Brezhnev

We present to your attention the audiobook by the well-known journalist, international correspondent, and TV host Leonid Mlechin “Brezhnev”, from the author’s cycle devoted to the people and events of the last hundred years of Russian history.

The personal archive of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Chairman of the Defense Council of Marshal of the Soviet Union Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev—from documents from the time of his youth, handwritten notes, and beautifully preserved amateur photographs, as well as papers belonging to his wife, Viktoria Petrovna, including, let’s say, her culinary recipes and even her daughter Galina Leonidovna’s love letters—everything of it turned out to be in the trash. In the literal sense.

They threw it away not for political reasons, not while showing a break with an unloved past, but for the most mundane motives. In short, as a result of the tragedy that befell the female branch of the Brezhnev family. And only by sheer accident did very good people save the archive—though, probably, not completely. They picked it out of the trash, not letting it perish in a heap of garbage sent for recycling, and handed the author a pyramid of stuffed-to-the-brim cardboard folders that are now no longer used.

Now it is time to make all this information public. Its value lies in the fact that it allows you to understand why Brezhnev became head of our country and led the Soviet Union until his very death—and also provides a key to understanding what our state later went through.

And, in essence, it even explains why the General Secretary’s own archive ended up thrown into the trash in the end…