Brezhnev’s Son, 53, Removed from Post
Yuri L. Brezhnev, son of the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev, has been removed from his job as a first deputy minister of foreign trade, according to an official announcement.
The announcement, published in the latest collection of Soviet government decrees, said he had been moved “in connection with his retirement on a pension on health grounds”.
Brezhnev, 53, is unusually young to receive a pension. He had been widely expected to leave his job after he failed to retain his position as a non-voting member of the Communist Party Central Committee at the 27th party congress last March.
Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev used the congress to launch a scathing attack on the stagnation of the last years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule.
The younger Brezhnev was appointed a first deputy minister of foreign trade in March, 1979, and entered the lower ranks of the Central Committee at the 26th Congress in 1981. His father died in November, 1982.
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