WHEN Leonid Brezhnev replaced Nikita Khrushchev in Russia's top job eight years ago, Kremlinologists tended to agree that the obscure new First Secretary of the Communist Party was just another faceless nullity in the gray mass of Soviet bureaucrats. They were wrong, of course. At 65 the Soviet leader has emerged as a shrewd, robust, forceful and even dashing personality, with a love of fast cars and a zest for life. On the same stage with him, other Politburo members almost seem like part of the furniture.
Different as they are, Brezhnev and Nixon could admire their mutual skill at political maneuver and their long, hard way up to power. Brezhnev's triumph springs from a mixture of perseverance, hard work and calculation —plus an ample measure of good luck. The child of Russian working-class parents, he was born in the Ukrainian town now known as Dnieprodzerzhinsk. He had the right proletarian qualifications for Soviet success, but his early career was not singularly promising. After graduating from a trade school in Kursk, he held a series of unspectacular jobs: land surveyor, factory worker, school director.
In 1931 Brezhnev formally joined the Communist Party and spent much of the next four years doing part-time studies in metallurgical engineering. Then came Stalin's great purge, which swept hundreds of thousands of loyal Communists into prison. Brezhnev was too insignificant a party member to be among the victims. But the terror left a vacuum in the party leadership that helped Brezhnev—like his colleague Premier Aleksei Kosygin—achieve a position of influence quite out of proportion to his age and experience. In 1939, at the age of 33, he became a party leader of a major industrial region in the Ukraine.
During World War II, Brezhnev was a political officer in charge of propaganda in a front-line army. He was promoted from colonel to major general, and won several combat medals. After the war, Brezhnev held a series of party jobs that honed and broadened his organizational skills. As chief of the
Moldavian party he completed the collectivization of peasants formerly under Rumanian rule. In 1952 his success in carrying out such unglamorous tasks bore fruit. Brezhnev finally broke into the Kremlin establishment as an alternate member of the Presidium (now the Politburo) under Stalin and as a Secretary of the Central Committee.
After the dictator's death, Brezhnev owed his advancement to Khrushchev, who had recognized his abilities and loyalty in the Ukraine. Khrushchev entrusted his protégé with supervision of his vast "Virgin Lands" agricultural scheme and later made him a full Presidium member and gave him the prestigious but honorific title of Chief of State. Finally, Khrushchev gave him power second only to his own in the party. Thus entrenched, and now a master of Kremlin power politics, Brezhnev became a leading member in the plot to oust his patron. Within hours of Khrushchev's fall, Brezhnev slipped into the slot of party chief. Since that time, he has succeeded in outmaneuvering and outdistancing his principal opponents in the Politburo—notably, Alexander Shelepin and Nikolai Podgorny. He has also managed to take over many of Premier Kosygin's functions.