In recent years, an increasing number of people are beginning to warmly recall the Brezhnev era of stagnation. The presence of stability and social elevators in the mind begins to outweigh the absence of dozens of varieties of sausages and lines for shortages. Many note the practical absence of tension between nations. Therefore, in those days no one was interested in Brezhnev's nationality.
Origin
Leonid Ilyich was born on January 1, 1907, although December 19, 1906 was considered his official birthday in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the adoption of the birth date in the old style was due to the fact that they wanted to separate the celebration of the New Year and the anniversaries of the first leader. He was born in the village of Kamensky (in Soviet times, the city of Dneprodzerzhinsk). In 2016, the city where Brezhnev was born was again returned the historical name.
Father Ilya Yakovlevich (1874-1930) and mother Natalya Denisovna Mazalova (1886-1975) lived in the village of Brezhnevo (now Kursk Region) before arriving in Kamenskoye. Leonid Ilyich had a younger brother, Yakov Ilyich (1912-1993) and sister Vera Ilyinichna (1910-1997).
Nationality Brezhnev
The metric and other official documents of the early period, which were stored in the regional archive of Dnepropetrovsk, were seized. In one of the rare documents available, the questionnaire of 1935, completed by him personally, in the column "nationality" Brezhnev says - Ukrainian. In later documents, he indicated Russian nationality.
A lot of myths are still being generated around her, based on the fact that Leonid Ilyich held the highest party posts in Moldova and then in Kazakhstan. The corresponding roots are attributed to him, because the position of first secretary of the party of the Soviet republic was usually held by a representative of local nationality. Stalin considered Brezhnev to be a Moldavian.
As usual, he was "found" and Jewish roots, as well as Polish, Gypsy and Romanian. Leonid Ilyich’s mother spoke good Polish, which she explained by her close proximity to the Poles. Most researchers are of the opinion that Brezhnev’s nationality is Russian with Ukrainian roots.
early years
In the hometown, the Brezhnev family lived in an ordinary two-story house number 40 on Pelina Avenue, in which there were four apartments. Later, the inhabitants of the city began to call it "Lenin House". As a child, he was very fond of playing with pigeons, for which a dovecote was built in the courtyard. The last time Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev came to his homeland in 1979. He visited the house where he spent his childhood, and residents got the opportunity to take pictures with his former neighbor.
The official biography says that he is from a working family, but most likely his father was a technical worker at a metallurgical plant, since Ilya Yakovlevich managed in 1915 to send his eldest son to study in a classical gymnasium. Leonid Ilyich graduated in 1921, by which time the gymnasium had become a labor school.
Having received secondary education, the young Brezhnev went to work at the Kursk butter mill, where in 1923 he joined the Komsomol. From 1923 to 1927 he studied at a land-reclamation technical school, having married Victoria Denisova in the graduation year. Then Leonid Ilyich worked as a land surveyor in Belarus and other regions of the country. In 1931, he became a member of the Communist Party. In 1935 he graduated from the Dneprodzerzhinsky Metallurgical Institute.
Years of war
Leonid Ilyich began the war in October 1941 with the rank of brigade commissar on the South, then the Caucasian fronts. In 1943 he became head of the political department of the 18th Army, which was part of the First Ukrainian Front, where political work was led by N. Khrushchev. They had already met in 1931, and Nikita Sergeevich became a mentor to young Brezhnev.
In 1943, he participated in the battles for Novorossiysk, where about 40 times with a risk to his life he sailed with a naval landing force to the Malaya Zemlya bridgehead. Once it was thrown into the sea by a blast wave from a seiner, from where sailors pulled Leonid Ilyich. The obsessive propaganda in Soviet times by L. I. Brezhnev’s book “Small Earth” made many people skeptical about this period of life. But, according to military sources, he really fought bravely. At the Victory Parade, he walked with the commander A. I. Eremenko at the head of the column of the Fourth Ukrainian Front.
In the first year after the war, he served in the Carpathian Military District, where he participated in the fight against Ukrainian nationalists. According to one version, it was at this time that Brezhnev began to write nationality as Russian.
Good and bad
In 1964, after the deposition of Khrushchev N.S. as a result of a conspiracy in the country's top leadership, L.I. Brezhnev became the first person in the state. In the first decades, there was a qualitative improvement in the life of the population, most of the population got access to the basic benefits of that time. Further, the implementation of the space program, the oil and gas production program in Siberia, was successfully launched.
However, in the last decades of Brezhnev’s reign, due to an ineffective economic policy, personality cult, and conservation of the development of social and spiritual life, an era of stagnation has begun.