Bisous sur la bouche leonid brezhnev biography

Leader of the Soviet Union from to

"Brezhnev" redirects here. For other uses, see Brezhnev (disambiguation).

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev^[b][c] (19 December &#;&#; 10 November )^[4] was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from until his death in , and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from to and again from to His year term as General Secretary was second only to Joseph Stalin's in duration.

Brezhnev was born to a working-class family in Kamenskoye (now Kamianske, Ukraine) within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. After the results of the October Revolution were finalized with the creation of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev joined the Communist party's youth league in before becoming an official party member in When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June , he joined the Red Army as a commissar and rose rapidly through the ranks to turn into a major general during Society War II.

Following the war's end, Brezhnev was promoted to the party's Central Committee in and became a full member of the Politburo by In , he consolidated enough authority to replace Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the country.

During his tenure, Brezhnev's governance improved the Soviet Union's international standing while stabilizing the position of its judgment party at home. Whereas Khrushchev regularly enacted policies without consulting the Politburo, Brezhnev was watchful to minimize dissent among the party elite by reaching decisions through consensus thereby restoring the semblance of collective leadership.

Additionally, while pushing for détente between the two Cold War superpowers, he achieved nuclear parity with the United States and strengthened Moscow's dominion over Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the large arms buildup and widespread military interventionism under Brezhnev's leadership substantially expanded Soviet influence abroad, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.

By the mids, numerous observers argued the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States to become the world's strongest military power.

Conversely, Brezhnev's disregard for political reform ushered in an era of socioeconomic decline referred to as the Era of Stagnation.

In addition to pervasive corruption and falling economic growth, this period was characterized by an increasing technological gap between the Soviet Union and the United States.

After , Brezhnev's health rapidly deteriorated and he increasingly withdrew from international affairs despite maintaining his keep on power.

He died on 10 November and was succeeded as general secretary by Yuri Andropov. Upon coming to influence in , Mikhail Gorbachev denounced Brezhnev's government for its inefficiency and inflexibility before launching a campaign to liberalise the Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the backlash to his regime's policies in the mids, Brezhnev's rule has received consistently high approval ratings in public polls conducted in post-Soviet Russia.

Early life and prior career

– Origins

Brezhnev was born on 19 December in Kamenskoye (now Kamianske, Ukraine) within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire, to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev (–) and his wife, Natalia Denisovna Mazalova (–).

His father lived in Brezhnevo (Kursky District, Kursk Oblast, Russia) before moving to Kamenskoye. The parents of Brezhnev's mother came from Yenakiieve.^[5] Brezhnev's ethnicity was given as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport,^[6][7][8] and Russian in others.^[9] A statement confirming that he regarded himself as a Russian can be found in his book Memories (), where he wrote: "And so, according to nationality, I am Russian, I am a proletarian, a hereditary metallurgist."^[11]

Like many youths in the years after the Russian Revolution of , he received a technical education, at first in land management and then in metallurgy.

He graduated from the Kamenskoye Metallurgical Technicum in and became a metallurgical engineer in the iron and steel industries of eastern Ukraine.

Brezhnev joined the Communist Party youth division, the Komsomol, in , and the Party itself in From to he completed the compulsory term of military service.

After taking courses at a tank school, he served as a political commissar in a tank factory.

During Stalin's Fantastic Purge, Brezhnev was one of many apparatchiks who exploited the resulting openings in the government and the party to advance rapidly in the regime's ranks.

In , he became director of the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum (a technical college) and was transferred to the regional center of Dnipropetrovsk.

More than three decades ago, Soviet Union General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev got a kiss on the lips from East German leader Erich Honecker. A news photograph of the moment took on a being of its own, cementing Brezhnev’s reputation as a smooching statesman, and creating a stereotype of Russian men as lip-lockers.

In May , he became deputy chairman of the Kamenskoye metropolis soviet. In May , after Nikita Khrushchev had taken rule of the Ukrainian communist party, he was appointed head of the propaganda department of the Dnipropetrovsk regional communist party, and later, in , a regional Party Secretary, in charge of the city's defense industries.

