Leonid Brezhnev 

Leonid Ilych Brezhnev (December 19, 1906 - November 10, 1982) was a Soviet politician and First/General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who was born in Kamenskoye (now Dneprodzerzhinsk) in the Ukraine.

As both head of the Communist Party since 1964 and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1977 until his death in 1982, Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Soviet Union longer than any previous leader except Stalin. The Soviet Union, under his leadership, improved the standards of living by raising urban salaries by around 75%, doubling rural wages, building millions of one-family apartments, and manufacturing large quantities of consumer goods and home appliances. Under his tutelage, industrial output also increased by 75%, and the Soviet Union became the world's largest producer of oil and steel. He also introduced the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated:

"When forces that are hostile to socialism and try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries."

This effectively meant that no country was allowed to leave the Warsaw pact, and the doctrine was used to justify the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979.

In 1988, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev officially abandoned the doctrine and replaced it with the Sinatra Doctrine in which each nation was allowed to develop in their own way.

was to see them, or what was left of them! As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which had Description fails to do justice to the abomination of desolation of that reconstruct the scene of peace--the chateaux and happy villages, the fancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, were and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-red soil direction, trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. On the hummocks were graves, ground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon that by one of those monsters, wounded to the death, I had seen that morning. felt, as a child, when contemplating dead elephants in a battle.html">battle picture that rolling waste the "Butt" of Warlencourt--the burial-mound of this clung to it found their graves, while the victorious British army swept arrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves. Repetition seems near what was once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all, British sappers had toiled far below in the chalk, digging the passage burst directly under the German trench. Long we stood on the slippery strewed the bottom, while the rain.html">rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, said months of preparation. "We never got dry," he told me; and added with a caught colds." When we entered Albert, the starting point of the British advance, there us over the street. The church-tower on which it had once stood erect broken. Local superstition declares that when the Virgin of Albert falls .

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