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the “breathing space” to consolidate their gov-
ernment, before the expected backlash from
opposition forces taking shape in the south.
Opposition to the treaty within the party came
from two sources—Leon
TROTSKY
and Nikolai
BUKHARIN
. Bukharin and the Left Communists
opposed any peaceful relations with bourgeois
imperialist governments and supported a revo-
lutionary war to the end. Trotsky's position, sup-
ported by the majority of the Bolshevik Central
Committee, was defined by the slogan “neither
peace nor war,” in expectation of a German pro-
letarian revolution. When Trotsky, acting as com-
missar for foreign affairs, first told the German
negotiators at Brest that the Soviet government
would cease to fight but would not conclude a
peace, the Germans continued their advance on
Petrograd. Shaken by the German advance and
by Lenin's threat to resign unless a treaty was
signed, the Central Committee reversed its deci-
sion and supported Lenin by a small majority.
Soviet Russia's separate peace with Germany
gave further encouragement to the Allied mili-
tary intervention in northern Russia that hoped
to install a government that would reopen hos-
tilities with Germany. With Germany's defeat in
November 1918, the Soviet government unilat-
erally abrogated the treaty. While the Ukraine
was brought back into the newly formed Soviet
Union, the former Baltic provinces—reconsti-
tuted as the nations of Estonia and Latvia—as
well as Lithuania, remained independent until
1940.
1936, to a working-class family. He left school at
age 15 and briefly worked in amateur theater
troupes before eventually becoming a land sur-
veyor. In 1931 he joined the
COMMUNIST PARTY
and returned home to the Ukraine to enroll in
the Kamenskoe Metallurgical Institute. In the
late 1930s, like other hard-working young Party
activists of his generation, Brezhnev began to
advance his political career in the late 1930s at a
time when brutal purges had depleted the party
ranks. In 1939 he became first secretary of the
Dnepropetrovk's regional party committee.
Brezhnev spent World War II as a minor political
officer in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, eventu-
ally attaining the rank of major general. He
played a part in the important battle around
Novorossiisk, although later writings would
greatly embellish his role. After the war he
returned to party work in Dnepropetrovsk and,
in 1949, was elected to the Central Committee
of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Increasingly
important appointments followed during the
1950s, especially as
KHRUSHCHEV
—whom he had
befriended in the late 1930s—gained the upper
hand in the post-Stalin political struggles. After a
stint in Kazakhstan, where he took part in the
Virgin Lands Campaign, Brezhnev returned to
Moscow in 1956, becoming a full member of the
Presidium (Politburo) after the defeat of the
ANTI
-
PARTY GROUP
that tried to oust Khrushchev
in 1957. In 1960 he was named titular head of
state of the Soviet Union, a prominent position
though with little real power.
Although not a leader of the conspiracy that
overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964, Brezh-
nev benefited from its outcome—perhaps
because of his relatively unthreatening political
persona—and became first secretary of the Com-
munist Party of the Soviet Union. Advocating a
policy of “stability of cadres” that appealed to
party members who had survived
STALIN
's terror
and Khrushchev's bureaucratic reorganizations,
Brezhnev gradually consolidated his power over
the next decade, even as his health began to fail.
For the next 18 years, a conservative party
bureaucracy diluted or defeated reformist attempts
Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich
(1906-1982)
ruler
Leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982,
Brezhnev presided over a long period of relative
stability and international power that, however,
led to the country's demise a decade after his
death, in great part as a result of the stagnation
and corruption that were also hallmarks of his
rule.
Brezhnev was born in the Ukrainian town of
Kamenskoe, renamed Dneprodzerzhinsk in
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