Here, he took the first steps toward building a network of supporters which came to be known as the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" that would greatly aid his rise to power.

– Earth War II

When Nazi Germanyinvaded the Soviet Union on 22 June , Brezhnev was, like most middle-ranking Party officials, immediately drafted.

He worked to evacuate Dnipropetrovsk's industries before the city fell to the Germans on 26 August, and then was assigned as a political commissar. In October, Brezhnev was made deputy of political administration for the Southern Front, with the rank of Brigade-Commissar (Colonel).

When the Germans occupied Ukraine in , Brezhnev was sent to the Caucasus as deputy head of political administration of the Transcaucasian Front.

In April he became chief of the Political Department of the 18th Army. Later that year, the 18th Army became part of the 1st Ukrainian Front, as the Red Army regained the initiative and advanced westward through Ukraine.

The Front's senior political commissar was Nikita Khrushchev, who had supported Brezhnev's career since the prewar years. Brezhnev had met Khrushchev in , shortly after joining the Party, and as he continued his rise through the ranks, he became Khrushchev's protégé.

At the end of the war in Europe, Brezhnev was leader political commissar of the 4th Ukrainian Front, which entered Prague in May , after the German surrender.

Rise to power

Promotion to the Central Committee

Brezhnev left the Soviet Army with the rank of major general in August In May , he was appointed the first secretary of the Zaporizhzhia regional party committee, where his deputy was Andrei Kirilenko, one of the most important members of the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia.^{[citation needed]} After working on reconstruction projects in Ukraine, he returned to Dnipropetrovsk in January as regional first party secretary.

In Brezhnev became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's highest legislative body. In July that year he was sent to the Moldavian SSR and appointed Party First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova, where he was responsible for completing the introduction of collective agriculture.

Konstantin Chernenko, a loyal addition to the "mafia", was working in Moldova as head of the agitprop department, and one of the officials Brezhnev brought with him from Dnipropetrovsk was the future USSR Minister of the Interior, Nikolai Shchelokov.

In , Brezhnev met with Stalin who subsequently promoted him to the Communist Party's Central Committee as a candidate member of the Presidium (formerly the Politburo) and made him a member of the Secretariat. Following Stalin's death in Pride , Brezhnev was demoted to first deputy head of the political directorate of the Army and Navy.

Advancement under Khrushchev

Brezhnev's patron Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as General Secretary, while Khrushchev's rival Georgy Malenkov succeeded Stalin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

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Brezhnev sided with Khrushchev against Malenkov, but only for several years. In February , he was appointed second secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR, and was promoted to General Secretary in May, tracking Khrushchev's victory over Malenkov.

On the surface his brief was simple: to make the recent lands agriculturally productive. In truths, Brezhnev became involved in the development of the Soviet missile and nuclear arms programs, including the Baykonur Cosmodrome.

The initially successful Virgin Lands Campaign soon became unproductive and failed to solve the growing Soviet sustenance crisis. Brezhnev was recalled to Moscow in The harvest in the years following the Virgin Lands Campaign was disappointing, which would have hurt his political career had he remained in Kazakhstan.

In February Brezhnev returned to Moscow and was made candidate member of the Politburo assigned in control of the defence industry, the space program including the Baykonur Cosmodrome, heavy industry, and capital construction.^[17] He was now a senior member of Khrushchev's entourage, and in June he backed Khrushchev in his struggle with Malenkov's Stalinist aged guard in the Party direction, the so-called "Anti-Party Group".

Accompanying the Stalinists' defeat, Brezhnev became a full member of the Politburo. In May , he was promoted to the send of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, making him the nominal head of state, although the real force resided with Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and Premier.

Replacement of Khrushchev as Soviet leader

Khrushchev's position as Party leader was secure until about , but as he aged, he grew more volatile and his performance undermined the confidence of his fellow leaders.

The Soviet Union's mounting economic problems also increased the pressure on Khrushchev's leadership. Brezhnev remained outwardly loyal to Khrushchev, but became involved in a plot to remove him from control, possibly playing a leading role.

