Brezhnev Seen as a Puppet in Last Years

Leonid I. Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982, was depicted by a prominent Soviet historian Wednesday as a vain and senile fool in his final years and never the strong leader the country needed to break with its Stalinist past.

Roy A. Medvedev, who has chronicled the Soviet leadership since the time of dictator Josef Stalin, writes in the current issue of the avant-garde newspaper Moscow News that Brezhnev had suffered a near-fatal stroke in January, 1976, but ruled in a virtual daze for six more years.

‘Ceased to Understand’

Although he “ceased to understand what was happening,” he was kept in power, Medvedev charges, by an entourage of corrupt and decadent officials who knew they remained safe while he was the Soviet president and general secretary of the ruling Communist Party.

Medvedev’s harsh, unremitting two-page attack on Brezhnev in the widely read Moscow News appears to be part of a new effort by the current Soviet leadership under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the present general secretary, to end the continued resistance to its political and economic reforms.

While Gorbachev has been strongly critical of Brezhnev’s long years in power, calling them the “period of stagnation” and attributing many of the country’s current problems to them, Medvedev’s almost brutal article goes much further, forcing a Soviet reader to choose sides, either with Gorbachev or Brezhnev.

Although many of the officials Brezhnev installed in senior party and government have died or been removed, he adds, “the Brezhnev ‘team’ still exists, and that is clearly not the best element of the inheritance that its late leader left the party.”

Cronyism, Corruption

“The consequences of Brezhnevism were no less destructive than those of Stalinism,” Medvedev contends, accusing Brezhnev of ruling through cronyism and corruption and of showing cowardice when confronted with key issues, such as breaking with the legacy of Stalin.

Medvedev argues that the country’s decline under Brezhnev, particularly a loss of moral and ethical standards, “has mutilated the consciences of a whole generation--what we justifiably call the lost generation.”

“To put a final end to Brezhnevism,” says Medvedev, “it is not enough only to remove the signboards from the streets and cities, from the squares and districts” that were named after him but--by implication--to remove those he had placed in power.

The Medvedev article coincides with the opening of the trial earlier this week of Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri M. Churbanov, who is charged with accepting the equivalent of $1.1 million in bribes as the first deputy minister of internal affairs.

Era Stands Accused

While the prosecutor, Alexander Sboyev, declared Wednesday that it will not be a “political trial,” the lengthy, 1,500-page indictment of Churbanov and eight senior Interior Ministry officials from the Soviet Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan makes clear that a whole political era stands accused.

“The Churbanov case is an ordinary criminal, rather than a political, trial,” Sboyev told the official Tass news agency. “To expose everything in elaborate detail, in strict compliance with the law, without forgetting for a second the theory and practice of the presumption of innocence, is the task of this trial.”

But Medvedev is less circumspect, describing many of those around Brezhnev as “utterly corrupt and profoundly decadent.”

The weaker his health--he reportedly was “clinically dead” after his 1976 stroke but was revived by physicians--the more of his cronies and supporters he promoted to senior party and government posts, according to Medvedev.

‘Led by the Hand’

“Many people in his entourage who were influential but totally wallowing in corruption needed Brezhnev to appear from time to time in public as at least a formal head of state,” Medvedev says, recalling the late 1970s, “and they literally led him around by the hand.”

Brezhnev had come to power, according to Medvedev, not as the organizer of the ouster of Nikita S. Khrushchev but as a weak leader installed by the party’s barons who did not want a strong figure again dominating them from the center.

“Sometimes weak leaders are necessary,” Medvedev writes, summing up the mood in the party leadership in 1982. “The leadership of the party and state had grown tired of (Khrushchev’s) reforms . . . and tired of the total unpredictability, unreliability and insecurity of the situation. Having removed Khrushchev, the party leadership did not want another strong leader. They wanted a quieter life, quieter work.”

Medvedev, expelled from the Communist Party under Brezhnev for writing about Stalin, for years could only publish his works abroad, but he has recently won new respect here as a reformist historian whose ideas are closely in line with those of Gorbachev.