Brezhnev at 70

...Early photographs from 1947 show him wearing four bars of ribbons...

...By the time Brezhnev was 15, Russia and his Ukraine had gone through a disastrous World War I, a revolution and a civil war, and they were in the midst of a fam?ine that ultimately left millions dead, maimed or depleted...

...He and his wife, Viktoriya Petrovna, have two children, a son, Yuri, 43, and a daughter, Galina, 47, and even a great-granddaughter...

...He is reported to have one of the best collections of live birds in Moscow...

...His wife has said he works 18 hour days, and he once told American correspondents gathered at the Kremlin that his duties take up al?most all of his time...

...Brezhnev, 46, was already in high Moscow circles...

...There is no doubt that Brezhnev possesses some of the qualities ascribed to him...

...Traditionally, they observe, even honorable retirement from the Kremlin-let alone Khrushchev-like banishment-has meant an unperson existence...

...By 1971, he was shedding the gray-flannel corporate blandness that was his image in the West and revealing a distinct, ro?bust personality with an easy informality and humor...

...Unlike their American counterparts, former Soviet political figures do not write their memoirs (at least not for official publication), take world trips, run for the Senate, or teach at universities...

...Nothing the Party chairman has written, or had writ?ten for him and approved, reveals more than a tough, hard-driving organization man...

...To REACH the status of vozhd in the USSR requires delicate footwork...

...retired Soviet officials lose the luxurious government offices and villas, the staffs, limousines, special planes and trains, not to mention the sheer ad?venture and prestige of being in on the action...

...And it is noted that he was so important a figure in the Soviet military armaments and space programs of the 1950s, he was awarded a Hero of Socialist Labor medal in 1961...

...Three long rests...

...He also showed himself to have an agile if not pro?found mind, a world leader's grasp of big issues and global currents...

...In addition, the military, secret police and foreign policy bureaucracies were given Politburo seats, effectively neutralizing them as potential alternative power bases for palace revolutionaries...

...As he advanced toward the pinnacle of power, the Soviet leader could draw a number of graphic conclusions from his experiences: Life is hard, primitive and cruel...

...For a 70-year-old Brezhnev wondering how history will judge him, that would not be bad at all...

...Brezhnev, by increasingly dramatic official ac?counts, faced enemy fire and risked his life with front-line troops as a political commissar on the southern front, his valor and record earning him a respected place in the 1945 Victory Parade through Red Square...

...Then World War II came, devastating the western Soviet Union...

...By age 60, in 1966, he was lucky to be among the one out of four of his generation who had survived the purges, the War years and the aftermath of both...

...If his death gives him a few more years, Brezhnev might take the role of senior statesman, concentrating on foreign affairs, an area that has fascinated him...

...For diversion, he likes soccer, hockey, hunting, and driving fast, expensive cars-several of which, including a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes and Citroen, have been gifts from the West...

...Some Kremlin watchers think the aging leaders will hold on until ill?ness or death solves the problem...

...His reputation would not be muddied...

...Younger men could run the bureaucratic machinery and continue his basic policies...

...Brezhnev acquired the skills necessary for managing that power while working at an assortment of jobs in factories, on farms, in the Party apparatus...

...For just as Americans demand truth from their politicians, the Soviet popular ethic places a high priority on modesty...

...It is reasonable that Brezhnev at 70 is thinking of how his pre?decessors have been treated, and to his own pages in history...

...THE RESULT has been a remarkably stable Brezhnev leadership, only slightly ruffled by the dismissal of four Politburo members over the last 12 years...

...Brezhnev began to emerge as first among equals in the post-Khrush?chev collective leadership days of the late 1960s...

...This characteristic, meshed with instinctive timing, de?termination and circumstances we may never know in this century, put him at the levers of Soviet power...

...A new and unusual?ly detailed biographical sketch published by the foreign-language Mos?cow News, but also distributed in the Soviet Union, says that Brezhnev "knows the taste of bread grown by one's own hands, he knows the smell and heat of molten steel he is of the worker's flesh and blood...

...Brezhnev at 70 by mark hopkins Moscow ONLY A little bit is known about the small-town boy from a Russian factory worker's family who, having scaled some of the world's most treacherous political slopes, has been at the top in the Soviet Union longer than Vladimir Lenin or Nikita Khrushchev, and half as long as Joseph Stalin...

...Enemies are everywhere-outside the country, inside, even within the Kremlin walls...

...Hardly an official characterization of Brezhnev appears, for example, that does not stress this trait...

...It is essential in Soviet political life to come from humble worker origins as well, to be known as one who can mingle with the rank and file, talk their language, understand their concerns...

...Two of the four-Alexander Shelepin and Dmitri Polyansky-were once regarded as young rising stars...

...Un?like the erratic, "hare-brained" Khrushchev, he has been conspicu?ously careful to elicit the Politburo's and the Party Central Committee's approval of every major policy and agreement for the public record...

...He might even break new ground and write his memoirs for everyone to read...

...His family would be spared ostracism...

...Soon political underlings and the Soviet press started fawn?ing over Brezhnev's "personal" statesmanship and the extraordinary value-collective leadership not?withstanding??of his "personal" contacts with foreign heads of state...