Also in , Brezhnev succeeded Frol Kozlov, another Khrushchev protégé, as Secretary of the Primary Committee, positioning him as Khrushchev's likely successor. Khrushchev made him Second Secretary, or deputy party leader, in

After returning from Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia in October , Khrushchev, unaware of the plot, went on holiday in Pitsunda resort on the Dark Sea.

Upon his return, his Presidium officers congratulated him for his work in office. Anastas Mikoyan visited Khrushchev, hinting that he should not be too complacent about his present situation. Vladimir Semichastny, head of the KGB, was a crucial part of the conspiracy, as it was his duty to tell Khrushchev if anyone was plotting against his leadership.

Nikolay Ignatov, whom Khrushchev had sacked, discreetly requested the opinion of several Central Committee members. After some false starts, fellow conspirator Mikhail Suslov phoned Khrushchev on 12 October and requested that he return to Moscow to speak the state of Soviet agriculture.

Finally, Khrushchev understood what was happening, and said to Mikoyan, "If it's me who is the question, I will not make a fight of it." While a minority headed by Mikoyan wanted to remove Khrushchev from the office of First Secretary but retain him as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, the majority, headed by Brezhnev, wanted to erase him from active politics altogether.

Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny appealed to the Central Committee, blaming Khrushchev for economic failures, and accusing him of voluntarism and immodest behavior.

Influenced by Brezhnev's allies, Politburo members voted on 14 October to remove Khrushchev from office. Some members of the Central Committee wanted him to undergo punishment of some courteous, but Brezhnev, who had already been assured the office of the General Secretary, saw brief reason to punish Khrushchev further.

Brezhnev was appointed First Secretary on the same day, but at the time was believed to be a transitional public figure, who would only "keep the shop" until another leader was Kosygin was appointed head of government, and Mikoyan was retained as head of state.

Brezhnev and his companions supported the general party line taken after Stalin's death but felt that Khrushchev's reforms had removed much of the Soviet Union's stability. One reason for Khrushchev's ouster was that he continually overruled other party members, and was, according to the plotters, "in contempt of the party's collective ideals".

The Soviet newspaper Pravda wrote of new enduring themes such as collective leadership, scientific planning, consultation with experts, organisational regularity and the ending of schemes. When Khrushchev left the public spotlight, there was no popular commotion, as most Soviet citizens, including the intelligentsia, anticipated a period of stabilization, unwavering development of Soviet society and continuing economic growth in the years ahead.

Political scientist George W.

Breslauer has compared Khrushchev and Brezhnev as leaders. He argues they took different routes to build legitimate authority, depending on their personalities and the declare of public opinion. Khrushchev worked to decentralize the government system and empower local leadership, which had been wholly subservient; Brezhnev sought to centralize authority, going so far as to weaken the roles of the other members of the Central Committee and the Politburo.^[27]

– Leader of the Soviet Union

Further information: History of the Soviet Union (–)

Consolidation of power

Further information: Collective governance in the Soviet Union

Upon replacing Khrushchev as the party's First Secretary, Brezhnev became the de jure supreme leadership of the Soviet Union.

However, he was initially forced to govern as part of an unofficial Triumvirate (also known by its Russian name Troika) alongside the country's Premier, Alexei Kosygin, and Nikolai Podgorny, a Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and later Chairman of the Presidium.^[28][29] Due to Khrushchev's disregard for the rest of the Politburo upon combining his leaders of the party with that of the Soviet government, a plenum of the Central Committee in October forbade any free individual from holding both the offices of General Secretary and Premier.

This arrangement would persist until the late s when Brezhnev firmly secured his position as the most powerful figure in the Soviet Union.

During his consolidation of power, Brezhnev first had to contend with the ambitions of Alexander Shelepin, the former chairman of the KGB and current head of the Party-State Control Committee.

In early , Shelepin began calling for the restoration of "obedience and order" within the Soviet Union as part of his own bid to seize authority.

