Andrey Kozovoy's new book on Brezhnev draws on little known sources

On the history shelf at the Fnac in Nantes, next to "The Real Novel of Gorbachev", stands a book about Brezhnev, the new work of Andrei Kozovoi, a French historian of Soviet origin who specialises in the Cold War and its manifestations in culture. This history of Brezhnev draws on unpublished or little-known sources and, although it contains a decent helping of black
humour on almost every page, it shows the General Secretary as rather more than a weary marionette, noting, for example, how he outlasted Stalin and Khrushchev thanks to his personal qualities. Interestingly, Kozovoi's Brezhnev is not a discredited figure but an intriguing, if contradictory, political actor.