The Younger Generation of Brezhnevs

Lyuba Brezhneva, The World I Left Behind. 1980

 

Perhaps, one may speculate, at least the Soviet nouveaux riches were happy behind the tall fences they had built to set themselves apart from the “ordinary” people. A Russian adage says that “every cottage has its playthings,” and the palaces of the nomenklatura did not lack for expensive toys. But where was their happiness? In their families?

Leonid Il’ich’s greatest sorrows were prompted by his closest relatives. We know of many other political bosses whose children became a lifelong badge of shame, but Leonid’s daughter, Galina, was unequaled. Eventually she was like an open sore, there for the whole world to see, From several of his statements, I know that in his old age Leonid felt nothing but sorrow for his daughter and annoyance with her behavior. It was only when he remembered Galina as a little girl, plump, pink, and funny, that tender feelings still stirred faintly in his heart.

During the perestroika period, after Leonid’s death, the typewriters of sensation-hungry journalists rattled furiously with stories in which she was featured prominently – for good reason, of course. Her wild lifestyle had contributed to the complete discrediting of Leonid Brezhnev as a father and as a political leader. It had all begun years earlier.

Leonid’s heart attack came several years after Galina’s first marriage, in the 1950s, a union he never accepted. Her husband, Evgenii Milaev, was only four years younger than her father and had been working in the circus since the age of eighteen. In 1950, he and his partners developed a unique act, involving tightrope walkers on a double ladder, which broke world records and brought fame to its creators. In 1951, he was in Kishinev, the capital of Moldavia, with a traveling show, and it was there that he met and married Galina.

Her father disliked Milaev’s age and his occupation. When Leonid was first secretary of the Moldavian party, he would drop into his daughter’s home on the way to work. Finding Galina still in bed, he would taunt her, holding a long pole above her head and saying, “Giddyup!” She responded by angrily throwing her pillow at him.

Like most Soviet citizens, Leonid was leery of the art world in general and the world of the performing arts in particular. He felt that Evgenii’s nomadic, haphazard existence would have a disruptive effect on young Galina, who already seemed somewhat unbalanced. He’d had a different future in mind for his daughter, hoping that after the university, she would marry within his own world. He had friends whose sons-military specialists and budding political careerists-would have made fine husbands for her, he thought. Her chances of finding a more suitable young man were good: she was not bad looking and not lacking in intelligence.

Leonid would have preferred almost any young man to Galina’s choice. He used to tell his brother, “Yasha, she’d have been better off marrying some young tractor driver. What does she see in this Milaev fellow?”

Less and less, it appeared. After several years of married life, Galina grew bored and began to “wag her tail” again, as my father put it. Milaev was insanely jealous and tried to take her along whenever he went on tour. Once they both came to Magnitogorsk. Among the members of the troupe were Zoya and Sergei Naumov, two old friends of my mother’s, and they dropped by our house.

Finally Milaev’s jealousy caused him to break all the pieces in Galina’s beloved crystal collection and then try out his fists on her face, for the first and final time. She ran to her father’s house for protection; her first marriage had lasted eight years.

Afterward, Galina maintained friendly relations with her ex-husband and many other circus performers and continued to attend the circus, Leonid, on the other hand, virtually stopped going to the circus, convinced that it had ruined his daughter. Believing this at least gave him a focus for his hatred and disappointment.

In the late ’70s, Milaev became the director of the circus in the Lenin Hills in Moscow. When I took my children there, as I often did, he would greet me cordially at the door or send someone to make sure that we were comfortable. He always found time to chat no matter how busy he was.

Galina, meanwhile, had been studying journalism and began to work in that field. In the early ’60s, she worked as the editor of the department of the Novosti Press Agency that handled news from within the Soviet Union.

Ordinary journalists had no chance of being hired by the NPA; connections were the key. Not that good journalists were eager to work there: the main requirement was skill at following the party line, no matter how much distortion this required; initiative and talent were irrelevant.

From year to year, I observed Leonid being drained of strength in the losing battle with his children. He used to say of his daughter, “She has some kind of demon inside her. She’s like a curse sent down on me.”

Before his conflict with Viktoriia Petrovna, my father often visited Leonid at his dacha, spending the night there. He would watch as Leonid tried to give his recently divorced daughter some long-overdue discipline, alternately nagging and cajoling her, but all to no avail.