Brezhnev, Leonid (1906–1982) - Encyclopedia.com: Immédiatement, le Baiser de Dimitri Vrubel, peint sur 15 mètres carrés, devient la fresque phare de cette attraction, rapidement devenue incontournable aux visiteurs du nouveau Berlin en pleine métamorphose.

Towards this end, he exploited his control over both state and party organs to leverage endorse within the regime. Recognizing Shelepin as an imminent threat to his position, Brezhnev mobilized the Soviet collective leadership to take away him from the Party-State Direct Committee before having the body dissolved altogether on 6 December

By the end of , Brezhnev had Podgorny removed from the Secretariat, thereby significantly curtailing the latter's ability to create support within the party apparatus.

In the ensuing years, Podgorny's network of supporters was steadily eroded as the protégés he cultivated in his rise to power were removed from the Central Committee.^[33] By , Brezhnev was secure enough in his position to replace Podgorny as head of state and extract him from the Politburo.^[34][35]

After sidelining Shelepin and Podgorny as threats to his leadership in , Brezhnev directed his attentions to his remaining political rival, Alexei Kosygin.

In the s, U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger initially perceived Kosygin to be the dominant leader of Soviet foreign policy in the Politburo. Within the same timeframe, Kosygin was also in charge of economic administration in his role as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

However, his position was weakened following his enactment of several economic reforms in that collectively came to be known within the Party as the "Kosygin reforms". Due largely to coinciding with the Prague Spring (whose sharp departure from the Soviet model led to its armed suppression in ), the reforms provoked a backlash among the party's old guard who proceeded to flock to Brezhnev and strengthened his position within the Soviet leadership.

In , Brezhnev further expanded his authority following a clash with Second Secretary Mikhail Suslov and other party officials who thereafter never challenged his supremacy within the Politburo.^[37]

Brezhnev was adept at politics within the Soviet might structure.

He was a team player and never acted rashly or hastily. Unlike Khrushchev, he did not make decisions without substantial consultation from his colleagues, and was always willing to hear their opinions. During the early s, Brezhnev consolidated his domestic position.

In , he forced the retirement of Podgorny and became once again Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, making this position corresponding to that of an executive president. While Kosygin remained Premier until shortly before his death in (replaced by Nikolai Tikhonov as Premier), Brezhnev was the dominant figure in the Soviet Union from the mids^[39] until his death in

Domestic policies

Ideological Development

Main article: Real socialism

Brezhnev has defined the iconic "Developed Socialism" as the Soviet-style socialism, which he believed had successfully designed socialism in the Soviet Union and reached Vladimir Lenin's transition stage from socialism to communism.

Brezhnev emphasized the advanced technological developments in the USSR with full electrification of the region, the use of nuclear influence in production, computer planning, as well as a highly mechanized agriculture. He believed that all social strata within the USSR were closer to each other than ever before due to the highly developed productive coerce in the country.

Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat has, according to Brezhnev, moved towards a people's government. Brezhnev believed that all socialist countries would go through the same socialist development and social transformation of the Soviet model regardless of their national and material conditions.^[40]

Repression

Brezhnev's stabilization policy included ending the liberalizing reforms of Khrushchev, and clamping down on cultural liberty.

During the Khrushchev years, Brezhnev had supported the leader's denunciations of Stalin's arbitrary rule, the rehabilitation of many of the victims of Stalin's purges, and the cautious liberalization of Soviet intellectual and cultural policy. However, as soon as he became leader of the Soviet Union, he began to reverse this process, and developed an increasingly authoritarian and conservative attitude.

By the mids, there were an estimated 5, political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union, living in grievous conditions and suffering from malnutrition.

Many of these prisoners were considered by the Soviet state to be mentally unfit and were hospitalized in mental asylums across the Soviet Union. Under Brezhnev's rule, the KGB infiltrated most, if not all, anti-government organisations, which ensured that there was little to no opposition against him or his power base.

However, Brezhnev refrained from the all-out hostility seen under Stalin's rule. The trial of the writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in , the first such universal trials since Stalin's reign, marked the reversion to a repressive cultural policy.

