 Leonid Brezhnev was born in Ukraine in 1906 and here he had the beginnings of his political career.
His loyalty and love of his motherland was, however, restricted to his home region of Dnipropetrovsk. In 1979, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev, who was an "absolutist" owner of the country's treasury, visited Dnipropetrovsk and gave it money to build a metro network. Dnipropetrovsk residents are still grateful to "dear Ilyich" for this generous gesture.
The rest of Ukraine said farewell to Brezhnev in 1950, when he was promoted to a higher post.
The dangerous ballerina
When Brezhnev settled in Moscow, he changed his biography slightly by stating that he was Russian, not Ukrainian. He also started mocking the Ukrainian language more often.
Nobody knows who made the country's leader change his ethnic orientation. But his political comrades in Ukraine caustically nicknamed him "ballerina," for he could be easily led and submissively turned in any direction. In the Kremlin, this sin of his became even more sinister, to correspond to his superior rank.
In 1982, approaching the end of his rule of the gigantic country and the huge party comprising 17 million functionaries, Brezhnev had become a champion as far as his decorations and awards. His military jacket could hardly accommodate 110 orders and the four stars telling the world that he was a Hero of the Soviet Union.
He owned a collection of foreign automobiles and rare hunting guns. However, no one spoke about his private library. Books must have been scarce in the life of the secretary general that always delivered his speeches incoherently and slowly, syllable by syllable, and made many spelling mistakes in his writings.
Engineer Brezhnev's mind-set was technical. He adored the smell of gasoline. He often visited his garages to admire and contemplate the unique design of his automobiles and believed that ethnic uniqueness was an almost extinct characteristic.
Being influenced by the Kremlin's main ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, who was as spiritually poor as his boss, Brezhnev persistently propagandized the idea of ethnic unification. He declared that the Soviet Union would soon have a new ethnic group, Soviet people speaking the Russian language.
This was the greatest ideological debacle of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union fell not only because of the economic crisis but also because of interethnic contradictions. The only two exceptions were Belarus and Ukraine. The sword Brezhnev lifted to stab these two republics still poses a threat.
The lord of fates
A modest party functionary in charge of the staff department of the regional party committee called himself the lord of fates. He was my friend when I was working as a reporter in Donbas between the 1950s and 1960s.
One day, he was frank enough to show me three files with information on those who were personal minions of the secretaries of the Donetsk party committee. He had to remind them from time to time whom to promote. He said Stalin, who was a meticulous bureaucrat, had devised such files.
Candidates for higher posts were perfect as far as their social origins (they all came from families of peasants or workers) and professional biographies.
Leonid Brezhnev was one of them. His father was a worker. He began to work at 15 and joined the party at 25.
Brezhnev was a metallurgist but he never worked in steel mills. He was immediately appointed a middle-level party official.
During the war, Nikita Khrushchev, who was a member of the military front council, liked Colonel Brezhnev, who became his minion.
Between the 1940s and 1950s, Brezhnev was promoted several times. He led regional committees in Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk, and then was appointed as leader of cozy Moldova and later of huge scorching Kazakhstan.
The experienced Brezhnev appeared in Moscow's highest echelons in 1956. Eight years later, he led the Kremlin coup to overthrow his lord of fates, Nikita Khrushchev.
The sturdy man
Like Brezhnev's, my humble career was also developing. My guardian angel was my portfolio of newspaper articles. In 1972, the Print Agency headquartered in Moscow appointed me as chief of its Kyiv office. My new position automatically enabled me to attend meetings with Ukraine's senior officials.
Wearing an embroidered folk shirt, the republic's communist number one, Petro Shelest, is sitting on a throne-like chair before journalists. He is smiling heartily as if it had been his birthday. His aide gave those present a wonderfully illustrated book written by Shelest, Our Soviet Ukraine.
Its author was a truly remarkable personality. He proudly acknowledged he was of Cossack descent. Journalists said he was quite competent in economic issues. They called him a sturdy man. Shelest emotionally objected to the government's decision to invest in Siberia at the expense of Ukraine. He was maturing an idea of Ukraine's autonomy within the Soviet Union and promoted the Ukrainian language and literature. He expressed most of his thoughts and ideas in his book.
When we were leaving his office, we did not know the book would soon become a rarity. The folio authored by the Kyiv nationalist angered the Kremlin. The book, glorifying the Zaporizhzhya Sich, was branded seditious and its edition eliminated. Shelest was promoted and sent to Moscow to become one of the fifteen deputies of the head of the Soviet government. This promotion was clearly a way of punishing him and putting him in a powerless position.
Lemon tea and billions
One day, I was sitting in the office of Ukraine's new leader, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, to write a draft article. Facing a pile of sheets with forecasts made by the prolific Economy Institute,
I had to make Shcherbytsky's ideas wise but readable and intelligible. My article, like all other articles that were not written by the republican leader but bore his name, was later polished and embellished by a party stylist.
Shcherbytsky never wrote books and never gave live interviews. Journalists and those working at the central party committee composed everything for him.