“One night she came home drunk, looking like something the cat dragged in,” my father told me. “Lenya stayed up until she came home and nearly dropped dead when he saw her. The next morning he began bawling her out over breakfast. It was like talking to a wall. She picked up her plate and stormed out of the dining room. I could see tears in Leonid’s eyes. He had a full workday ahead. This is what his family had brought him to.

“All of his family treated me, Leonid’s own brother, like a nobody. Good Lord, what a three-ring circus his family life was! How did he manage to survive it all? At the beginning, Leonid asked me to intervene. While scolding Galina, he would often say to me, ‘Yasha, why don’t you at least say something to her; you’re her uncle after all!’ Then that impudent little Galka would turn to me and say, ‘Just you try!’ and stalk out of the room … ”

Viktoriia and her daughter often had ugly, hysterical quarrels that ended with both of them turning to Leonid for comfort and support. He was near tears when this happened, too, and tried to unload his burdens on his brother: “What have I done to deserve this punishment, Yasha? I’ve been working like a mule all my life. I never take any time out to enjoy life. I’ve wanted to do the best for everyone around me, but I’ve always wound up doing more harm than good. Ever since Galina was a little girl, I let her have whatever her heart desired, but I never took part in raising her. As for Viktoriia, she has nothing but money on her mind; you know that.”

Sometimes Leonid would go off to be alone in his study – and to weep. Back from a visit to his brother’s dacha in the late ’60s, my father said, “I went to Leonid’s office to get a cigarette lighter. There was no answer to my knock on the door, so I figured no one was inside, and I went in. Leonid was alone at his desk, his eyes red. I asked him if he was sick. He was very distant. He pulled back slightly and said, ‘All anyone is interested in is my health. No one cares what’s happening with my soul.’ ”

In both my father’s and my uncle’s families, the upbringing of the children and grandchildren was firmly in the hands of the wives and grandmothers. Leonid Il’ich, who spent all his adult life in positions of leadership, often arrived home after midnight. He saw fits children sporadically. Once when my father and I were in Leonid’s office, talk turned to a subject near to the hearts of both men: their children and grandchildren. My uncle, referring to his wife and daughter, said, “What more do those dizzy broads want? They’ve grabbed everything they could lay their filthy paws on. They’re both so wide that they can barely squeeze through the door, but they’re not satisfied yet. It’s my own fault, of course. Instead of racing from meeting to meeting, I should have been watching over my children-then I’d have a peaceful old age to look forward to. I practically never saw them. When I came home from work, they would already be sleeping. I would peek into the children’s room and stroke them on the cheek. The next morning a car would be waiting outside the house, and off I went! I’ve spent my whole life running somewhere.”

A little-known detail of Leonid’s biography is that he had a third child, born at the end of the 1950s in either Moldavia or Kazakhstan. When the boy, whom Iakov Il’ich saw when he was four, grew up, his powerful father helped him, and he moved to Moscow. There he “misbehaved,” as my father put it, and his life did not go well. Viktoriia Petrovna knew about her husband’s illegitimate son, but my father was the only person I ever heard speak of him.

Iurii Churbanov, Galina’s second husband, was a young militiaman. They married in April 1971, and he soon made a dizzying leap in his career. After their wedding, everyone heaved a deep sigh of relief. his second son-in-law was completely to Leonid’s liking. I myself was somewhat shocked, because of the bad reputation that militiamen had among decent people in our country. The Russians called them “musor” [trash].

For a long time, the romance between Galina and Iurii had been the topic of detailed discussions. Handsome, standing tall and straight in his uniform, he impressed the Brezhnevs favorably. Here, they thought, is a forceful character. Even my father pinned high hopes on him, saying, “Finally there’s a real man on the scene. He’ll bring her into line!” My aunt Vera, an unsophisticated and unpretentious woman, was openly delighted with Galina’s new husband. She had been mortified by tales of her niece’s adventures and had scolded her more than once.

Galina was not a complete monster, not the hellcat sometimes portrayed in the press. She could be kind in her own condescending manner. She was temperamental but quick to forgive. She was well educated and, like her father, had a strong loyalty to friends. In her own circles, she was well loved. She was affectionate and reputed to know a thing or two about sex. And she lavished attention on Iurii.

