Brezhnev

Article

Brezhnev is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 28, 2022 and August 11, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Brezhnev et all reverted to a more authoritarian rule”; “post-Brezhnev was made up of a series of power blocks”. It most often appears alongside CIA, Stalin, US.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 28, 2022
  • Last seen: August 11, 2023

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

April 28, 2022 · Original source
I read somewhere that after Stalin's death, his successors wanted to make sure one-man rule would not return. They all had experienced first-hand how not even the highest ranking Polit-buro member had been safe from Stalin's vindictiveness. Therefore Khrushchev et al. ruled by committee. Then Khrushchev was deposed, so maybe power was diluted too much. Brezhnev et all reverted to a more authoritarian rule but never killed fellow communists again, and were not nearly as brutal as Stalin's regime.
August 11, 2023 · Original source
The Soviet Union post-Brezhnev was made up of a series of power blocks in negotiation with each other. Brenzhev was about as democratic as a Soviet leader could have realistically been (which is not very). The Soviet Union had always had a conflict between the security services and the military going all the way back to Stalin's time. Generally in direct confrontation the military won as with Khruschev or in 1991. But the security services could gain dominance when the political elite sided with them.