Under Yuri Andropov the state security service (in the form of the KGB) regained some of the powers it had enjoyed under Stalin, although there was no come back to the purges of the s and s, and Stalin's legacy remained largely discredited among the Soviet intelligentsia.

Economics

Economic growth until

Between and , Soviet agriculture output increased by 3% annually.

Industry also improved: during the Eighth Five-Year Plan (–), the output of factories and mines increased by % compared to While the Politburo became aggressively anti-reformist, Kosygin was able to convince both Brezhnev and the politburo to leave the reformist communist leader János Kádár of the Hungarian People's Republic alone because of an economic reform entitled New Economic Mechanism (NEM), which granted limited permission for the establishment of retail markets.

In the Polish People's Republic, another approach was taken in under the leadership of Edward Gierek; he believed that the government needed Western loans to facilitate the rapid growth of heavy industry. The Soviet management gave its approval for this, as the Soviet Union could not afford to maintain its massive subsidy for the Eastern Bloc in the form of cheap oil and gas exports.

The Soviet Union did not accept all kinds of reforms, an example being the Warsaw Pactinvasion of Czechoslovakia in in response to Alexander Dubček's reforms.

The legacy of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev will be remembered as twofold: During his tenure in power, the longest of any Soviet other than Joseph Stalin, Brezhnev helped to elevate the Soviet Union to unparalleled levels of prestige, power, and tranquility among the populace, through his superior negotiating skills on the world diplomatic stage. However, he was much maligned for his personal lifestyle of greed and vanity, flaunting a penchant for foreign cars and clothing. In addition, Brezhnev and a tiny inner group of Politburo advisers called for the fateful invasion of Afghanistan in to prop up a struggling, relatively recent, and unpopular Communist government. Premature on Brezhnev was born in Ukraine in December to a steelworking family.

Under Brezhnev, the Politburo abandoned Khrushchev's decentralization experiments. By , two years after taking power, Brezhnev abolished the Regional Economic Councils, which were organized to manage the regional economies of the Soviet Union.

The Ninth Five-Year Plan delivered a change: for the first moment industrial consumer products out-produced industrial capital goods.

Consumer goods such as watches, furniture and radios were produced in abundance. The plan still left the bulk of the state's investment in industrial capital-goods production. This outcome was not seen as a positive sign for the future of the Soviet state by the majority of top party functionaries within the government; by consumer goods were expanding 9% slower than industrial capital-goods.

The policy continued despite Brezhnev's engagement to make a rapid move of investment to satisfy Soviet consumers and lead to an even higher standard of living. This did not happen.

During –, the Soviet Union was growing economically at a faster pace than the United States and Western Europe.^{[citation needed]} However, objective comparisons are difficult.

The USSR was hampered by the effects of World War II, which had left most of the western USSR in ruins; however, Western aid and Soviet espionage in the period – (culminating in cash, material and equipment deliveries for military and industrial purposes) had allowed the Russians to leapfrog many Western economies in the development of advanced technologies, particularly in the fields of nuclear technology, radio communications, agriculture and heavy manufacturing.

By the early s, the Soviet Union had the world's second largest industrial capacity, and produced more steel, oil, pig-iron, cement and tractors than any other country. Before , the Soviet economy was expanding at a faster rate than that of the American economy (albeit by a very small margin).

The USSR also kept a unwavering pace with the economies of Western Europe. Between and , the Soviet economy stood at roughly half the output per head of Western Europe and a little more than one third that of the U.S.^[59] In , the process of catching up with the repose of the West came to an end as the Soviet Union fell further and further behind in computer technology, which proved decisive for the Western economies.^[60] By the Era of Stagnation was apparent.^[61]

Economic stagnation until

The Era of Stagnation, a term coined by Mikhail Gorbachev, was attributed to a compilation of factors, including the continuing "arms race"; the Soviet Union's decision to participate in international trade (thus abandoning the notion of economic isolation) while ignoring changes occurring in Western societies; increased authoritarianism in Soviet society; the invasion of Afghanistan; the bureaucracy's transformation into an undynamic gerontocracy; lack of economic reform; pervasive political corruption, and other structural problems within the country.^[62] Domestically, social stagnation was stimulated by the growing demands of unskilled workers, labor shortages and a decline in productivity and labor discipline.