Until he met Galina, his life had been lackluster. He was in no way outstanding: a young man who loved sports, his wife, and his son, Misha. When he met the general secretary’s daughter, everything changed. He was faced with a choice: either a stable, totally predictable and humdrum existence with his family or a life full of events, fame, flattery, and luxury at the side of a well-placed, unsettled, and spoiled woman. His friends advised him to choose the second: “You got lucky once; there will never be a second chance All of a sudden Iurii Churbanov felt special, singled out by fate for fortune. He decided to divorce his wife and marry Galina.

They used the large new luxury apartment rapidly awarded them to indulge their shared passion: parties with an abundance of booze. They were quite happy, at the beginning.

One of Galina’s close friends was Svetlana, the wife of Nikolai Shchelokov, head of the MVD, which was in charge of the militia. In exchange for his fawning loyalty, Leonid Brezhnev had pulled Shchelokov out of Dnepropetrovsk, brought him to Moscow, and given him the opportunity to rise to the post of minister. His wife was inordinately fond of diamonds and furs, as was Galina.

Watching the wives of the nomenklatura being chauffeured in their black automobiles to some presumably important gathering, I recalled what one historian has written about the czar’s court at the end of the eighteenth century: “The luxury and extravagance of the aristocracy had grown, and exceedingly rich fur coats were worn.” At the Soviet court, the nomenklatura’s wives rated one another by the quality and quantity of their coats, the number and price of one’s furs serving as an indicator of social status rather than mere wealth. They created a definite hierarchy: Galina was the “first lady,” Svetlana was the second, and some actress held third place, by virtue of her being the mistress of Grigorii Romanov, secretary of the Leningrad Oblast party committee.

Churbanov rose swiftly in the ministry, having a father-in-law who was general secretary and a wife who was a close friend of his boss’s wife. He received promotion after promotion, becoming successively colonel, major general, lieutenant general, and colonel general. For this, as for so many other things, my father had his own rather curious explanation: “Our Leonid always went in for pigeons, even as a kid. On Galka’s advice, Iurii brought him the fanciest pigeons to be found in the whole country. Every time one of those birds craps, our Iurii Churbanov gets a new star on his uniform!” By 1980, he had ascended to the rank of Shchelokov’s assistant, virtually the second militia boss in the country.

Leonid’s lifelong friend, Kostya Grushevoi, himself a lieutenant general and chief of the political administration of the Moscow military district, was outraged: “I shed my blood for this rank. And now, Lenya, you’ve gone and handed that punk, who’s never fired a shot in his life, the same rank on a silver platter. Aren’t you ashamed? You yourself were only a major general by the end of the war!” He insisted that no good would come of this promotion.

In the company of his son-in-law, Leonid began feeling uncomfortable for some reason, he said. He had had great hopes for Churbanov, expecting him to bring order to Galina’s life, For a while, she did indeed quiet down: her infatuation with her new husband kept her busy for several years. But ultimately her husband turned out to be every bit as weak willed as the male members of the family he had married into.

At the beginning, he avidly sought out his father-in-law. In the evenings at the dacha, while Galina was arguing with her mother, he would drop by Leonid’s study to talk. But Leonid did not react with great enthusiasm to these advances. He saw his own younger self in this handsome young opportunist, as though he were looking into a time travel mirror.

In the late ’70s, I went to a party given by the Brezhnev wive–ssomething I almost never did–and was there when Galina came by with her husband. The men had been invited to show up later, after a preliminary “hen party,” and Galina explained Iurii’s presence by saying that they were planning to go to another gathering that evening. As always, she was outlandishly attired, in a light, fishnet dress, through which one could see her already sagging flesh. On her feet were gold trimmed sandals that might have belonged to the wife of a Roman patrician, at least in some crazed designer’s fancy. Her fingers boasted a dazzling number of rings.

Galina had a few drinks before the men arrived. When her brother, Iurii, dropped by with some male friends, Galina became even more buoyant and began to drape herself over one man after another. For some reason, Churbanov wasn’t drinking that evening. He sat to one side looking gloomy. When Galina, hopping up and down like a little girl, approached him, swinging her hips and hanging from some man’s neck, he grabbed her waist from behind and abruptly pulled her onto a chair: “Won’t you ever sit down?” he said irately, his face livid. They left together soon afterward. It was obvious that their marriage was beginning to sour.

When drunk, Galina loved to prance about, cavorting and laughing-anything to be the center of attention. My father literally shook with frustration at the sight of her. After one of their many arguments, he told me, I don’t consider that nitwit my niece!”

Iakov Il’ich told me, too, of the traditional Russian wake held for his brother-in-law, Vera’s husband, Zhora Grechkin. To keep Vera Il’inichna from fainting, a nurse stood behind her, periodically giving her smelling salts.

