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Brezhnev loved gifts and gadgets of all kinds. When he took a particular shine to a gold Rolex, word was given to its Swiss makers, and before long the watch found its way to his thick wrist. Gerald Ford remembers how, on his way to Vladivostok for a meeting on strategic arms limitations in 1974, he was given a wolfskin coat during a stop in Alaska. When Ford stepped off Air Force One in the frozen remoteness of Vladivostok, a waiting Brezhnev immediately spied the coat. He pulled it off the President, tried it on and walked away with it at the end of the talks after jamming a fur hat down over Ford's ears. It was, by Brezhnev's standards, a fair trade.
"He likes beautiful cars," Nixon once told Television Interviewer David Frost, "and he likes beautiful women." Nixon vividly recalls the procession of women who followed in Brezhnev's wake when he visited the summer White House at San Clemente, Calif., in 1973. Women often appreciated his bantering flattery.
After dining with the Soviet leader, Norwegian Actress Liv Ullmann gushed that "Brezhnev looks a little vain, but I feel an immediate liking for him when he takes my hand and tells me that he loved The Emigrants [her 1972 film]." Brandt's wife Rut was also taken by his gallantry. On his first state visit to West Germany, in 1973, Brezhnev kissed her hand and said, "You are the first person I am going to invite to Moscow." Cozying up beside her on a sofa, he promised that "all Moscow will lie at your feet," as a gaggle of diplomats listened with fascination. In spite of his flirtatious ways, he enjoyed a stable relationship with his wife Victoria, and he doted on his three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Son Yuri is a foreign trade official, and Daughter Galina is married to a high Ministry of Interior official.
The son of a Russian metalworker, Brezhnev was born in the Ukrainian industrial town of Kamenskoye (now known as Dneprodzerzhinsk). His father may have taken part in strikes that accompanied the 1905 revolution against Tsar Nicholas II's rule. Brezhnev was ten years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He attended a grammar school that was subsidized by his father's steel plant, worked for a time as a manual laborer and in 1923 joined the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization. After vocational school, one of his first jobs was to help supervise the distribution of land in the Urals that had been seized from peasants as part of Stalin's brutal collectivization program. Brezhnev became a member of the Communist Party in 1931 and subsequently an apparatchik holding a succession of dreary but important jobs that led to the post of deputy chairman of the local city government and finally to a regional party committee membership. On his way up the bureaucratic ladder, he earned a degree in engineering. Somehow he escaped the great purges of 1937-38 that sent tens of thousands of party officials to their deaths. Whether he actively took part in those purges is unclear. Harvard Sovietologist Adam Ulam concludes that Brezhnev was "clever as well as lucky; at a time when people in the party hierarchy were being liquidated right and left, he not only survived but prospered."