He came from Brezhnev's Dnipropetrovsk clan and was very chaste. Unlike his Moscow superior, he had no supermodel secretaries but male aides. They called him V.V. abbreviating his name and patronymic, Volodymyr Vasylyovych.
His aide appeared in the room with a cup of lemon tea and said, "Leonid Ilyich is angry today."
He left the door to V.V.'s office open and I saw the gloomy face of the always friendly Shcherbytsky. He looked cornered after a phone conversation with his Kremlin boss.
One minute later, I heard him teleconference with regional authorities. He asked them strictly why Ukraine produced less metal and coal.
All knew the answer to these questions but nobody dared ask them but Petro Shelest.
The truth was that Ukraine's steel mills were outdated and inefficient, and the Donetsk coal basin almost exhausted. The republican budget could not be used to simultaneously finance the renewal of the aging industry and invest in the exploration of huge oil and gas fields in the east of the Soviet Union.
Shcherbytsky was loyal to the Kremlin. He never asked Moscow to send funds destined for Siberia to Ukraine. His loyalty, however, was impulsive and contradictory, and eventually proved fatal.
Who fired a machine gun?
Shcherbytsky executed the Kremlin's order to persecute dissidents. By the end of Brezhnev's era, most of the Ukrainian freethinkers had been either imprisoned, or had emigrated or repented.
In 1972, a monument was unveiled near the village of Stavyshche in the Zhytomyr region. Its plaque read that Leonid Brezhnev had fired a machine gun there "to fight the Nazi enemy" on December 12, 1943.
Shcherbytsky did not object to this doubtful myth composed by party sycophants. When Brezhnev died, the monument of laughter, as it was called and known, was dismantled.
Shcherbytsky and Chornobyl
The Chornobyl nuclear disaster was the symbol of Shcherbytsky's indecisiveness. Although he insisted that the power plant be built in the Carpathians, his resistance was submissive. The station exploded during the perestroika period and blasted the authority and power of Shcherbytsky, who did not tell the nation the truth about the catastrophe.
My Brezhnev Gossips
I often visited Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s. Soon I realized that the Soviet capital began drinking quite heavily under Brezhnev. I drank much vodka and ate little with my Moscow colleagues. Most of our talks during those intoxicating feasts were about Brezhnev. The secretary general with splendidly bushy eyebrows delivered boring speeches but his everyday behavior was unconventional and extraordinary. The Soviet people liked him and never spoke about any other leader with such kind irony.Here is the mix of some anecdotes and episodes I remember
Kilograms of medals and orders
'Is it true there was an earthquake in Moscow?'
'No, Brezhnev's military jacket fell down from the hanger.'
Brezhnev's jacket was reinforced with a special framework to hold eight kilograms of his decorations.
'He served well'
'Leonid Ilyich, how did you become a marshal?'
'I seized the Kremlin.'
This anecdote is based on a true story.
One journalist told me in a restaurant one day he had heard it from an old soldier. Brezhnev was meeting with war veterans. When he entered the room, someone said, "Stand up! The marshal is coming." When he came in and took off his raincoat, all saw he was in a marshal's jacket. The secretary general said, "I served well."
The nominal cigarette case
Charles de Gaulle proudly showed off a cigarette case with an engraved inscription: "To Charles from the French." Winston Churchill showed his cigarette case reading: "To Winston from the Naval Infantry." Leonid Brezhnev produced his diamond cigarette case with an engraving "To Count Orlov from Catherine II."
Important information
Brezhnev walks down the corridor and meets a party functionary.
'Christ is risen, Leonid Ilyich.'
'Thank you, it is important information but I have been already informed.'
'How should we call you?'
'Stalin was called Comrade Stalin, Khrushchev was called Nikita and how shall we call you?
'Call me Ilyich or our dear Leonid Ilyich.'
Women's hips guarded
Brezhnev was a playboy when he was young and remained a pleasure seeker as he grew older. A photographer was invited to one of his parties. He took lots of photos, including those of Brezhnev hugging three young women. Two hours later, security officers came to the photographer to confiscate his recently developed films.
Brezhnev loved women and his affection helped them: in 1966, he issued a decree to declare March 8, International Women's Day, an official holiday in the Soviet Union.
Homemade snacks
Brezhnev killed a roe deer in his summer residence, Zavidovo. He suggested that he and his foreign guests celebrate this event. His bodyguard opened a rucksack and produced bottles with vodka and beer, cucumbers, tomatoes, bread, and sausages.
Brezhnev did not like culinary extravagances.
***
 The famous Russian publicist Roy Medvedev must be right when he says Brezhnev's lack of ambitions, mildness and mediocre skills satisfied the groups involved in a power struggle in the Kremlin. This helped him be the ruler of the country for sixteen years, even though he did not seek power.
After Khrushchev, who tried to refresh the bureaucratic system, Brezhnev led the country to the tranquil harbor of stagnation with long queues and deficits.
The great paradox, however, is that Ukraine lived the happiest and calmest period in its history under Brezhnev, and so one of the popular slogans in our country is: "We want back to the Brezhnev times!"
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