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).