Leonid Brezhnev was Chairman of the CPSU from 1964 to 1982 and shaped the development of the Soviet Union for almost two decades. Contrary to what had long been claimed in the West, Brezhnev was not a hardliner or restalinizer, but had himself suffered under Stalin and seen so much suffering that he declared prosperity for all to be the general line of the party. The horrors he had experienced in the Second World War led him to seek a balance with the West. Brezhnev mimicked the Western statesman and was accepted by his partners as one of their own. But when Georges Pompidou died in 1974 and Willy Brandt and Richard Nixon resigned, Brezhnev found himself faced with the ruins of his policy of détente. For, as no one in the West suspected, there was no change of policy in the Kremlin. Stress and insomnia led Brezhnev into a pill addiction that further ruined his peace efforts: the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops in 1979 was decided by a Politburo troika without him.
A man in his time: Based on numerous previously inaccessible sources, Eastern European historian Susanne Schattenberg presents the first academic biography of Leonid Brezhnev on the 35th anniversary of his death in November 2017.

ISBN: 978-3412502096