Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and arbitrary Stalinist terror gave way to selective
persecution of political, religious, and nationalist
activists, who were often harassed at work or
imprisoned in “psychoprisons,” while economic
growth fueled by the postwar recovery slowed
down and corruption spread through the system.
With Brezhnev in office, the Soviet Union
appeared at the peak of its international power,
even though excessive military spending ulti-
mately contributed to the domestic crisis of the
1980s. The August 1968
WARSAW PACT
invasion of
Czechoslovakia was later justified by the Brezh-
nev Doctrine, which defended the Soviet Union's
right to intervene in Soviet-bloc countries where
it felt socialism was threatened. Brezhnev's pur-
suit of détente with the United States and its allies
led to concrete achievements in disarmament and
the 1975 Helsinki Agreement. The cold war com-
petition was transferred to places such as Angola
and Ethiopia, leading to the disastrous 1979
Soviet invasion of
AFGHANISTAN
, which embroiled
the Soviet Union in an unwinnable war and
whose far-reaching consequences are still being
felt today.
The final years of Brezhnev's rule were
marked by his declining health and an inability
to perform his basic duties, the subject of numer-
ous unofficial jokes from Soviet citizens increas-
ingly cynical about their rulers and communism
itself. He died of heart failure in November 1982,
three days after reviewing the traditional Octo-
ber Revolution parade in the cold of a Moscow
winter.
Racetrack, and the Brighton Beach Baths built in
1907. As the demand for housing increased in
the 1920s, more than 30 six-story apartment
buildings were built in the neighborhood, and
the area gradually came to have a large number
of Jewish residents, mostly of East European ori-
gin. By the 1970s the wood-frame houses and
bungalows of earlier years had considerably dete-
riorated, even though the 1920s Art Deco apart-
ment buildings were still in good condition. The
availability of housing and commercial stock and
the East European Jewish character of the neigh-
borhood made it an attractive place to resettle the
large numbers of Soviet Jewish émigrés who
arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. The maritime
character of the neighborhood, with its expan-
sive boardwalk and beach front, and the fact that
almost three-quarters of the recent immigrants
came from
ODESSA
and the Black Sea region con-
tributed to it being sometimes known as “Little
Odessa.” The dissolution of the Soviet Union in
1991 and the lifting of previous restrictions on
emigration brought another wave of immigrants
to the neighborhood, even as immigrants from
other nations started to settle in the outskirts of
the neighborhood. By the early 21st century,
Brighton Beach was no longer the final destina-
tion for emigrants from the former Soviet Union,
but with its Russian-language signs for restau-
rants, nightclubs, bookstores, bathhouses, and
fruit stands dominating the neighborhood land-
scape, it still remained their symbolic gateway
into New York and the United States.
Brighton Beach
A neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn, New
York, bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the
south and nestled between Manhattan Beach
and Coney Island, which in the last three decades
Brighton Beach has become the home to a new
wave of mostly Jewish émigrés from the Soviet
Union. The neighborhood dates to the late 1860s
and was named after its more famous English
counterpart. Some prominent early landmarks
were the Hotel Brighton, the Brighton Beach
Brodsky, Joseph
(1940-1996)
poet
One of the most accomplished Russian-born
poets of the postwar period, Joseph Brodsky
lived through political persecution, followed by
exile in the United States, before winning the
1987 Nobel Prize in literature. Born to a Jewish
family in Leningrad, Brodsky lived through the
harrowing nine-hundred-day siege of his home-
town by the invading Germans. He dropped out
of school at age 15 to become a factory worker,
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