The Return of Brezhnev

ChrisD(RJ) chrisd at russiajournal.com
Sun Aug 11 03:09:03 PDT 2002


I can say from (limited) personal experience that the descendents of the CPSU hierarchy tend to be pretty snobbish. (I know an Andropov and I know a guy who attends Moscow State U. with Gorbachev's granddaughter Anastasia.)

Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------

New York Times August 10, 2002 A Different Kind of Brezhnev in the Making By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW -- The political career of Andrei Y. Brezhnev, grandson of the late Soviet Communist leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, could hardly be called auspicious thus far.

The younger Brezhnev ran for Parliament in 1999 and won 2 percent of the vote. He tried to run for governor of the Urals region of Sverdlovsk that year but was thrown off the ballot. He made it onto the ballot for governor in Tula, south of Moscow, last year, but captured 1 percent, losing to Vasily A. Starodubtsev, one of the leaders of the August 1991 coup that hastened the end of the Soviet Union.

Name recognition, it seems, has its limits in Russia.

Yet Mr. Brezhnev has begun an improbably ambitious political campaign that, to date, has been propelled by little more than the fact that he is the grandson of the somber, stolid man who led the Soviet Union through 18 years

of stagnation until his death in 1982.

Mr. Brezhnev recently gathered 100 delegates in a Moscow hotel and announced

his plans to lead a new political movement to be known, for lack of a better

name, as the New Communist Party.

For Mr. Brezhnev, 41, the party is an opportunity to burnish a family legacy

that began its slide into disrepute even before the Soviet Union did, and he

aims to do so by fighting the inequities that, in his view, have roiled Russia since the old system collapsed.

"In the past 10 years, our people, they have received two things: the first is experience and the second is disappointment," he said. "Those heavenly fruits that were promised to people, they were just a declaration that brought nothing but general impoverishment."

In the last month, Mr. Brezhnev has taken his campaign on the hustings, recruiting the 10,000 people necessary to register the party. "In the stores

I visit now salespeople say, 'Andrei, how can I sign up?' " he said.

Based on that, if little else, he believes the time has come for a new movement to attract those left behind by Russia's tumultuous transition to quasi-capitalism: students, scientists and the soldiers suffering from the disintegration of the Red Army.

Reflecting the blurry ideological amalgam of Russian politics today, Mr. Brezhnev's party also hopes to appeal to a constituency that would have been

unthinkable to the Communists of his grandfather's era: people who, like him, own small businesses.

A year and a half ago, Mr. Brezhnev opened a bar, a British-style pub called

Alex on Krasnaya Presnya Street not far from the Moscow Zoo. Sitting in a booth the other day, he described a tyranny of taxes and codes that has made

doing business arduous and, with requisite bribes, expensive.

"Right now, there are a huge number of people who are ready to go into business but they can't," he said. "They have gone bankrupt because of the government's laws. They have gone bankrupt because they cannot compete against the big businesses."

Mr. Brezhnev is hardly a revolutionary. He is burly and gregarious, with a wry sense of humor. ("I'll call you when we're planning to seize power," he said as he bade a visitor farewell.) He divorced his wife, Nadezhna Lyamina,

in 1994, and their two sons attend boarding school in England.

In many ways, he embodies the transformation that has taken place in Russia.

Born in 1961, Mr. Brezhnev grew up a child of privilege. There were weekends

at his grandfather's dacha and summers in Crimea.

He recalls Leonid Ilyich, as he calls him, fondly, if distantly and not uncritically. "He was always my grandfather first, then general secretary, writer, Communist and so forth," he said. For the scion of a famous political family, he displays remarkably little nostalgia about the days of his grandfather's power. He said that until a recent trip there with a photographer, he had never bothered visiting the sculpture garden near Gorky

Park, the repository of the monuments of Soviet heroes, including two of Brezhnev.

He was 21 when his grandfather died, and his fortunes fell as quickly as the

old man's reputation as the Soviet Union entered a period of uncertainty before the rise of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

After studying economics at the prestigious Moscow State Institute for International Relations, Mr. Brezhnev worked in the Foreign and Trade Ministries until 1987. "At that time the last name Brezhnev was not fashionable, and I was asked to leave," he said.

His father, Yuri, who still lives in Moscow, had been dismissed from his post as first deputy minister for foreign trade four years earlier, in the classic Soviet manner, for reasons of ill health. His aunt, Galina, a member of the Soviet elite, was involved in a flurry of scandals, including the bribery conviction of her husband, Yuri M. Churbanov, in 1988.

Whether the time is right for another Brezhnev to return to the historical stage remains to be seen. In 1998 he formed the All-Russian Communist Movement, one of three small organizations that make up the New Communist Party, but its political successes have been negligible.

The Brezhnev era is still viewed as having been a period of corruption and cronyism, though some in Russia see it through the gauze of nostalgia as a period of relative stability. The problem for Mr. Brezhnev is that in today's Russia, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is more likely to be manifested in the kitschy decoration of a theme restaurant than in the foundation of a political movement.

The mere mention of his name widens the eyes of the many inspectors who come

calling in his bar. "People start smiling," he said. "They say, `Brezhnev! That means you have money.' "

The Brezhnev era, in his view, has been unfairly excoriated, but he is not blindly loyal to his grandfather's system. "People say the Soviet Union collapsed because it was unreformable, but no one tried to reform it," he said. "It is my view that it could have been reformed. It could have been more open. It could have established more cooperation with the economic systems of the West. It could have been, let us say, more humane."

The problem with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he said, was that it "lived its own separate life, with no influx of fresh ideas, fresh people."

"In the end, this boiler blew up," he said. "And the same thing -- but in a worse version -- is happening today."

Indeed, Mr. Brezhnev is more critical of the leader of today's Communist Party, Gennady A. Zyuganov, than he is of President Vladimir V. Putin. That distaste and Mr. Zyuganov's firm control of the party leadership are why he made no effort to ally himself with the party or challenge it from within.

The new party's platform is still evolving, but Mr. Brezhnev promises to bring back the best of the Brezhnev years: health care, education and a strong military. He also recently criticized Mr. Zyuganov's efforts to improve relations with the Russian Orthodox Church.

The new party, like the Communist Party of old, will be atheist.



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