“By nationality I am Russian, by origin a native proletarian, a hereditary metalworker”
By nationality I am Russian, by origin a native proletarian, a hereditary metalworker. That is all that is known of my ancestry
In the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev, which are believed to have been written from his words by several prominent journalists and editors of the day and merely edited by the General Secretary, there is a very touching account of his mother.
Natalia Denisovna (1886-1975) was the daughter of a furnace welder at the same works where Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev was employed as an assistant roller; they met there, on the shop floor of the iron-rolling mill at the Dnieper Works.
My mother, Natalia Denisovna, outlived my father by many years. If from him I took what we used to call doggedness, patience, the habit of seeing a job through to the end once I had taken it on, then from her I inherited sociability, an interest in people, and the knack of meeting hardship with a smile and a joke. All her life she worked, raised us, fed us, washed our clothes, nursed us through illness, and, remembering this, I have grown used for ever to respecting the hard, unseen, unending and noble labour of women, the labour of mothers.
But the most interesting part is in the passage shown in the photograph. Brezhnev tells how his mother went on living in the settlement of Kamenskoye, by then the town of Dneprodzerzhinsk, even after he became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. And so the modest, aged mother of the head of the Soviet Union goes shopping herself, stands in queues, keeps house... And sometimes people stop her in the street and try to ask her to help settle some matter or other, and all she says to them is: here are my two hands, I will help as I can, but I shall give my son no instructions.
On the next page Brezhnev relates that in 1966 his mother, who was already 80, finally agreed to move to Moscow to live with him.
She lived to see her great-grandchildren, lived quietly, at peace with her conscience, surrounded by the love of all who knew her, proud of the trust that the people and the Party had placed in her firstborn, and for me it was a great happiness, after all my labours, to sit beside my mother, to hear her dear voice, to look into her kind, radiant eyes
Natalia Denisovna lived to the age of 89. She is buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery
