Date: 30 years without Leonid Ilyich

On November 10, 1982, the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev died.

The Soviet media reported this only two days later. The longest reign of an unchangeable state leader since Stalin's death has ended.

Brezhnev became the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1964, being a little-known apparatchik. To those who brought him to the place of the “voluntarist” Khrushchev, it seemed that Brezhnev would remain a dependent and temporary figure.

During his 18 years of rule, he concentrated almost absolute power in his hands, adorned himself with all possible orders and completely lost his sense of reality. Brezhnev spoke about himself in the third person during public speeches broadcast throughout the USSR, his “memoirs,” written by the country’s best journalists, were studied in the school curriculum, and he received the country’s highest literary award for them , the Lenin Prize.

What remains in the memory of him now, 30 years after his death?

A humming old man in a marshal's uniform, wearing shiny orders from shoulders to waist. Stable poverty (although many remember it as poor stability). Queues, total shortages, total doublethink, construction projects of the century and many jokes, from obscene ditties to sophisticated anecdotes, ridiculing his complacency and his incapacity, his love of power and tchotchkes. The best of them, however, is not at all about the personal qualities of our dear comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, but precisely about what exactly the merciless and cynical passage of time leaves in history. Brezhnev was still alive and relatively healthy when people in the Soviet Union joked: “in the 21st century encyclopedia it will be said about Brezhnev that he is a minor political figure of the era of Alla Pugacheva.”

And this would be true if we consider Brezhnev’s 18 years in power only as an “era of stagnation,” vegetarian times. In 1978, Nikita Mikhalkov directed the film “Five Evenings” based on the play of the same name by Alexander Volodin. The film, like the play, ends with the words “If only there was no war.” This phrase is the embodiment of one of the most important elements of the ideology of the Brezhnev era: on the one hand, the cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War (it was Brezhnev who declared May 9 a day off in 1965 and established the order of holding parades on Red Square on this holiday), on the other - " the struggle for world peace." As long as there is no war, and the rest doesn’t matter, we’ll live somehow - it was precisely this thesis that doomed us to stagnation. But there was a war - both with our own dissidents and abroad: sometimes in Czechoslovakia, sometimes in Afghanistan.