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Brezhnev's decision to invade Afghanistan with 80,000 Soviet troops in December 1979 constituted a major change in Soviet policy. Not since 1945 had the Soviet army been used to impose the Kremlin's will on a foreign country that had not previously been under Soviet control. Brezhnev and his colleagues in the Politburo underestimated the extent of Western reaction. The U.S. and more than 30 other countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics in the summer of 1980, much to the Soviets' discomfiture. Economic sanctions imposed as a result of the invasion curtailed U.S.-Soviet trade. Relations with the U.S. worsened after Gen eral Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland last December with the Kremlin's backing.
The suppression of the Solidarity trade union in Poland reflected Brezhnev's innate duality. Though he doubtless aspired to be remembered as a man of peace, he was also proud to be the creator of the "Brezhnev doctrine,'' which was used to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 in the cause of preserving Communism. Neither Brezhnev nor his comrades in the Politburo could accept the movements for change in Poland that sprang from the very working people they claimed to represent. Similarly, Brezhnev's offer on his trip to West Germany last November to reduce nuclear weapons in Europe "by the hundreds" could scarcely be taken seriously in view of the vast arsenal Brezhnev had built and was constantly expanding, militarily, the Soviet Union has never been stronger.
Moscow is likely to maintain at least nuclear parity with the U.S. for years to come; meanwhile, the U.S.S.R.'s dominance in conventional weaponry is unchallenged.
Thanks partly to military intervention by such client states as Cuba, East Germany and Viet Nam, the Moscow brand of Communism has gained fresh footholds in Central America, Africa, the Far East and Southwest Asia. But Brezhnev was unable to patch up Moscow's quar rel with Peking, even after the death of Mao Tse-tung.
Though Brezhnev's proudest legacy is one of vast military might, he wielded that power with care until the close of his reign. The invasion of Afghanistan represented a shift in Brezhnev's characteristic course, and strained relations with the West. Days before his death, the man who had fostered detente warned that Soviet armed strength was the only way to deter "hot head imperialists." Will his heirs revert to Brezhnev's earlier caution? Or will they prove increasingly imprudent, exploiting targets of opportunity in the Middle East and other vital areas of U.S. interest? If that happens, Americans might have cause to look back on the Brezhnev era with something approaching nostalgia.
—By Patricia Blake