biography
| name: |
Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich
|
pronunciation:
[brezhnyef]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1906–82)
|
| biography:
| Russian statesman, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (1964–82), and president of the Supreme Soviet (1977–82), born in Kamenskoye, (present-day Dniprodzerzhyns'k) EC Ukraine. He trained as a metallurgist, and became a political commissar in the Red Army in World War 2. After the war, he was a party official in the Ukraine and Moldavia, becoming a member (1952–7) and then chairman (1960–4) of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was general secretary of the Party Central Committee after Khrushchev, and gradually emerged as the most powerful figure in the Soviet Union, the first to hold simultaneously the position of general secretary and president. |
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