Brezhnev during his visit to the USA.
Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) - communist activist, Soviet politician, dictator. He was born in Ukraine as the son of a steelworker. From the end of the 1930s, he made a career in the party apparatus:first in Ukraine, then in Moldova and Kazakhstan. In 1957 he became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In 1964, after the removal from power of the incumbent leader of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, he became the first secretary. He held this function (later renamed the secretary general) for almost twenty years, until his death. Responsible for the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia (1968) and for the many years of war in Afghanistan, which strained not only the budget but also the prestige of the Soviet Union.
The opinion of him as a hardliner, strictly adhering to the "Brezhnev doctrine" - the principle of limited sovereignty of the Eastern bloc countries - played an important role when Solidarity began to develop in Poland. The introduction of martial law in 1981 was justified by the fear that Brezhnev would deal with the Poles in the same way as before with the Czechs.
In recent years, he has become the subject of numerous jokes due to his advanced age and mental infirmity. There are assumptions that he may have been murdered.