Galina put in an appearance, dressed up for a night on the town and wearing the makeup of a streetwalker. Yet this was nothing more than what people had become accustomed to expect of her.

On her finger, Vera wore a diamond ring, a wedding-anniversary gift from her late husband. Galina, who had been eyeing it for years, sat next to the widow, slipped off the ring, and tried it on. “Aunt Vera,” she said, “give it to me. I’ve adored it for such a long time.”

Vera was speechless. My father, sitting nearby, took his niece to one side: “Galka, you’re out of your mind. That was a gift from Grechkin!”

Galina, unruffled, said, “Oh well, he’s dead now, and my aunt’s an old woman; what does she need a ring for?” She didn’t offer a word of condolence.

My uncle’s trilogy includes the following passage: “In December 1947 a currency reform was carried out in the country, and there were individuals who … knew the exchange rates ahead of time and rushed to place their money in savings accounts… I insisted that these people be expelled from the party.” Fine-expulsion from the party, I thought, reading this. But what about criminal prosecution?

In 1981, Galina was informed of an impending increase in the retail price of gold and Jewelry, and she used this knowledge for personal gain: the day before the increase, she showed up with Svetlana Shchelokov in the biggest jewelry shop of Moscow’s Arbat district. There they entered into a deal with the store’s director: first they bought up all the largest items, and then the next morning they coolly returned the jewels to the stockroom, selling them at the new price. This was in blatant violation of Soviet law.

Semen Tsvigun, a close friend of Leonid’s, the husband of one of Viktoriia Petrovna’s cousins and deputy chairman of the KGB, was hot on the trail of the general secretary’s wayward daughter. When there was no longer any sense trying to conceal matters, Tsvigun paid Leonid a visit. Lying on the couch in his study, Brezhnev listened carefully as his friend told him of the jewelry-store caper and asked what should be done with Galina.

Saying “Prosecute her to the fullest extent of the law,” Leonid turned toward the wall and wept. But Galina was never prosecuted.

Before long, Tsvigun shot himself. That day my father told me, “I may be her uncle, but I’d cast the first vote to send that bitch to the Butyrki. I saw her a while back. She looked like a fishwife: glazed eyes, puffy mouth, and an ass bigger than her mother’s. The hell with her, even if she is a doctor of science! All the grief she’s put my brother through … ”

When my father talked in this vein, I merely listened silently. Was Galina the only cause of my uncle’s sorrows?

Leonid’s son, Iurii, began his career modestly in the field of metallurgy. For two years after his graduation from the Dnepropetrovsk Metallurgy Institute, in 1955, he worked as a foreman of a tube-rolling shop at the Liebknecht Plant in the same city. Then he moved to Moscow with his young wife and entered the All-Union Foreign Trade Academy, where he specialized in the Scandinavian countries and learned English and Swedish.

The academy behind him, Iurii was shortly appointed engineer-in-chief and department head at the Soviet Trade Bureau in Sweden, and from 1966 to 1970 he was a deputy director of that bureau. He didn’t distinguish himself, but in March 1979 he was appointed first deputy to the minister of foreign trade, a post known as a gold mine.

Bribery was pervasive in the ministry. The medium of exchange was not the ruble, cognac, or perfume but hard currency and electronic equipment. From Sweden came containers full of videocassette recorders. A great rarity in Russia in the late ’70s, they cost fifteen to twenty thousand rubles-almost as much as a Volga in good condition.

Trips abroad were a special source of income for typical members of the nomenklatura, who, instead of conducting the business they had been sent abroad to do, stalked discount stores in search of the small consumer goods always in short supply in the Soviet Union. They bought up whatever they could find cigarettes, lighters, souvenirs, handkerchiefs, paper napkins…

Everyone who went abroad knew a black marketer who would pick up the merchandise and leave the money – very discreetly, of course. You would never see the general secretary’s son or grandson selling a tape recorder in an alley or haunting one of the consignment stores that bought used goods legally. The wives had their own buyers, who took dresses, cosmetics, socks, handbags, and brand-name diaphragms. The ultimate consumers were usually high-class prostitutes, the kind who could invest a thousand rubles in a Christian Dior Jacket or five hundred in a skirt.

