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Show Ilyich Brezhnev was bom on Ieonid 19, 1906, the youngest son of steelworker in impoverished Zaporozhia-Kamenskoya small town in the Ukraine whose name was later changed by the Bolsheviks to Dneprodzerzhinsk. His childhood was dise, rupted by war, typhus, revolution civil strife. and Nathan Kruglak, who now runs an auto supply store in Milwaukee, Wis., attended the Kamenskaya Klassiche-skay- a Cymnazya, the local junior high school, with Brezhnev for six years ana' remembers him as "quiet, cautious, the son of a steel laborer who worked in the town steel factory, the Kamenskoy Zavod, which was then owned by French and Belgian interests. Leonid was very poor as a boy and kept pretty much to himself. "There were 40 of us in the same class," Kruglak recalls. "I was one of four Jewish students, and naturally we didn't mix too much with the others. I sat in the back of the room, and Brezhnev sat three desks ahead of me. He was good in the Russian language but not in any other subject. non-talkin- No intellectual "As a student he just didn't have it upstairs," Kruglak continues. "Intellectually he is no match for Nixon, at least in my opinion, but of course, he will not be allowed to negotiate with Nixon man to man. That's not the way the Soviets work. remembers, Kruglak "Anyway," "Brezhnev was extremely skinny as a kid. I remember when the typhus epidemic struck our town. Brezhnev was one of the first kids to come down with the sickness. It took him months to recover. When he did and came back to school he was nothing but skin and bones. "His life as a boy was filled with war and turmoil as was mine. Brezhnev and I first entered school in 1915 when Russia was under the Czar. We both were 9. Then in 1917 came the Red Revolution. Two years later the White Army under General Denikin, a Czarist, invaded the Ukraine. One year later Trotsky organized the Red Army. This time the Red Army marched into the Ukraine, took over our town, changed the name of our school to the Kamenskaya Trudo-day- a Shkola (trud means labor) and the name of our town to Dneprodzerzhinsk. "Brezhnev and I graduated in 1921. That year an unemployed engineer, engineer Petrov we called him, had a 10 bright idea. He organized a metallurgical institute in the steel complex, the Kamenskoy Zavod. Brezhnev and I both entered. I had some opportunity to study and work with Brezhnev, and I tell you, the brightest man in the world he is not. Cautious, careful, safe he is. Bright he is not unless, of course, he has changed considerably over the years. But at 17, when I last saw him, he was average." Joins young Reds After Kruglak and his family emigrated to America to avoid Ukrainian Brezhnev took his first political step. He joined the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and moved to the Urals where he worked first as a surveyor and then in various administrative posts. Those were the years of Stalin's forced collectivization and liquidation of the kulaks, and as a trusted Brezhnev undoubtedly administrator helped conduct the offensive against the peasantry. In 1930 Brezhnev went to Moscow where he attended the Timiryazeff Academy w'hich is an agricultural institute and simultaneously applied for membership in the Communist Party, which requires a period of 12 months as a is candidate before membership granted. Somewhere along the line Brezhnev decided that he would rather become a metallurgist than an agriculturist. He and returned to Dneprodzerzhinsk studied at the metallurgical institute until 1935. He was graduated at age Nathan Kruglak of Milwaukee, who knew him when, holds Brezhnev photo. 26 and then, according to his latest biography in the'Kommunist Spravoch-m- k Kalendar," performed military service. Earlier Brezhnev's life in various clopedias fail to mention two years of versions of Soviet Encymilitary serv- ice. In any event, Brezhnev began to While move politically in 1937-193Nikita Khrushchev, then in charge of the Ukraine, dismissed and exterminated thousands of party bureaucrats for real or imagined opposition to Stalins regime, Brezhnev rose quickly through the ranks, achieving positions beyond all reasonable expectation for a person of his age and limited experience. Within a short time, thanks to Khrushchev, he became mayor of Dneprodzerzhinsk, and a leading party function8. ary. Fought in war When World War II broke out, Khrushchev appointed Brezhnev a political con.missar in the army. Brezhnev spent the war years fighting in the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia. He was commissioned a colonel at the start, then promoted to major general in 1943. Col. Brezhnev (seated, at lar right) as a political commissar in April, 1943. After the war, Brezhnev, still under Khrushchev's sponsorship, received top regional assignments. In 1950 he followed Krushchev to Moscow where he emerged as a member of the top Soviet leadership. He was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia. When Stalin died in 1953, Brezhnev was briefly demoted to the navy's political department, but patron Khrushchev rescued and sent him to Kazakhstan in western Siberia in 1954 as second in command of his ambitious virgin lands program. This was a bold scheme to increase agricultural output by plowing up almost 100 million acres of virgin land in western Siberia. The program entailed a massive mobilization and transportation of people and resources. Brezhnev eventually headed the program and luckily presided over a bumper crop before the entire scheme fell apart. By that time, however, the crafty Brezhnev was safely back in Moscow, hanging on to Khrushchev's coattails. As a reward for loyal service in Khrushchev's struggle for power, Brezhnev in 1960 was appointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the titular President of the Soviet Union, largely a ceremonial position but one which for the first time afforded him visibility, prestige, foreign travel, and personal influence. Widely regarded as Khrushchev's heir apparent, Brezhnev in 1964 traded the shadow of power for its substance when he helped oust, in traditional Soviet style, his former patron. In the postcoup division of the spoils, he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, the position from which Josef Stalin molded his tragic and despotic dominance of the Soviet Union. Admittedly, Leonid Brezhnev is no Stalin, and the days of Stalin's mass murders are finished. But when dealing with the Soviets, one should never lose sight of Lord Acton's most memorable and applicable axiom, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." PARADE MAY 21, 1972 |