Leonid Brezhnev and his hobbies

Leonid Brezhnev was born 105 years ago on December 19, 1906. From 1964 to his death in 1982, or 18 years, he held top positions in the Soviet hierarchy.

He became General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, or the top state official, in 1966. “Dear Leonid Ilyich” was how he was addressed in official messages of greeting, which he was fond of reading to CPSU congresses.

Brezhnev’s passion for kissing was the topic of numerous jokes during his lifetime. Photo: Leonid Brezhnev greeting Jovanka Broz, Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s wife, at an official ceremony attended by the SFRY delegation.

The General Secretary was an equally passionate kisser of men and women.
Photo: General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev welcoming Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov who arrived to attend the celebrations in honor of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia.

It was only in 2009 that Dmitry Vrubel’s 1990 picture portraying Leonid Brezhnev lip-locked with the GDR leader Erich Honecker was wiped off a surviving Berlin Wall slab.

As testified by Brezhnev’s personal photographer (Musayelyan), he was absolutely unable to give up smoking. Longer-filter cigarettes were made especially for him, but he refused even to touch them. Doctors invented a timer-equipped cigarette case that meted out one cigarette every 45 minutes. But that did not help either because Brezhnev could easily bum a cigarette off someone in his entourage.

Hunting was also one of Brezhnev’s hobbies.

He was no less fond of decorations that were bestowed on him regularly. He became the Hero of Socialist Labor for the first time at the age of 55. He received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and another Gold Star Medal for his 60th birthday. He was the bearer of five top Soviet decorations, the only one in the entire history of the USSR.

Cars were yet another of Brezhnev’s passions. He could have made it into the Guinness Book of Records had it been made public in 1980 that his collection included 324 vehicles.

The Brezhnev years became known as the “stagnation period,” while the ruling group was dubbed a “gerontocracy” because all the members of the CPSU Central Committee in the mid-1980s were men of more than a venerable age.