ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the roles, policies, and attributes of the Leonid Brezhnev leadership, which has held political authority in the Soviet Union since the exclusion from political life of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev in October 1964. The centralized pattern of interlocking decision-making and control personnel that have been describing is traditional for the Soviet system. During much of Brezhnev’s leadership there has been a studied effort to create the impression that the USSR was under collective leadership, and that Brezhnev was carefully sharing, with his associates, both the formation of policy and whatever credit there might be for its results. The post-Khrushchev leadership has been characterized by Party-state duality. The chapter discusses age, education, career patterns, nationality, and some other attributes of the present Soviet supreme leadership, and describes the relationships between attributes of the present leaders and the future of Soviet supreme political leadership.