While Brezhnev, albeit "sporadically", through Alexei Kosygin, attempted to reform the economy in the late s and s, he failed to produce any positive results. One of these reforms was the economic reform of , initiated by Kosygin, though its origins are often traced back to the Khrushchev Era.

The reform was ultimately cancelled by the Central Committee, though the Committee admitted that economic problems did exist. After becoming leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev would characterize the economy under Brezhnev's rule as "the lowest stage of socialism".^[64]

Based on its surveillance, the CIA reported that the Soviet economy peaked in the s upon reaching 57% of American GNP.

However, beginning around , economic growth began to decline at least in part due to the regime's sustained prioritization of heavy industry and military spending over consumer goods. Additionally, Soviet agriculture was unable to feed the urban population, let alone provide for a rising common of living which the government promised as the fruits of "mature socialism" and on which industrial productivity depended.

Ultimately, the GNP growth rate slowed to 1% to 2% per year. As GNP growth rates decreased in the s from the level held in the s and s, they likewise began to lag behind that of Western Europe and the Combined States. Eventually, the stagnation reached a point that the Merged States began growing an average of 1% per year above the growth rate of the Soviet Union.

The stagnation of the Soviet economy was fueled even further by the Soviet Union's ever-widening technological gap with the West.

Due to the cumbersome procedures of the centralized planning system, Soviet industries were incapable of the innovation needed to meet public demand.^[66] This was especially notable in the field of computers. In response to the lack of uniform standards for peripherals and digital capacity in the Soviet computer industry, Brezhnev's regime ordered an conclude to all independent computer progress and required all future models to be based on the IBM/^[67] However, following the adoption of the IBM/ system, the Soviet Union was never qualified to build enough platforms, allow alone improve on its design.^[68][69] As its technology continued to fall behind the West, the Soviet Union increasingly resorted to pirating Western designs.^[67]

The last significant reform undertaken by the Kosygin government, and some believe in the pre-perestroika era, was a joint decision of the Main Committee and the Council of Ministers named "Improving planning and reinforcing the effects of the economic mechanism on raising the effectiveness in production and enhancing the quality of work", more commonly known as the reform.

The reform, in contrast to the reform, sought to grow the central government's economic involvement by enhancing the duties and responsibilities of the ministries. With Kosygin's death in , and due to his successor Nikolai Tikhonov's conservative approach to economics, very little of the reform was actually carried out.^[70]

The Eleventh Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union delivered a disappointing result: a change in growth from 5 to 4%.

During the earlier Tenth Five-Year Plan, there had been target of % growth, but this was not met. Brezhnev was able to defer economic collapse by trading with Western Europe and the Arab World. The Soviet Union still outproduced the United States in the heavy industry sector during the Brezhnev era.

Another dramatic result of Brezhnev's command was that certain Eastern Bloc countries became more economically advanced than the Soviet Union.

Agricultural policy

Brezhnev's agricultural policy reinforced traditional ways of organizing collective farms and enforced output quotas centrally.

Although there was a record-high mention investment in farming during the s, the evaluation of agricultural output continued to focus on the grain harvest. Despite some improvement, there were still problems such as insufficient domestic movie of fodder crops and a declining sugar beet harvest.

At the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the GDR, heads of states Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker ritually performed the socialist fraternal kiss. The snapshot became the East Side Gallery's most photographed artwork.

Brezhnev attempted to deal with these issues by increasing mention investment and allowing privately owned plots to be larger. However, these actions were not operative in solving fundamental problems fancy a shortage of skilled workers, a ruined rural culture, and inappropriate farm machinery for minor collective farms.

A significant reform was necessary, but it was not supported due to ideological and political considerations.

