Brezhnev on screen as played by Shakurov and Stoyanov, and the image of a feeble old man

Brezhnev as played by Shakurov and Brezhnev as played by Stoyanov are like a bear and Winnie-the-Pooh. The two heroes turned out very different indeed. Both are charming, but Stoyanov's Leonid Ilyich is, all the same, a little too much of a caricature.

I have seen Brezhnev in six films, if not more, and no two of them resemble one another. What they all have in common, and all are guilty of it, is to portray him as an utterly decrepit old man, although his illness began to tell seriously only in the last few years of his life. Still, Shakurov's Brezhnev, though excessively frail, is in full possession of his wits, whereas Stoyanov's Brezhnev is no longer quite lucid