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As far as the Soviet people were concerned, Brezhnev probably did deserve the title vozhd. In numerous respects, he compared favorably with his predecessors, even though his virtues were perhaps best expressed in negative terms. He was not a cold-blooded fanatic like Lenin. He was not a bloodthirsty tyrant like Stalin. He was not a capricious, mercurial improviser like Khrushchev. To his credit, Brezhnev gave his nation almost two decades of relative stability without resorting to the insane bloodletting and midnight terror of the Stalin era.
To be sure, he saw to it that dissidence was stifled, and there was no dilution of the power of the secret police. But the average Soviet citizen no longer had to fear that his life would be destroyed by arbitrary condemnation to inhuman Gulags.
To the tens of thousands of apparatchiks in the enormous, tentacular Soviet bureaucracies, Brezhnev's long reign provided much desired security, so much so that the Communist Party has come under the rule of a gerontocracy.
On the international scene, Brezhnev presided over the realization of his country's most cherished hope: the achievement of strategic parity with the U.S. Having emerged as a nuclear superpower under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union was in a position to wield considerably greater influence in foreign relations. Leading from strength, Brezhnev was able to guide his country into an unprecedented era of detente with the West, and he espoused U.S.-Soviet talks on nuclear arms limitations. A cornerstone of Soviet strategy, detente held out the promise of great trade benefits and the opportunity to extend Soviet influence farther with little risk of confrontation with the U.S. or its allies. At the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Brezhnev obtained long-sought legitimization of Soviet rule over its empire. Under his aegis, Moscow ruthlessly reinforced its hegemony over Eastern Europe. But nearly three years before his death, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan dealt an apparently mortal blow to the detente he had once fostered.
At home, Brezhnev proved to be an ultracautious administrator who was reluctant to undertake any fundamental economic reforms, no matter how urgently needed. Because of his conservatism and his diversion of vast resources to the military, the Soviet people have been denied the full social and economic benefits that are enjoyed in other modern industrial societies. During his iong tenure, the country's finest natural and human resources were thrown into the development and deployment of weapons. Until the late 1970s, the Brezhnev regime was also able to raise the standard of living of the Soviet people at a rapid rate. But though Brezhnev substantially improved the quality and quantity of consumer goods, he failed to supply the national economy with the large-scale in vestment needed for long-term growth. The slowdown in the growth of the gross national product that began in Brezhnev's last years is expected to continue for the rest of the 1980s.