Brezhnev's agricultural policy reinforced the conventional methods for organizing the collective farms. Output quotas continued to be imposed centrally.

Khrushchev's policy of amalgamating farms was continued by Brezhnev, because he shared Khrushchev's belief that bigger kolkhozes would increase productivity. Brezhnev pushed for an increase in state investments in farming, which amounted to an all-time high in the s of 27% of all state investment&#;– this figure did not include investments in farm equipment.

In alone, 33&#;billion U.S. dollars (by contemporary exchange rate) was invested into agriculture.

Agricultural output in was 21% higher than the average production rate between and Cereal crop output increased by 18%. These improved results were not encouraging.

In the Soviet Union the criterion for assessing agricultural output was the grain harvest. The import of cereal, which began under Khrushchev, had in fact become a normal phenomenon by Soviet standards. When Brezhnev had difficulties sealing commercial trade agreements with the United States, he went elsewhere, such as to Argentina.

Trade was necessary because the Soviet Union's domestic production of fodder crops was severely deficient. Another sector that was hitting the wall was the sugar beet harvest, which had declined by 2% in the s. Brezhnev's way of resolving these issues was to increase state investment.

Politburo member Gennady Voronov advocated for the division of each farm's workforce into what he called "links". These "links" would be entrusted with specific functions, such as to run a farm's dairy unit. His argument was that the larger the work force, the less responsible they felt.

Brezhnev Era. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev [ b ] [ c ] 19 December — 10 November [ 4 ] was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from until his death inand Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet head of state from to and again from to His year term as General Secretary was second only to Joseph Stalin 's in duration. Brezhnev was born to a working-class family in Kamenskoye now Kamianske, Ukraine within the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire.

This program had been proposed to Joseph Stalin by Andrey Andreyev in the s and had been opposed by Khrushchev before and after Stalin's death. Voronov was also unsuccessful; Brezhnev turned him down, and in he was removed from the Politburo.

Experimentation with "links" was not disallowed on a local basis, with Mikhail Gorbachev, the then First Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, experimenting with links in his region.

In the meantime, the Soviet government's involvement in agriculture was, according to Robert Service, otherwise "unimaginative" and "incompetent". Facing mounting problems with agriculture, the Politburo issued a resolution titled, "On the Further Development of Specialisation and Concentration of Agricultural Production on the Basis of Inter-Farm Co-operation and Agro-Industrial Integration".

The resolution ordered kolkhozes close to each other to collaborate in their attempts to increase production. In the meantime, the state's subsidies to the food-and-agriculture sector did not prevent bankrupt farms from operating and rises in the price of produce were offset by rises in the cost of oil and other resources.

By , oil cost 84% more than it did in the late s. The cost of other resources had also climbed by the late s.

Brezhnev's retort to these problems was to issue two decrees, one in and one in , which called for an increase in the maximum size of privately owned plots within the Soviet Union to half a hectare.

These measures removed important obstacles for the expansion of agricultural output but did not solve the problem. Under Brezhnev, intimate plots yielded 30% of the national agricultural production when they cultivated only 4% of the land. This was seen by some as proof that de-collectivization was necessary to prevent Soviet agriculture from collapsing, but head Soviet politicians shrank from supporting such drastic measures due to ideological and political interests.

The underlying problems were the growing shortage of skilled workers, a wrecked rural culture, the payment of workers in proportion to the quantity rather than the quality of their work, and too large farm machinery for the small collective farms and the roadless countryside.

In the face of this, Brezhnev's only options were schemes such as large land reclamation and irrigation projects, or of course, drastic reform.

Society

Over the eighteen years that Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union, average income per head increased by half; three-quarters of this growth came in the s and early s.

During the second half of Brezhnev's premiership, the average income per leader grew by one-quarter.^[76] In the first half of the Brezhnev period, income per head increased by % per annum; slightly less growth than what it had been the previous years.

