Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  EARLY CAREER

  Brezhnev was born on December 19, 1906, in the east Ukrainian steel town of Kamenskoe, later renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk. His grandfather and father had migrated there from an agricultural village in Kursk province, hoping to find work in the local steel mill. Unlike some of his later Politburo colleagues, who joined the Red Army at age fourteen, Brezhnev evidently played no role in the civil war. At the time of collectivization, having trained in Kursk as a land surveyor, he was working in the Urals where there were few peasant villages to collectivize. In 1931 he abruptly returned to his home city, where he enrolled in a metallurgical institute, joined the Communist Party, and accepted low-level political assignments. Completing his studies in 1935, he trained as a tank officer for one year in eastern Siberia, only to return again to Dneprodz-erzhinsk. Often accounted a member of the generation whose political careers were launched when the purges of 1937 and 1938 vacated so many high posts in the Communist Party, Brezhnev received only minor appointments. By 1939 he was no more

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  than a provincial official, supervising the press and party schooling, and he transferred the next year to oversee conversion of the province’s industry to armaments production. The German invasion in June 1941 interrupted that uncompleted task, and within a month Brezhnev had been reassigned to the regular army as a political officer. With the rank of colonel, he was charged with keeping track of party enrollments and organizing the troops. Many years later, well into his tenure as General Secretary, efforts were made to glorify him as a war hero, primarily by praising him for regularly visiting the troops at the front; however, he never actually took much part in combat.

  Following the war he was recommended to Nikita S. Khrushchev, whom Josef Stalin had assigned to administer the Ukraine as Communist Party chief. Khrushchev presumably approved Brezhnev’s assignments, first as Party administrator of the minor Zaporozhe province and later of the more important Dnepropetrovsk province. Although Brezhnev would later claim that Stalin himself had found fault with his work in Dnepropetrovsk, Khrushchev seems to have regarded Brezhnev as an effective troubleshooter and persuaded Stalin to put Brezhnev in charge of the lagging party organization in neighboring Moldavia in 1950. Brezhnev did well enough that he was chosen for membership in the Central Committee, and then inducted into its Presidium, as the ruling Politburo was renamed when Stalin decided to greatly expand its membership. (This expansion, apparently, was the first move in a plan to purge its senior members). But Stalin’s death in March 1953 canceled whatever plans he may have harbored. In that same month, Brezhnev was summarily transferred back to the armed forces, where he spent another year supervising political lectures, this time in the navy. Although his postwar political career was temporarily derailed, he had gained the opportunity to form bonds with a number of officials who would take over ranking posts when he became General Secretary. Moreover, his reassignment to the Ministry of Defense enabled him to make additional connections with top military commanders.

  Khrushchev’s success in the power struggle unleashed by Stalin’s death enabled the First Secretary to recall Brezhnev from military duty in 1954. Brezhnev was sent to Kazakhstan to take charge of selecting the Communist Party officials who would execute Khrushchev’s plan to turn the so-called Virgin Lands into a massive producer of grain crops. Within eighteen months Brezhnev took the place of his initial superior and successfully led the transformation of the Virgin Lands. This record, combined perhaps with Brezhnev’s previous experience, moved Khrushchev to return Brezhnev to Moscow in June 1957 as the Communist Party’s overseer of the new strategic missile program and other defense activities. While Brezhnev could claim some credit for the successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957, he had supervised only the last stages of that program. He did not manage to prevent the failure of the initial intercontinental ballistic missile program, on which Khrushchev had placed such high hopes. By 1960 Brezhnev had been shoved aside from overseer of defense matters to the ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, where for the first time he came into extensive contact with officials of foreign governments, particularly in what was then becoming known as the Third World. A stroke suffered by his rival, Frol R. Kozlov, enabled Brezhnev to return to the more powerful post of Secretary of the Central Committee, where Khrushchev regarded him as his informal number two man.

  LEADER OF THE POLITBURO, 1964-1982

  It was Brezhnev who organized the insider coup against his longtime patron, Khrushchev, spending some six months calling party officials from his country seat at Zavidovo and delicately sounding them out on their attitudes toward the removal of the First Secretary. Khrushchev quickly learned about the brewing conspiracy; but the failures of his strategic rocketry, agricultural, and ambitious housing programs, as well as dissatisfaction with his reorganizations of Party and government, had undermined Khrushchev’s authority among Soviet officials. The Leningrad official, Kozlov, on whom Khrushchev had relied as a counterweight to Brezhnev, did not recover from his illness. Khrushchev was thus unable to mount any effective resistance when Brezhnev decided to convene the Central Committee in October 1964 to endorse Khrushchev’s removal. Brezhnev did not overplay his own hand, taking only the post of First Secretary for himself and gaining rival Alexei N. Kosy-gin’s consent to Khrushchev’s ouster by allowing him to assume Khrushchev’s post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers (head of the economy).

