Let’s Learn about the Cold War: Part 22 – Leonid Brezhnev

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Sean D. Smith
  • Minot Air Force Base Public Affairs
MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. --  After pushing Nikita Khruschev out of office, Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1964. He would lead the USSR until his death in 1982, making him the longest-serving leader of the Cold War.

Initially a metallurgical engineer, Brezhnev was drafted into service for World War II, and his political career began immediately after the war. Brezhnev grew in influence with support from Nikita Khruschev, the same man he would later unseat from power. 

After replacing him, Brezhnev repealed many of Khruschev's policies and undid much of his work toward liberalizing the Soviet Union. A period of more conservative politics and repression followed, with Brezhnev taking cultural inspiration from the era of Joseph Stalin's leadership -- the very thing that Khruschev had tried to guide the USSR away from.

During the 18 years that Brezhnev was in power, income and standard of living increased in the Soviet Union. The Russian people have repeatedly named him the most popular Russian leader of the 20th century, despite his domestic policy with regard to culture and expression.

In the West, Brezhnev is best remembered for the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that any attempt to turn a socialist country toward capitalism was a broader problem that affected all socialist countries and justified action. This policy was part of an effort to consolidate Soviet power and reduce the autonomy of Soviet satellite states.

Brezhnev has also been criticized for choosing to rule without major economic reform, instead focusing on other things. The resulting economic shortfall would be a major contributor to the Soviet Union's later collapse. 

Relations between the USSR and the West eased somewhat while Brezhnev was in power, despite the fact that in the 1970s, the Soviet Union had never been stronger in relation to the United States. Nuclear armaments were such that mutually-assured destruction was indisputable, Soviet control of eastern Europe was relatively solid, Soviet support of the North Vietnamese helped drive the United States out of Vietnam, and American politics were struggling under the weight of the Watergate Scandal.

But the Soviet Union had problems of its own; relations with China had been getting worse ever since Khruschev was pushed out of power, and the USSR was about to go to war again -- this time in Afghanistan.

Next time: The Soviet-Afghan War