Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev spent World War II as a political commissar with the 18th army, rising in rank from colonel to major general. His primary task was to ensure the political probity of his fellow officers, but, the Soviet press now reports, he also had a harrowing and even heroic combat career.
New Times, a Soviet foreign-language weekly, has recently recounted a number of previously unreported exploits by Brezhnev. During the Kiev campaign in 1943, New Times reported, he took the place of a machine gunner who had been killed and rallied the defenders to beat off a German attack....
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