...MARK HOPKINS, a past contributor to these pages, is a specialist in Soviet and East European affairs...

...Brezhnev does have a different style than his predecessor, though, and the only question?ing of his authority is thought to have occurred around December 1974 in a conflict whose surface swirls left Kremlin watchers wondering what happened deeper down...

...He keeps watch on the military and secret police through two political proteges serving on the Politburo, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov and KGB chief Yuri Andropov...

...He could go on traveling, as a respected world leader...

...He has admitted to one heart attack 15-20 years ago...

...And by the time of the 25th Party Congress last February-March, Brezhnev's name and face virtually monopolized Soviet politics...

...Brezhnev has run the Soviet Union in deft concert with other senior political leaders-President Nikolai Podgorny, Premier Alexei Kosygin, the durable Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, and a relative newcomer to the Politburo's inner circle, Andrei Kirilenko...

...The worst of the hunger, brutality and killing-taking a toll of perhaps 40 million-ended in 1953 when Stalin died...

...for seven weeks from December 1974 into February 1975, for a month in May-June 1975, and six weeks in March-April 1976??have not been fully explained, leaving lingering suspicions that he has some form of cancer, heart disease or circulatory ailment...

...Less than 10 years later, after Brezhnev had finished vocational high school and gotten a low-level agricultural ad?ministration job, Stalin launched his brutal collectivization campaign...

...The tough and shrewd survive, but even they are often eliminated by caprice...

...Most important of all, however, since recollections of World War II are as fresh as yesterday here, a Soviet political leader must be a documented War hero...

...Politically he seems unchallenged, although the inner workings of the system here are so secretive that the discovery a while back of what day each week (Thursday) the ruling Communist party Politburo assembles in the Kremlin was news...

...Brezhnev could thus retain an honored place while lightening his administrative load...

...Finally-and this could decide the issue-his assuming the mantle of senior stateman would show Brezhnev to be a true Leninist, a man every bit as dedicated to world peace and the Soviet building of Communism as the present theology surrounding the Lenin myth demands...

...Last year he finally gave up smoking, a two-pack-a-day habit he previously tried to break with an alarm-equipped case that opened at intervals to ration a cigarette...

...His name and photographs would not be abruptly censored from textbooks, encyclopedias and the press, as Stalin's and Khrushchev's have been...

...They and subordinate Politburo members shunted aside have been replaced by Party functionaries whose names and faces are unfamiliar, and whose political performances so far give no clues as to how or when the fifth Soviet leader will be installed...

...a 1976 photograph of Brezhnev in the uniform of a Soviet marshal displays 11...

...He wears a new hearing aid in his left ear, and his naturally soft Ukrainian speech has been slurring because of dental work or a jaw malady...

...Indeed, in the current graying, physically waning hierarchy, there is no observable line of suc?cession...

...The 1930s purge trials that followed saw Brezhnev, a young Communist party member, move into suddenly created vacancies...

...An alter?native for him consistent with Com?munist practice now would be to adopt the Tito or Mao formulas...

...This is not very much to know about Leonid I. Brezhnev, who at 70 basks in the title of vozhd (the leader)-as did Joseph Stalin routinely and Nikita Khrushchev rarely-and who apparently oversees directly or indirectly all the Soviet power centers...

...On the other hand, Brezhnev could look back on tragic, human episodes of bravery, camaraderie, sacrifice and unrelenting struggle that, whatever the rich, hostile bourgeois West might say, had contributed, too, to making the Soviet Union a world power...

...It is a civilized global power that can rearrange its leadership without the kind of violence or jockeying for position that causes righteous head-shaking in the West about the Russian enigma...

...It is tempting to recall that both these men accepted Khrushchev's overthrow in October 1964, just six months after Brezhnev, then the USSR's President, embraced and kissed him in a praise-filled cere?mony marking Khrushchev's own 70th birthday...

...He appears to rebound physically yet at times looks drawn and tired, as was the case in the summer of 1975 at the Helsinki summit and last month in Belgrade...

...Status, not money, brings most privileges here...

...The Soviet Union's "Western policy" goes back to the early Khrushchev years, of course, but it became closely associated with Brezhnev through summit meetings in Western Europe and the United States...

...A few billboard-size photographs of him were erected in Moscow...

...His dress runs to dark, finely tailored businessman's suits and equally conservative ties, but at his Crimean villa or govern?ment dacha half an hour from Mos?cow he changes to sports shirts, slacks and jackets...

...Born in 1906, he graduated from a school of hard knocks unimaginable to American and West European contemporaries he was to meet...

...Betrayal, deception and dis?trust are political norms...

...None called for intellectual genius...

...After all, the Kremlin thinking could well go, the Soviet Union is not a barbaric state still having to conceal nights of long knives...

...He led all lists and Red Square line-ups...

...The adulation of Brezhnev in the controlled press is probably as much an apologia as a contrived campaign to create a supreme leader, with all the proper attributes, in a country where older generations still speak respectfully of a strong, Tsar-like Stalin...

...Party leader for a dozen years, Brezhnev heads the Politburo, chairs the top-secret De?fense Council, and holds the Army's highest rank of marshal...