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When World War II began, Brezhnev was placed in charge of converting factories in the Ukraine from civilian to military production. His superior was Nikita Khrushchev, then party boss of the area. Brezhnev became part of a fast-rising cadre of officials who came to be known in the West as the "Ukrainian Mafia." Later in the war he served as a political officer in charge of propaganda and morale with various Red Army forces. Official Soviet biographies credit him with numerous feats of wartime heroism, even though he apparently played a largely noncombatant role.
After the war Brezhnev rose steadily in the Ukrainian party organization as a protege of Khrushchev's; he followed his mentor to Moscow in the early '50s, and was subsequently dispatched to a key job in Kazakhstan. Brezhnev helped administer Khrushchev's costly "virgin lands" program, aimed at increasing the harvests in
Central Asia and Siberia, and was lucky enough to be able to proclaim a bumper wheat crop for 1956. In 1960 he succeeded Marshal Kliment Voroshilov in the post of Soviet President. Brezhnev took advantage of the undemanding job to travel widely outside the U.S.S.R. as a spokesman for Khrushchev's foreign policy. In 1964 he was a member of the conspiracy against his former mentor that forced Khrushchev into retirement. Brezhnev's reward: the high-ranking post of First Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1966 Brezhnev assumed the grander title of General Secretary that had been adopted by Stalin.
In 1965 Historian Bertram Wolfe unwisely described Brezhnev as "an insignificant transition figure in a new interregnum." Initially, Brezhnev shared authority in a triumvirate with Premier Alexei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny. By 1973 he had elbowed aside any rivals for power. He placed allies in principal positions in the party hierarchy and increasingly emerged as chief spokesman for the Politburo. On trips abroad he was treated as head of state, even though he did not formally assume that title again until after Podgorny's dismissal in 1977.
Brezhnev, at first with Kosygin's assistance, began dismantling many of Khrushchev's more quixotic experiments, especially those that weakened the power of the Communist Party. Restrictions on private farming were eased, and wages were increased. At the same time, Brezhnev subtly moved back toward some policies that were reminiscent of the Stalin years. Arrests and deportations gradually extinguished the dissident movement. Some future historians may mark Brezhnev's expulsion in 1974 of Nobel-prize-winning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as one of the most significant events of the Soviet leader's long reign.