Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev [antikvár]

eonid llyich Brezhnev was born into a Russian worker's family on December 19, 1906, in the village of Kamenskoye, now Dneprodzerzhinsk, a large iron and steel centre in the Ukraine. His grandfather and his father both worked for many years at the local iron and steel plant. And there Leonid Brezhnev also worked, first as a worker and then as an engineer and a shop superintendent. His brother and sister were also employed there. The family of L. I. Brezhnev put in a total of almost a hundred years of work at that enterprise.Leonid Brezhnev began to work in the early years of the Soviet state, born of the October Socialist Revolution in 1917. Those were hard years. Hunger, economic dislocation, poverty and ignorance were the legacy the young Soviet republic received from the tsarist regime. The nation was faced with the task of bringing the economy out of the havoc wrought by the First World War, the Civil War and the foreign military intervention. With great dedication the Soviet people, led by the party founded by V. I. Lenin, set about transforming old and backward Russia into a new and socialist state. They rebuilt factories, erected power stations and organised the first collective farms. They began eagerly to study and seek knowledge. This was the period which saw the emergence in the land of the Soviets of a fine generation of pioneers of socialist construction, and Leonid Brezhnev was among them.Leonid Brezhnev is bound with the people by strong and close ties. At each sharp turn in the history of the Soviet Union he was invariably in the front ranks where perseverance and fortitude were called for.At the age of 17, Leonid Brezhnev joined the Young Communist League in whose ranks, as he himself put it, he learned the difficult science of life, of class struggle and of building the new society. It was there that he found a source of energy and optimism which stood him in good stead for many years to come. When he was 25 he joined the Communist Party whose cause he has faithfully served ever since.During the first five-year periods the entire nation was engaged in building new projects, in studying and acquiring knowledge. As a young Communist Leonid Brezhnev was a front-rank worker and made excellent progress in his studies. It was a difficult and at the same time a heroic period for the country, a period of vital importance. It was then that the question of what the world's first socialist country would be like was being decided. A new society could not be built on an obsolete economic foundation. The Communist Party has therefore concentrated efforts on building an