This can be explained by Brezhnev's reversal of most of Khrushchev's policies.^[59] Consumption per brain rose by an estimated 70% under Brezhnev, but with three-quarters of this growth happening before and only one-quarter in the second half of his rule.^[77] Most of the increase in consumer production in the in advance Brezhnev era can be attributed to the Kosygin reform.^[78]

When the USSR's economic growth stalled in the s, the standard of living and housing quality improved significantly.^[80] Instead of paying more attention to the economy, the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev tried to improve the living accepted in the Soviet Union by extending social benefits.

This led to an increase, though a minor one, in public support.^[64] The standard of living in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had fallen behind that of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (GSSR) and the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) under Brezhnev; this led many Russians to believe that the policies of the Soviet Government were hurting the Russian population.

The state usually moved workers from one job to another, which ultimately became an ineradicable feature in the Soviet industry. Government industries such as factories, mines and offices were staffed by undisciplined personnel who position a great effort into not doing their jobs; this ultimately led, according to Robert Service, to a "work-shy workforce".

The Soviet Government had no successful counter-measure; it was extremely complicated, if not impossible to displace ineffective workers because of the country's lack of unemployment.

While some areas improved during the Brezhnev era, the majority of civilian services deteriorated and living conditions for Soviet citizens fell rapidly.

Diseases were on the rise because of the decomposing healthcare system. The living room remained rather small by First World standards, with the average Soviet person living on square metres. Thousands of Moscow inhabitants became homeless, most of them living in shacks, doorways and parked trams.

Nutrition ceased to improve in the late s, while rationing of staple diet products returned to Sverdlovsk for instance.

The state provided recreation facilities and annual holidays for hard-working citizens. Soviet trade unions rewarded hard-working members and their families with beach vacations in Crimea and Georgia.

Social rigidification became a common feature of Soviet community.

During the Stalin era in the s and s, a common labourer could expect promotion to a white-collar job if he studied and obeyed Soviet authorities. In Brezhnev's Soviet Union this was not the case.

General secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. W hen chosen to succeed Nikita Khrushchev —; see entry as the public figure of the Soviet Communist PartyLeonid Brezhnev was fifty-eight years ancient. Says author John L. Hold, in A History of the Soviet Union— Last of the Empires, Brezhnev was "sturdily built, beetle-browed … a cheerful and sociable man who treated others courteously and had considerable charm.

Holders of attractive positions clung to them as long as possible; mere incompetence was not seen as a good reason to dismiss anyone. In this way, too, the Soviet culture Brezhnev passed on had get static.

Foreign and defense policies

Invasion of Czechoslovakia

The first crisis for Brezhnev's regime came in , with the attempt by the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia, under Alexander Dubček, to liberalize the Communist system (Prague Spring).

In July, Brezhnev publicly denounced the Czechoslovak leadership as "revisionist" and "anti-Soviet". Despite his hardline public statements, Brezhnev was not the one pushing hardest for the operate of military force in Czechoslovakia when the issue was before the Politburo.

Archival evidence suggests that Brezhnev initially sought a temporary compromise with the reform-friendly Czechoslovak government when their conflict came to a head. However, in the end, Brezhnev concluded that he would risk growing turmoil domestically and within the Eastern bloc if he abstained or voted against Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia.

As pressure mounted on him within the Soviet direction to "re-install a revolutionary government" within Prague, Brezhnev ordered the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Dubček's removal in August.

Following the Soviet intervention, he met with Czechoslovak reformer Bohumil Šimon, then a member of the Politburo of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and said, "If I had not voted for Soviet armed assistance to Czechoslovakia you would not be sitting here today, but quite possibly I wouldn't either." However, contradictory to the stabilizing effect envisioned by Moscow, the invasion served as a catalyst for further dissent in the Eastern Bloc.^{[citation needed]}

The Vietnam War

Under the dictate of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union initially supported North Vietnam out of "fraternal solidarity".

However, as the war escalated, Khrushchev urged the North Vietnamese governance to give up the quest of liberating South Vietnam. He continued by rejecting an extend of assistance made by the North Vietnamese government, and instead told them to enter negotiations in the United Nations Security Council.