  The contest between Brezhnev and Kosygin for ascendancy dominated Soviet politics over the next period. As a dictatorship, the Soviet regime could not engender the loyalty of the general populace by allowing citizens to reject candidates for the

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  exercise of power; in other words, it could not let them vote meaningfully. Thus, how to sustain popular allegiance was a recurrent topic of discussion among Soviet leaders, both in public and in private. In the public discussion, Brezhnev took the conventional Soviet stance that the Communist Party could count on the allegiance of workers if it continued its record of heroic accomplishment manifested in the past by the overthrow of tsarism, the industrialization of a backward country, and victory over Germany. He proposed two new heroic accomplishments that the leadership under his guidance should pursue: the transformation of Soviet agriculture through investment in modern technology, and the building of a military power second to none. Kosygin, by contrast, argued that workers would respond to individual incentives in the form of rewards for hard work. These incentives were to be made available by an increase in the production of consumer goods, to be achieved by economic reforms that would decentralize the decision-making process from Moscow ministries to local enterprises, and, not coincidentally, freeing those enterprises from the control of local party secretaries assigned to supervise industrial activity, as Brezhnev had done in his early career.

  The contest between these competing visions took almost four years to resolve. Although Kosy-gin blundered early by interpreting the outcome of the 1964 U.S. presidential election as a sign of American restraint in the Vietnam conflict, Brezhnev equally blundered by underestimating the difficulty, or more likely impossibility, of resolving the Sino-Soviet split. Kosygin sought to protect economic reforms similar to the one he proposed for the Soviet Union, then in progress in the five East European states controlled by the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia, economic reforms suddenly brought about political changes at the top of the Communist Party, impelling its new leader, Alexander Dubcek, to begin retreating from the party’s monopoly of power. Brezhnev took advantage of this emergency to align himself with military commanders pressing for the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the restoration of an orthodox communist dictatorship. Introduction of a large Soviet army enabled Czechoslovak communists, working under Brezhnev’s personal direction, to remove reformers from power, and the replacement of leaders in Poland and East Germany ended economic reforms there as well. By
1971 proponents of economic reform in Moscow became discouraged by the evident signs of Kosygin’s inability to protect adherents of their views, and Brezhnev emerged for the first time as the clear victor in the Soviet power struggle.

  According to George Breslauer (1982), Brezhnev used his victory not only to assert his own policy priorities but to incorporate selected variants of Kosygin’s proposals into his own programs, both at home and abroad. At home he emerged as a champion of improving standards of living not only by increasing food supplies but also by expanding the assortment and availability of consumer goods. Abroad he now emerged as the architect of U.S.-Soviet cooperation under the name of relaxation of international tensions, known in the West as the policy of d?tente. Yet Brezhnev represented each of these new initiatives as compatible with sustaining his earlier commitments to a vast expansion of agricultural output and military might, as well as to continuing support for Third World governments hostile to the United States. His rejection of Kosygin’s decentralization proposals did nothing to address the growing complexity of managing an expanding economy from a single central office.

  Although the policy of d?tente and the doubling of world oil prices in 1973 and again by the end of the decade made it financially possible for Brezhnev to juggle the competing demands of agriculture, defense, and the consumer sector, there was not enough left over to sustain industrial expansion, which slowed markedly in the last years of his leadership. As the crucial criterion by which communist officials had become accustomed to judging their own success, the slowdown in industrial expansion undermined the self-confidence of the Soviet elite. Brezhnev’s policy of cadre stability-gaining support from Communist Party officials by securing them in their positions- developed a gerontocracy that blocked the upward career mobility by which the loyalty of officials had been purchased since Stalin instituted this arrangement in the 1930s. Brezhnev therefore made opportunities available for corruption, bribe-taking, and misuse of official position at all levels of the government, appointing his son-in-law as chief of the national criminal police to assure that these activities would not be investigated. His encouragement of corruption rewarded officials during his lifetime, but it also further sapped their collective morale, and made some of them responsive to the proposals for change by his ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev.

  In foreign policy his initially successful policy of d?tente foundered as his military buildup lent

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  persuasiveness to objections from American conservatives. Soviet backing for the 1973 attack on Israel and for armed takeovers in Africa discredited the U.S. public’s faith in the sincerity of the Soviet Union’s peaceful intentions. By 1979 the effort to occupy Afghanistan, in a reprise of the Czechoslovak action, landed the Soviet army in a war it proved incapable of winning while compelling President Jimmy Carter to abandon arms control negotiations and to withdraw from the Moscow Olympics. In the summer of 1980 Polish strikers formed the movement known as Solidarity, demonstrating to Soviet officials that Brezhnev had bet wrongly on the combination of military expansion, improved food supplies, and increases in the availability of consumer goods to secure the allegiance of workers in communist-ruled states.

  Under the strain of personal responsibility for preserving the Soviet order, Brezhnev’s health deteriorated rapidly after the middle 1970s. In 1976 he briefly suffered actual clinical death before being resuscitated; as a result, he was constantly accompanied by modern resuscitation technology bought from the West (which had to be used more than once). Ill health made Brezhnev lethargic; it is unclear, however, what even a more energetic leader could have done to solve the Soviet Union’s problems. Despite Brezhnev’s torpor, his colleagues within the Politburo and his loyalists, whom he had placed in key posts throughout the apex of the Soviet party and state, continued to see their personal fortunes tied to his leadership. He remained in power until a final illness, which is thought to have been brought on by exposure to inclement weather during the 1982 celebration of the October Revolution anniversary.

