Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman

502 Pages·2021·12.979 MB·English

by  Susanne Schattenberg

Brezhnev
i
ii
Brezhnev
Th e Making of a Statesman
Susanne Schattenberg
Translated by John Heath
iii
I.B.TAURIS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

First published in Great Britain 2022

Copyright © Bö hlau Verlag, Susanne Schattenberg: L eonid Breschnew, Staatsmann und
Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie , Cologne, 2019

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation
Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Offi ce, the collecting society VG WORT and
the B ö rsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

English Language Translation © John Heath

Susanne Schattenberg has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.

Cover design by Toby Way | tobyway.co.uk
Cover image: Leader of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow, 1974.
(© Laski Diffusion/Getty Images)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any
third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in
this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-8386-0638-1
ePDF: 978-0-7556-4211-3
eBook: 978-0-7556-4210-6

Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

To fi nd out more about our authors and books visit w ww.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our n ewsletters.
iv
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Glossary and list of abbreviations xii
Leonid Brezhnev: Chronology of life events xvi
Note on translation xix
Introduction 1
A man without a biography 4
Archives and fi les 5
Brezhnev’s ‘memoirs’ 8
Brezhnev’s ‘diaries’ and his photographer 10
1 Dreams of the Stage, or an Ordinary Soviet Man 14
Striving for education and bourgeois prosperity 15
Time out of joint: revolution and civil war, 1917–1920 19
Land manager in turbulent times, 1927–1930 28
Evening classes and activism, 1931–1935 36
Shock worker-engineer and director again, 1935/36 40
2 ‘How the Steel was Tempered’, or a Career Amidst Terror and War 44
Rise during the Great Terror 44
Th e ‘Great Patriotic War’ 53
In the Carpathians 61
3 In Stalin’s Shadow, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship I 73
Patronage 73
Zaporozh’ye 76
Dnepropetrovsk 84
In Moldavia 92
Stalin’s extra in Moscow 114
4 Under Khrushchev, or a General Secretary’s Apprenticeship II 118
Virgin lands under the plough 120
Khrushchev’s right-hand man 142
President of the Soviet Union 153
Khrushchev ousted 163
vii
viii Contents
5 Th e Caring General Secretary, or Collective Leadership as Th eatre 172
Trust and care: Brezhnev’s scenario of power 172
Familiarity in the Politburo, or L ë nya, Kostya and Andryusha 189
Male bonding 193
6 Live and Let Live, or ‘Everyone should be able to live and
work in peace’ 204
Benefactor and carer 205
Th e consumption course 220
Brezhnev versus Kosygin and Gosplan 225
‘Th e cadres decide everything’ 235
7 ‘ Developed Socialism’, or Re-launching the Soviet Project? 242
‘Developed socialism’ 242
Re-Stalinization? 246
‘We are heroes’: the cult of the Second World War 261
Th e BAM – the last of the Mohicans 263
8 Emotions and Pills in the Cold War, or How to Play the
Western Statesman 267
Concordia domi … or consensus in the East … 269
… foris pax , or peace with the West 283
Th e return to mistrust 314
Faltering foreign policy 320
9 Craving Glory and Physical Decline, or the Loneliness
of the General Secretary 333
Th e cult of personality 336
Addiction 342
Family and death 353
Epilogue 356
Notes 363
Sources and Bibliography 455
Archives 455
Memoirs and documents 457
Author’s interviews 462
Online sources 462
Secondary literature 463
Index 472
Th at I still enjoy thinking about Brezhnev to this day may be due to the fact that he was
the fi rst Kremlin lord who made the transition from an uncanny factor of power to a
person, experienced and calculable in his strengths and weaknesses. Th e man revealed
a Russian soul, capable of great emotions and generous gestures – brutality too,
certainly.
Egon Bahr, Z u meiner Zeit
History also consists of personal fates and lost opportunities.
Egon Bahr, Z u meiner Zeit
v
vi
Glossary and list of abbreviations
Bolsheviks Members of the Communist Party and its predecessor, the Russian Social
Democratic Workers’ Party, which split into the ‘Bolsheviks’ (the ‘majority’), following
Lenin, and the ‘Mensheviks’ (the ‘minority’) in 1903.
Cadre Soviet expression for personnel in the sense of specialist staff , but in the
political context the term was also used for party functionaries as well as for people in
general.
Candidate (e.g. in the Politburo) Member of the party organization without voting
rights; a status on the way to becoming a full member with voting rights.
Central Committee (CC) Represented the party between the party congresses and
implemented the guidelines determined at the latter. Th e CC was elected at the party
congresses and in turn appointed the ð Politburo; under Brezhnev the CC usually
convened twice a year in a plenum and comprised around four hundred members and
candidates.
Central Rada ‘Rada’ = Ukrainian for ð soviet or council, the title of the government of
Ukraine (1917–1920) aft er its secession from the Russian Empire, in which it was
supported by the German occupying forces. Aft er the Germans withdrew, the Central
Rada was outlawed by the Bolsheviks.
Cheka Stands for the letters in Russian ‘Ч К ’, which together are pronounced ‘cheka’; the
abbreviation for the ‘Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution’;
predecessor to the ð OGPU
Collectivization Merger of all farmsteads to create collective farms ( ð kolkhozes) as the
state took ownership of the land, livestock and machines; implemented in the Soviet
Union from 1928 to 1933, initially on a voluntary basis, then by force and
expropriation. Aft er 1945, collectivization was enforced in the occupied countries of
East-Central Europe, the Baltic and Moldavia.
Cooperative Peasants’ economic community: the peasants voluntarily formed a collective
to tend the fi elds and their livestock and sell their products; the land, livestock and
machines remained the property of the respective peasants, however.
CP Communist Party
CPC Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1952–1991
CPU Communist Party of Ukraine
CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Th e Conference fi rst
assembled in Helsinki in 1973 and became renowned aft er the Helsinki Accords were
signed in 1975. Originally the Soviet Union’s initiative for peaceful coexistence with
and rapprochement with the West, it was renamed the OSCE (Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe) in 1995.
CSSR Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
Dekulakization Offi cially, the dispossession and abolition of the ‘exploiting class’ of
wealthy peasants (ð kulaks) in the years 1928–1933; in fact, the displacement, arrest
and deportation of countless thousands of peasants who opposed Soviet power.
xii