II.

Early Career

Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoye (now Dniprodzerzhynsk, Ukraine) on December 19, 1906, the son of a steelworker. He was first trained in land reclamation, but after graduating (1935) from the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Institute, he became a steel engineer. A member of the Communist Party from 1931, he was soon noticed and set on a political and administrative career. After serving in the Red Army in the Russian Far East as a political commissar (a party official supervising army commanders), Brezhnev began his climb up the party ranks. A beneficiary of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that eliminated many top-level party officials, Brezhnev became deputy mayor of Dniprodzerzhynsk in May 1937 and secretary for propaganda of the regional party organization in 1939. He participated in World War II as a senior political officer in the Red Army. After the war ended in 1945, Brezhnev became head of the Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk party organizations in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) (present-day Ukraine). In 1950 he was transferred to head the Communist Party in the Moldavian SSR (present-day Moldova), where he was responsible for integrating the region into the Soviet structure. In 1952 he was rewarded for his service to the party by his election as a candidate, or non-voting, member of the party’s newly expanded Presidium (formerly Politburo), the Soviet Union’s highest decision-making body. At that time he also became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Brezhnev’s career owed much to his early association with Nikita Khrushchev, whom he had worked under during World War II. During the succession struggle that followed the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Presidium was reduced in size from 35 to 14 members. Brezhnev lost his candidate membership and was appointed deputy head of the political arm of the armed forces. When Khrushchev became first secretary (later called general secretary) of the CPSU later that year, he made Brezhnev deputy and then first secretary of the party apparatus in the Kazakh SSR (present-day Kazakhstan). In this post, Brezhnev supervised Khrushchev’s ambitious Virgin Lands programme, which sought to bring vast new tracts of land under agricultural cultivation.

Brezhnev was elected as a full member of the Presidium in 1957. He also served as the Central Committee secretary in charge of the Soviet space and missile programme. From 1960 to July 1964 he served as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the largely ceremonial position of head of state.