It’s no secret that the trade agreements written by officials in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, including Iurii Brezhnev, provided little or no protection for the Soviet Union. Contracts for shipments of second-rate merchandise were scaled by bribes, gifts, and business and personal favors, including orgies that destroyed not only individual reputations but the prestige of the entire Soviet government as well, Our negotiators, remarkably compliant after being treated to lavish dinners, signed deals allowing foreign companies to dump wares on the Soviet masses that were deemed unfit for the West. Year after year the Iurii Brezhnevs purchased machinery with missing parts and products that had long been decaying or gathering rust in warehouses. Yes, butter and meat were sold to us at cut-rate prices-after their “sell by” dates had expired, that is. And such deals were hailed as favorable to the Soviet Union. The attitude was a sort of haughty “let them eat rancid butter.”

Their disgraceful contracts signed, the diplomats returned, bringing their booty home by ship, plane, or train. The bribes, though not terribly large by Western standards, brought Joy to many a wife and child and tidy profits to the black marketeers.

Diplomatic work was considered a sinecure even in the first years of the Soviet state, when an unhealthy atmosphere of intrigue, nepotism, and bribery began developing in the trade agencies. Many unqualified, illiterate people with no knowledge of economics or trade landed jobs in Soviet commerce and made gross blunders. In one well-known case, a contract to buy tin scythes, so weak that a child could bend them in two, was signed in exchange for a bribe and a smile.

I don’t know a single case in which a Soviet trade official was punished for a deal that lost the government money. Such impunity signaled a green light. Honor and conscience, to these officials, were ballast to be discarded. Their sole concern was to keep making trips abroad.

Iurii Brezhnev was not an evil man, but he shared the weaknesses common to all the Brezhnevs. Like my father, he suffered from alcoholism and was treated for it unsuccessfully. To his credit, he always strove to maintain a proper facade and did not drink himself into oblivion, at least not in public.

He met his wife, Liudmila Vladimirovna, or Lusya as she was called in the family, during his final year at the institute. A pug-nosed blonde with delicate pink skin and barely visible eyebrows and eyelashes, she was rather pretty. They had two children: Leonid, who was named after his grandfather but resembled his mother, and Andrei, who looked somewhat like the general secretary.

For some reason, the Brezhnevs never considered Lusya “good enough” for Iurii. Even my father, who usually shunned gossip, was of the opinion that Lusya had “snared him.” For that matter, Russian families are rarely happy with a son’s bride. If she is made of purest gold, they will still find flaws in her.

Although there was no public display of the sheet at Iurii’s marriage, virginity was still prized at the time. Rumor had it that Lusya had got Iurii dead drunk at the wedding so that he wouldn’t notice her dishonor. The Brezhnev relatives rehashed the story for years; behind her back, they used to say, “Lusya really found a fool in Iurii.” I found these insinuations tasteless and would cut them short.

Lusya was a model wife and mother, from what I could gather. She built her life around her home and family, avoiding the intrigues so important to the other court wives. Of course, her situation was completely different from that of ordinary Soviet women: she had no need to work outside the home, and there was no shortage of money. She bought clothes and shoes in the Kremlin store or abroad, she certainly didn’t stand in line for two hours at Detskii Mir (Children’s World) to buy shoes for her sons. Leonid also helped them out and invited his grandsons to the Crimea for the summer. And with Iurii bringing back from Scandinavia whatever he could, Lusya, swimming in abundance, soon lost touch with real life.

Lusya’s parents, like the majority of Leonid Il’ich’s in-laws, made full use of their unexpected good fortune. Her mother, Antonina Petrovna, a longtime resident of Dnepropetrovsk, often came to Moscow to visit. A hardheaded, farsighted businesswoman, she used each trip to turn a profit. In the ’60s, when Italian raincoats (the Russians liked to call them Bologna raincoats) were the rage, Antonina bought up large supplies to resell back home at inflated prices. She also brought back nylon shirts, “shirts by Brezhnev,” as her clients dubbed them.

Along with foreign cars and hard currency, Iurii Brezhnev had a passion for collecting little porcelain dogs. Friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on often brought him new pieces. Even Leonid Il’ich bought his son porcelain dogs.

During the Andropov anti-corruption campaign that followed my uncle’s death, Iurii Brezhnev was never touched, though the heads of many other nomenklatura figures rolled. Not until Gorbachev’s presidency, when a special commission investigated the Brezhnev family, was he finally pensioned off.

Source: Luba Brezhneva, The World I Left Behind: pieces of a past (New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 346-358.

Comments are closed.