Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Brezhnev

By Martin Hahn

Having been a land surveyor in the 1920s, Brezhnev turned into a full part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1931 and studied at the metallurgical institute in Kamenskoye (now Dniprodzerzhynsk). After graduating (1935), he functioned as an engineer and also director of a technical college and also held a wide variety of local party posts; his career flourished under Joseph Stalin's rule, and also by 1939 he'd become secretary of the local party committee of Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipropetrovsk). During World War II Brezhnev served as a political commissar in the Red Army, improving in rank until he turned into a major general (1943) as well as head of the political commissars on the Ukrainian front.

After the war he once again held posts as chief of several local party committees in Ukraine. In 1950 he was sent to Moldavia as first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party with the job of sovietizing the Romanian public of which recently conquered territory. In 1952 he advanced to be a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU and also a candidate member of the Politburo.

When Stalin died (March 1953), Brezhnev had to drop his post in the Central Committee and also in the Politburo and had to acceprt the role of deputy head of the political department of the Ministry of Defense with the rank of lieutenant general. But in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, who had achieved total control in Moscow, made Brezhnev secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party (1954), in which he vigorously implemented Khrushchev's driven Virgin as well as Idle Lands Campaign in Kazakhstan. Brezhnev was quickly promoted to very first secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party (1955), and also in 1956 he was reelected to the posts of the CPSU Central Committee and also in the Politburo. A season later, after he'd loyally worked against the anti-party team which attempted to eliminate Khrushchev, Brezhnev was made a full member of the Politburo, and also in 1960 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet - i.e., the titular top of the Soviet state. In July 1964 he resigned the blog post to be Khrushchev's assistant as next secretary of the Central Committee, by that point he was regarded as Khrushchev's heir apparent as party leader. Three weeks later, nonetheless, Brezhnev really helped direct the coalition that forced Khrushchev from strength, and, in the division of spoils that followed, Brezhnev started to be first secretary (after 1966, general secretary) of the CPSU (October fifteen, 1964). Following a brief time of collective leadership with Premier Aleksey Kosygin, Brezhnev emerged clearly as the dominant figure.

As top of the party, Brezhnev left many affairs of state - e.g., diplomatic relations with non-communist states and domestic economic development - to his co-workers Nikolay and Kosygin V. Podgorny, chairman of the Presidium. Brezhnev concentrated on military and foreign affairs. When Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubek attempted to liberalize the communist system in his country in 1967/68, the principle was created by Brezhnev, widely known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine, that asserted the right of Soviet intervention in situations where essential common interests of various other socialist nations are compromised by one of their number. This doctrine was used as the rationale for the intrusion of Czechoslovakia near the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact friends in 1968.

During the 1970s Brezhnev attempted to normalize relations between West Germany and also the Warsaw Pact and also to ease tensions with the United States throughout the policy referred to as detente. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union's military industrial complex was greatly expanded and modernized. Under the leadership of his, the Soviets attained parity together with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons, and their space plan overtook the American one. A huge navy was equipped out and the army stayed the largest on the planet. The Soviet Union supported wars of national liberation in developing nations through the provision of military help to left wing movements and governments.

But Brezhnev's unceasing build up of the defense of his and aerospace industries left some other sectors of the economic system increasingly deprived of money. Health-care services, consumer-goods industries, and soviet agriculture declined throughout the 1970s and early' 80s as a consequence, resulting in shortages and decreasing requirements of existing.

In 1976 Brezhnev was made marshal of the Soviet Union, therefore becoming the one other party leader after Stalin to support the greatest military rank. The method of collective leadership concluded with the dismissal of Podgorny as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in May 1977 and Brezhnev's election to that particular position the next month. He therefore became the very first person in Soviet record to hold both the leadership of the party and the state. In 1979 Brezhnev reached agreement with U.S. President Jimmy Carter on a brand new bilateral strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II), although the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty, as well as shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (December 1979) in an attempt to prop up a faltering communist regime there. Brezhnev's government even helped General Wojciech Jaruzelski's suppression of Poland's Solidarity union in December 1981. The efforts of his to neutralize inner dissent within the Soviet Union itself had been similarly determined.

Brezhnev held on to the hold of his on power to the conclusion despite his frail healthiness and increasing feebleness. He gave the Soviet Union a formidable military industrial foundation capable of providing big amounts of the most contemporary weapons, but in so doing he impoverished the majority of the Soviet economic climate. After the death of his, he was criticized for a gradual slide in existing requirements, the spread of cronyism and corruption inside the Soviet bureaucracy, as well as the typically stagnant & dispiriting character of Soviet life in the late 1970s and early' 80s.

Get an affordable life experience degree from http://www.asian-europeanuniversity.com

Article Source:  Leonid Brezhnev