtatious ways, he enjoyed a stable relationship with his wife Victoria, and he doted on his three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Son Yuri is a foreign trade official, and Daughter Galina is married to a high Ministry of Interior official.

The son of a Russian metalworker, Brezhnev was born in the Ukrainian industrial town of Kamenskoye (now known as Dneprodzerzhinsk). His father may have taken part in strikes that accompanied the 1905 revolution against Tsar Nicholas II's rule. Brezhnev was ten years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He attended a grammar school that was subsidized by his father's steel plant, worked for a time as a manual laborer and in 1923 joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. After vocational school, one of his first jobs was to help supervise the distribution of land in the Urals that had been seized from peasants as part of Stalin's brutal collectivization program. Brezhnev became a member of the Communist Party in 1931 and subsequently an apparatchik holding a succession of dreary but important jobs that led to the post of deputy chairman of the local city government and finally to a regional party committee membership. On his way up the bureaucratic ladder, he earned a degree in engineering. Somehow he escaped the great purges of 1937-38 that sent tens of thousands of party officials to their deaths. Whether he actively took part in those purges is unclear. Harvard Sovietologist Adam Ulam concludes that Brezhnev was "clever as well as lucky; at a time when people in the party hierarchy were being liquidated right and left, he not only survived but prospered."

When World War II began, Brezhnev was placed in charge of converting factories in the Ukraine from civilian to military production. His superior was Nikita Khrushchev, then party boss of the area. Brezhnev became part of a fast-rising cadre of officials who came to be known in the West as the "Ukrainian Mafia." Later in the war he served as a political officer in charge of propaganda and morale with various Red Army forces. Official Soviet biographies credit him with numerous feats of wartime heroism, even though he apparently played a largely noncombatant role.

After the war Brezhnev rose steadily in the Ukrainian party organization as a protege of Khrushchev's; he followed his mentor to Moscow in the early '50s, and was subsequently dispatched to a key job in Kazakhstan. Brezhnev helped administer Khrushchev's costly "virgin lands" program, aimed at increasing the harvests in

Central Asia and Siberia, and was lucky enough to be able to proclaim a bumper wheat crop for 1956. In 1960 he succeeded Marshal Kliment Voroshilov in the post of Soviet President. Brezhnev took advantage of the undemanding job to travel widely outside the U.S.S.R. as a spokesman for Khrushchev's foreign policy. In 1964 he was a member of the conspiracy against his former mentor that forced Khrushchev into retirement. Brezhnev's reward: the high-ranking post of First Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1966 Brezhnev assumed the grander title of General Secretary that had been adopted by Stalin.

In 1965 Historian Bertram Wolfe unwisely described Brezhnev as "an insignificant transition figure in a new interregnum." Initially, Brezhnev shared authority in a triumvirate with Premier Alexei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny. By 1973 he had elbowed aside any rivals for power. He placed allies in principal positions in the party hierarchy and increasingly emerged as chief spokesman for the Politburo. On trips abroad he was treated as head of state, even though he did not formally assume that title again until after Podgorny's dismissal in 1977.

Brezhnev, at first with Kosygin's assistance, began dismantling many of Khrushchev's more quixotic experiments, especially those that weakened the power of the Communist Party. Restrictions on private farming were eased, and wages were increased. At the same time, Brezhnev subtly moved back toward some policies that were reminiscent of the Stalin years. Arrests and deportations gradually extinguished the dissident movement. Some future historians may mark Brezhnev's expulsion in 1974 of Nobel-prize-winning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as one of the most significant events of the Soviet leader's long reign.

Brezhnev's decision to invade Afghanistan with 80,000 Soviet troops in December 1979 constituted a major change in Soviet policy. Not since 1945 had the Soviet army been used to impose the Kremlin's will on a foreign country that had not previously been under Soviet control. Brezhnev and his colleagues in the Politburo underestimated the extent of Western reaction. The U.S. and more than 30 other countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics in the summer of 1980, much to the Soviets' discomfiture. Economic sanctions imposed as a result of the invasion curtailed U.S.-Soviet trade. Relations with the U.S. worsened after Gen eral Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland last December with the Kremlin's backing.

The suppression of the Solidarity trade union in Poland reflected Brezhnev's innate duality. Though he doubtless aspired to be remembered as a man of peace, he was also proud to be the creator of the "Brezhnev doctrine,'' which was used to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 in the cause of preserving Communism. Neither Brezhnev nor his comrades in the Politburo could accept the movements for change in Poland that sprang from the very working people they claimed to represent. Similarly, Brezhnev's offer on his trip to West Germany last November to reduce nuclear weapons in Europe "by the hundreds" could scarcely be taken seriously in view of the vast arsenal Brezhnev had built and was constantly expanding, militarily, the Soviet Union has never been stronger.

Moscow is likely to maintain at least nuclear parity with the U.S. for years to come; meanwhile, the U.S.S.R.'s dominance in conventional weaponry is unchallenged.

Thanks partly to military intervention by such client states as Cuba, East Germany and Viet Nam, the Moscow brand of Communism has gained fresh footholds in Central America, Africa, the Far East and Southwest Asia. But Brezhnev was unable to patch up Moscow's quar rel with Peking, even after the death of Mao Tse-tung.

Though Brezhnev's proudest legacy is one of vast military might, he wielded that power with care until the close of his reign. The invasion of Afghanistan represented a shift in Brezhnev's characteristic course, and strained relations with the West. Days before his death, the man who had fostered detente warned that Soviet armed strength was the only way to deter "hot head imperialists." Will his heirs revert to Brezhnev's earlier caution? Or will they prove increasingly imprudent, exploiting targets of opportunity in the Middle East and other vital areas of U.S. interest? If that happens, Americans might have cause to look back on the Brezhnev era with something approaching nostalgia.

--By Patricia Blake

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