Brezhnev brought in from cold, 25 years on

HE was a serial philanderer whose health was wrecked by drink, cigarettes and an addiction to sleeping pills.

The installation overnight of a commemorative plaque to Leonid Brezhnev outside his grand Moscow home has revived a debate o...

HE was a serial philanderer whose health was wrecked by drink, cigarettes and an addiction to sleeping pills.

In his later years, he often stumbled in speeches or lost the thread of Politburo discussions.

But the installation overnight of a commemorative plaque to Leonid Brezhnev outside his grand Moscow home has revived a debate on the bushy-eyebrowed Soviet leader's legacy.

Brezhnev was hopelessly vain, suspicious of new ideas and responsible for political repression, the doomed invasion of Afghanistan and the fatal stagnation of the Soviet economy.

Yet most Russians look back on his 18 years in charge of the USSR as an unmatched golden era in their history.

An original bronze plaque bearing his image and a description of some of the 100 or so titles and medals he helped himself to was removed during perestroika in 1988 and is now in a museum of the Cold War in Berlin.

Twenty-five years on, Moscow City Hall has commissioned a new plaque, by the sculptor Aleksander Rukavishnikov, the son of the artist who made the original. It was unveiled yesterday on the 107th anniversary of Brezhnev's birth.

Rukavishnikov, 63, said he had made various attempts to avoid the job, including quoting a prohibitively big fee, but was eventually talked into it.

He remembers Brezhnev as "not the worst" Soviet leader, and his rule as a mixed time for artists when "they took care of us but could also close an exhibition".

Brezhnev came to power as the leader of an internal coup against his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1964.

From 1952 until his death in November 1982 at the age of 76, he lived with his family in an opulent flat above a 10-lane avenue that leads from Moscow's affluent western fringes into the heart of the city.

The original plaque was torn off after Mikhail Gorbachev denounced his rule as the "era of stagnation".

THE TIMES