Leonid Brezhnev became the general secretary of the USSR in 1964. Under his new leadership, the USSR made nuclear programs a priority. At the time, the Soviet Union’s economic system was a command economy. In this type of economy, industry is controlled by the government.
Explanation:
Leonid Brezhnev was a Soviet politician, the leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982.
He quickly climbed within the Communist Party and the Soviet state power and eventually emerged victorious from the power struggle that took place after Nikita Khrushchev was deposed. In 1964, Brezhnev was the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union's superpower through his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Compared to its predecessor Khrushchev, Brezhnev was a conservative force.
A milestone in Soviet history also came in 1977, when the new Brezhnev Constitution replaced the old Stalin constitution of 1936 as the basis of the Soviet Union. The new constitution emphasized, and formally strengthened, the role of the party in Soviet society. Brezhnev himself also strengthened his internal position in the Politburo by giving the politicians and ministers who were loyal to him their life-time office, which resulted in the entire Soviet state power being made up of older and more conservative men over the years. This, in the longer term, hampered the implementation of changes and reforms in Soviet society and became one of the contributing causes of the Soviet economy stagnating during the 1970s and 1980s. The deteriorating economic situation also led to the spread of corruption, which has already accelerated during Khrushchev's time, on an ever-increasing scale throughout the Eastern Bloc.
During Brezhnev's time, the Brezhnev doctrine was coined in connection with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviet Union expanded its sphere of interest outside Europe and competed with the Americans in both Latin America and Africa as well as Asia. In 1979, the Soviet Union also went into full military attack on a state outside the Eastern bloc: the invasion of Afghanistan.
During the last years of his term, Brezhnev's health deteriorated and during his last years he was almost completely unable to control the country. This meant that power was in practice gradually shifted to Brezhnev's right hand, KGB chief Jurij Andropov, and Brezhnev himself was reduced to being a figurehead in the Kremlin. Leonid Brezhnev died of a heart attack in 1982.
