Brezhnev – The Making of a Statesman
by Susanne Schattenberg
IB Tauris £30

 
LEONID BREZHNEV has become the Soviet Union’s forgotten leader. Lacking the historic stature of Lenin or Stalin, the colourful character of Khrushchev or the tragic qualities of Gorbachev, he has slipped off the historical radar.
 
Yet he led the Soviet Communist party for longer than anyone except Stalin, and the years of his leadership, 1964 to 1982, are now regarded by many Russians as something of a golden age for their country.

This well-sourced biography by a German academic aims to rectify this omission. It comprehensively follows Brezhnev from his humble beginnings in Ukraine to his end, dying in office dependent on tranquilisers and more-or-less incapacitated by illness.
 
The book emphasises Brezhnev’s diligence in undertaking whatever the party asked him to do and his decency, as an official who did not use threats, bullying or exclusion as weapons of first resort. This helped his rise from regional to republican to all-union posts in the apparatus.
   
Certainly he owed part of his eminence to a talent for giving the least offence to the largest number, and to carefully nurturing networks of supporters which he eventually took all the way to the central committee and the politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).  

This construction of “clans” loyal to an individual became one of the problematic aspects of the CPSU’s political functioning.

Brezhnev is portrayed as a practical man oriented towards results rather than rhetoric.  No theoretician, his notebooks reveal not as much as a passing acquaintance with Marxism and Schattenberg reports that he initially asked his speech writers to omit quotes from Lenin from his addresses because no-one would believe he had read him anyway.
 
As general secretary, he set two broad objectives – improving the living standards of the Soviet people and preserving world peace. He was successful at both – in the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet people began to reap the benefits of the sacrifices and privations of previous decades and to become better housed, fed and supplied with consumer necessaries.

On the international stage he parlayed the strength of the USSR into a détente with the Western powers, building strong personal relationships with US, French and West German leaders (Britain does not feature very much).
   
Brezhnev’s own experiences as a solider-commissar during the Great Patriotic War informed his determination to avoid war. On his watch the memorialisation of the war began to take the central place in Soviet and Russian life and public culture which it holds to this day.

The period of Brezhnev’s leadership can therefore be considered to be as good as Soviet socialism got. However, it was swiftly damned as a “period of stagnation” by Gorbachev. Partly that reflected the new leadership’s need to define itself and its tasks against the record of the recent past, but partly it was an acknowledgement of the problems left unsolved by the Brezhnev team.

These included the failure to decisively raise labour productivity, continuing extraordinary waste in industry and agriculture, unaddressed nationality problems within the union and the consequences of the intervention in Afghanistan, which Schattenberg implies was imposed on an ailing Brezhnev by the combined efforts of the Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs and the head of the KGB.
 
Nor were matters helped by Brezhnev remaining in office long after his health and capacity for work had largely failed. He was propped up by pills, a burgeoning personality cult centred around an inflated war record and ghost-written memoirs, and the fact that an elderly leadership didn’t know what to do next.

Viewed as a rather colourless bureaucrat throughout his time in office, Schattenberg draws a human picture of Brezhnev, whose desire not to rock the boat was perhaps an understandable response to 50 preceding years of violence and turmoil.  

More bemused by than antipathetic towards the tiny number of dissidents, he generally came down on the side of relative lenience in their handling. Any reader of this comprehensive work will feel more sympathetic to its subject.

The book is marred by some factual errors – the 19th CPSU Congress at which Brezhnev joined the central committee is repeatedly referred to as the 11th, which took place 30 years earlier. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky headed the Polish armed forces, but never its communist party; conversely Maksim Saburov ran Soviet state planning but was not a major-general. Sergei Trapeznikov was responsible for education and science not economics in the CPSU apparat, and of the dates given for the resignation of Premier Aleksei Kosygin only 1980 is correct.

Notwithstanding, Schattenberg has done a service in rescuing the Brezhnev period from obscurity. “Stagnation” it may have been, but it was also a time of security, stability and social improvement, and it seems that very many people across the former USSR regard it as somewhat better than anything that has befallen them since.