(1906–82), general secretary of the Soviet Communist party (1964–82), the most powerful position in the Soviet Union.

Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoye (now Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine) on Dec. 19, 1906, the son of a steelworker. He was first trained in land reclamation, but after graduating (1935) from the Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical Institute, he became a steel engineer. A member of the Communist party from 1931, he was soon tapped for a political and administrative career. In 1939 he became a Ukrainian party secretary, and during World War II he served as a Red Army political commissar, attaining the rank of major general.

After the war Brezhnev was first assigned to help rebuild the Ukraine and was then made party leader of the Moldavian SSR. At Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, he was a national party secretary in Moscow. In 1954 the new Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, sent him as party chief to the Kazakh SSR to supervise an experimental program to cultivate arid virgin lands. Evidently pleased with Brezhnev’s performance, Khrushchev brought him back to Moscow as a national party secretary in 1956 and in 1957 made him a member of the party’s ruling Presidium (later the Politburo). In May 1960 he was elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a post equivalent to chief of state.

Again a national party secretary in 1963, Brezhnev helped to engineer the ouster of Khrushchev in October 1964 and then succeeded him as party leader. As first secretary (later called general secretary) of the party, he formed a triumvirate with Prime Minister Aleksey N. Kosygin and President Nikolay V. Podgorny.

Through sharing power, the forceful, astute Brezhnev emerged as the chief figure in the Soviet Union. In foreign affairs he developed the “Brezhnev doctrine,” which asserted that Communist states can intervene in one another’s internal affairs if they consider their common political system threatened, as exemplified by the Warsaw Pact invasion of reform-minded Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the 1970s he fostered a policy of détente with the U.S., signing agreements on scientific cooperation and the first strategic arms limitation (SALT) treaty. In domestic affairs he sought to control a small dissident movement, slightly relaxed curbs on Jewish and other emigration, and guided adoption of a new constitution. Continuing to accumulate power, he assumed the military rank of marshal in 1976 and, following the ouster of Podgorny in 1977, became president, thus consolidating his control of the Soviet leadership. Despite hostile U.S. reaction to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979) and U.S. reluctance to ratify SALT II, Brezhnev continued to affirm his belief in détente. He was reelected party chief again in 1981 but died on Nov. 10, 1982, and was quickly replaced by Yuri V. Andropov.        T.S., THEODORE SHABAD, B.S.