  LATER REAPPRAISAL

  For Gorbachev and his adherents, Brezhnev came to personify everything that was wrong with the Soviet regime. The popularity of Gorbachev’s program among Western specialists, and the interest generated by the new leader’s dynamism after the boring stasis of Brezhnev’s later years, precluded a reappraisal of Brezhnev’s career until 2002, when a group of younger scholars picked up on Brezhnev’s growing popularity among certain members of the Russian population. These people remembered with fondness Brezhnev’s alleviation of their or their parents’ poverty, a relief made all the more striking by the extreme impoverishment experienced by many in the post-Soviet era. This reassessment may appear unwarranted to those who prize political liberty above marginal increments in material consumption. See also: BREZHNEV DOCTRINE; CONSTITUTION OF 1977; D?TENTE; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; KOSY-GIN, ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH; POLITBURO

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anderson, Richard D., Jr. (1993). Public Politics in an Authoritarian State: Making Foreign Policy in the Brezhnev Politburo. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bacon, Edwin, and Sandle, Mark, eds. (2002). Brezhnev Reconsidered. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Breslauer, George W. (1982). Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics. London: George Allen and Unwin, Publishers. Brezhneva, Luba. (1995). The World I Left Behind, tr. by Geoffrey Polk. New York: Random House. Dawisha, Karen. (1984). The Kremlin and the Prague Spring. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dornberg, John. (1974). Brezhnev: The Masks of Power. New York: Basic Books. Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. (1982). Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev: A Short Biography. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press.

  RICHARD D. ANDERSON JR.

  BRODSKY, JOSEPH ALEXANDROVICH

  (1940-1996), poet, translator.

  Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky left school at the age of fifteen, and worked in many professions, including factory worker, morgue worker, and ship’s boiler, as well as assisting on geological expeditions. During his early years, Brodsky studied foreign languages (English and Polish). His first foray into poetry occurred in 1957 when Brodsky became acquainted with the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who praised the creativity of the budding poet. In the 1960s Brodsky worked on translating, into Russian, poetry of Bulgarian, Czech, English, Estonian, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Polish, Serbian-Croatian, and Spanish origins. His translations opened the works of authors such as Tom Stoppard, Thomas Wentslowa, Wisten Oden, and Cheslaw Milosh to Russian readers; John Donne, Andrew Marwell, and Ewrypid were newly translated.

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  On February 12, 1964, Brodsky was arrested and charged with parasitism and sentenced to five years deportation. In 1965, after serving eighteen months in a labor camp in northern Russia, protests in the USSR and abroad prompted his return from exile.

  During the summer of 1972, Brodsky emigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1980. Before his departure from the Soviet Union, he published eleven poems during the period from 1962 to 1972.

  By the 1960s Brodsky was still relatively unknown in the West. “Cause of Brodsky” found scant exposure on the pages of the emigrant press (Russkaya mysl, Grani, Wozdushnye Puti, Posev, etc.). Brodsky’s first collection of poems was released by the Ardis publishing house in 1972. Throughout the 1970s Brodsky collaborated as a literary critic and essay writer in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and gained a wider readership in the United States.

  Brodsky taught at several colleges and universities, including Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College. In 1987 he won the Nobel prize for literature. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1991 to 1992.

  Brodsky died in 1996 of a heart attack in his Brooklyn apartment. See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; INTELLIGENTSIA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bethea, David M. (1994). Joseph Brod
sky and the Creation of Exile. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loseff, Lev. (1991). “Home and Abroad in the Works of Brodskii.” In Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian Emigre Writing, ed. Arnold McMillin. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press with the SSEES University of London. Loseff, Lev, and Polukhina, Valentina, eds. (1990). Brod-sky’s Poetics and Aesthetics. London: Macmillan. Polukhina, Valentina. (1989). Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Polukhina, Valentina. (1992). Brodsky through the Eyes of His Contemporaries. London: Macmillan Press. Polukhina, Valentina. (1944). “The Myth of the Poet and the Poet of the Myth: Russian Poets on Brodsky.” In Russian Writers on Russian Writers, ed. Faith Wigzell. Oxford: Berg.

  MARIA EITINGUINA

  BRUCE, JAMES DAVID

  (1669-1735), one of Peter the Great’s closest advisers.

  A man of many m?tiers, James David Bruce (“Yakov Vilimovich Bruce”) served Russia over the course of his lifetime as general, statesman, diplomat, and scholar. Bruce participated in both the Crimean and Azov expeditions. In 1698 he traveled to Great Britain, where he studied several subjects, including Isaac Newton’s then-avant-garde philosophy of optics (i.e., that light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays) and gravity (i.e., that celestial bodies follow the laws of dynamics and universal gravitation). Upon return to Russia, Bruce enthusiastically established the first observatory in his native country.