Leonid Brezhnev, the dour faced, bushy-browed Soviet leader who ruled the USSR from 1964 to 1982, tends to be overshadowed in the popular imagination by the more famous Soviet rulers who preceded him – Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev. But as a new book by prominent Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko argues, Brezhnev‘s long reign encompassed the height of Soviet power, the peak of the Cold War, and the beginning of the USSR‘s long decline. "Brezhnev‘s nearly two decades in power were a pivotal era that shaped the course of the Cold War and the fate of the Soviet Union itself," Radchenko writes in "The Kremlin‘s Dark Underworld: Brezhnev, the KGB, and the Decline of the Soviet Empire."
From Humble Commissar to Kremlin Schemer
Brezhnev‘s early biography follows a template typical of the Soviet ruling elite in the mid-20th century. Born to a working-class family in Ukraine in 1906, he received a technical education before joining the Communist Party in 1931 and beginning a steady climb up the ladder of the party-state apparatus. During World War II, Brezhnev served as a political commissar in the Red Army, playing a key role in enforcing discipline and motivating Soviet troops in brutal battles against the invading Nazis at Stalingrad, Kursk and other pivotal turning points in the war.
After rising to become a top official in the post-war Soviet space program, Brezhnev was brought into the Kremlin inner circle in the 1950s by the reformist premier Nikita Khrushchev, who valued Brezhnev‘s organizational skills and seeming loyalty. But as Khrushchev‘s erratic leadership increasingly alienated much of the Politburo in the early 1960s, Brezhnev began to scheme against his patron. In October 1964, Brezhnev led a palace coup that swiftly removed Khrushchev from power and installed himself as the new General Secretary of the Communist Party.
The "Era of Stagnation" and the Brezhnev Doctrine
Brezhnev‘s tenure as Soviet leader ushered in what later became known as the "era of stagnation" – a period of economic drift, political repression and gerontocratic leadership under a Politburo increasingly filled with old men clinging to power. As historian Edwin Bacon notes, "Brezhnev presided over a Soviet Union that was stable to the point of torpor, its economy growing at a sluggish pace and its political elite increasingly self-interested and corrupt."
But while Soviet citizens faced empty store shelves, dreary state housing, and KGB harassment, Brezhnev was determined to project an image of the USSR as a dynamic global superpower abroad. After Warsaw Pact tanks brutally crushed the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 under Brezhnev‘s orders, the Soviet leader enunciated what became known as the "Brezhnev Doctrine" – the principle that the USSR had the right to militarily intervene in any country to prevent it from leaving the Communist bloc. It was a chilling reassertion of Soviet domination over the captive nations of Eastern Europe.
Haunted by the memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, Brezhnev also devoted enormous resources to achieving military parity with the United States. By the early 1970s, a massive Soviet arms buildup had given the USSR rough strategic nuclear parity with the Americans for the first time, as well as a powerful conventional military and navy with global reach. A RAND Corporation study from 1975 estimated that the Soviet Union had over 9,000 strategic and tactical nuclear warheads at the time, a 350% increase from a decade earlier. This newfound strength at once emboldened Brezhnev‘s foreign policy and provided the basis for a period of détente and arms control diplomacy with the West.
The Soviet Union and the World
Under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union reached what Radchenko calls "the Everest of [its] influence on the world stage." Eager to establish the USSR as the leader of the global socialist movement, Brezhnev embarked on a massive program of foreign interventionism, pouring an estimated $51 billion (in 2022 dollars) worth of economic and military aid into Soviet client states in the developing world between 1974-1984 alone. Soviet weapons, advisers and proxies fueled conflicts across Asia, Africa and Latin America, from Angola to Vietnam to Nicaragua. A 1981 CIA assessment found that "Moscow is currently providing military assistance to 24 countries, out of 34 countries worldwide receiving foreign military aid. The Soviets furnish nearly 50% of total international arms exports."
This Cold War adventurism reached its disastrous climax in 1979, when Brezhnev sent the Red Army to invade Afghanistan in order to prop up a tottering pro-Soviet regime. Soviet forces soon found themselves bogged down in a brutal guerrilla conflict against Afghan mujahideen rebels covertly armed by the CIA, in what became known as the Soviets‘ own "Vietnam." The war dragged on for a decade, draining Soviet blood and treasure, and foreshadowing the imperial overreach that would contribute to the USSR‘s collapse a few years later.
Brezhnev‘s foreign policy was also bedeviled by the deepening Sino-Soviet split, as relations between the world‘s two largest Communist powers deteriorated into bitter ideological arguments and a scramble for influence in the Third World. Ironically, Western leaders often failed to grasp the depth of the rivalry, as evidenced by an exasperated President Nixon telling his cabinet in 1971 that, "We are doing China a disservice by making it look as if China and the USSR are working hand in glove when they hate each other‘s guts."
Twilight of an Empire
By the time of Brezhnev‘s death at age 76 in 1982, the Soviet Union looked more powerful than ever on paper, with a nuclear arsenal rivaling the United States‘, a vast conventional military, and a network of allies across the world. But the stability and strength that Brezhnev had seemed to provide was proving increasingly illusory. A top-secret KGB report from late 1982 recently unearthed by Radchenko paints a picture of a Soviet economy beset by "declining growth rates, raw material shortages, low productivity and poor quality of production," with a leadership "increasingly divorced from reality, as well as isolated from the public."
The gap between the Soviet system‘s outward might and inner rot would be brutally laid bare just a few years later, when Brezhnev‘s successor Gorbachev began his policy of glasnost (openness) intended to reform the USSR, only to watch helplessly as it sent the whole Soviet empire hurtling toward collapse. Looking back, then, Brezhnev‘s legacy is deeply paradoxical – he led the Soviet Union to its greatest heights of global power and prestige, but in doing so he doubled down on the very pathologies of economic backwardness, ideological rigidity and imperial hubris that would destroy it within a decade of his passing.
As one of Brezhnev‘s longest-serving Politburo colleagues, Mikhail Suslov, put it shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, "We thought we were at the pinnacle of strength, but it turned out we were at the edge of an abyss." By following Brezhnev‘s life and scheming, the underworld of his Kremlin, and his role on the world stage, historians can better understand both how the Soviet Union reached that pinnacle, and why it then plunged into the dust.
