For many years she was the most privileged woman in the nation.
But today she is just another bitter pensioner, nearly blind, neglected by her children, rarely leaving home except to go to the hospital.
Twelve years after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union for almost two decades, his 86-year-old wife, Viktoria, hangs on like just more rubble from the collapse of communism-humiliated by both her country and her kinfolk, sometimes even barred from visiting his grave.
“Such a fall!” said her neighbor, Vladimir Karpov, one of the few people she opens her door for these days. “She was the first lady of the state. Her husband was one of the most powerful men in the world. To see her like this, it’s just very sad.”
No doubt, many Russians take a less sympathetic view of the widow Brezhnev’s plight.
As the wife the Soviet Union’s longtime Communist Party boss, she enjoyed a lavish lifestyle-by Moscow standards, at least-at a time when the country’s economy was being bludgeoned to its knees.
Indeed, there is something in the Russian character that delights in the downfall of the rich and powerful, and that is especially true in Brezhnev’s case, because her family’s privileges sprang from a corrupt system that impoverished and repressed so many people.
Still, there is a poignancy to her fate, wasting away like some modern-day Miss Haversham in Moscow, taunted by the faded luxury of her surprisingly small flat (just five simple rooms), complaining of boredom and betrayal, afflicted with debilitating diabetes.
For Viktoria Brezhnev, the one-time midwife who presided over Kremlin society and was treated like a queen on trips abroad, life began to sour on that gloomy November morning in 1982 when she climbed out of bed and sat down to breakfast, happy that her husband was sleeping late, not realizing he was dying-or even already dead.
For a while, a commemorative plaque outside her apartment building at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospect informed passersby that this was once the residence of the man who came to power in 1964 and helped push the Soviet Union to international status as a superpower, even as its totalitarian political system slowly crumbled.
But when later rulers, unable to reverse the fatal trend, sought to excuse themselves by heaping blame on the dead Brezhnev, the plaque was removed, along with a shelf on which the family used to place floral bouquets in his memory.
However, another plaque honoring Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor who lived one floor above him, is still affixed to the facade of the building.
By 1988, Viktoria Brezhnev was evicted from the posh, state-owned country home just outside Moscow where the family spent much of its time. At first, she was given access to a smaller cottage, but soon the government removed her servants and then forced her out of the second dacha.
Officials searched her flat and walked away with all her husband’s medals and awards, plus any household items supplied by the state and gifts received from foreign leaders while Brezhnev was in office.
The new rulers even cut off the royalties from Brezhnev’s books, which were ghost written at public expense. But the family went to court and won them back-although inflation soon gobbled up their value, anyway. Viktoria Brezhnev receives a monthly pension of about $30.
Today, the Brezhnev era is popularly derided as the “period of stagnation,” although the rigors of life under Boris Yeltsin are causing more and more Russians to look back on those days with a blind nostalgia and selective memory.
When neighbor Karpov, a writer, tried to publish a series of articles based on his interviews with Viktoria Brezhnev, no major newspaper was interested.
In most other countries, publications would have fought for the rights to the recollections of the widow of one of the towering figures of the 20th Century. But Karpov’s articles eventually appeared in an obscure newspaper published for railroad workers.
The 10 segments provide a fascinating peek into the private lives of the former first family-and confirm many of the seedy rumors that whirled about the Brezhnevs during their heyday.
For all his power and prestige, “Brezhnev lacked the authority to maintain order in his own family,” Karpov said. “His children turned out to be family tragedies.”
Both daughter Galina and son Yuri became pathetic alcoholics. The coarse, promiscuous Galina was a worry and an embarrassment from her teenage years.
“She was always a willful girl,” her mother recalled. “She didn’t like the way we were bringing her up,” and dropped out of college at 19 to elope with a circus performer.
After that marriage fell apart, Galina moved into the apartment next to her parent’s flat. But her father, by then the Soviet Union’s top figure, had the door to his daughter’s dwelling sealed so she would have to come and go through his entranceway.
It was a futile attempt to try to keep her under control. When she eloped with a second circus star, the acclaimed magician Igor Kio, Brezhnev had the marriage quashed.
A third marriage to an interior ministry official spurred hopes that Galina finally had settled down, but those hopes soon were dashed. Galina embarked on a series of public love affairs that helped weaken her father’s position in his final years.
The most notorious liaison involved a young actor named Boris Buryatse, better known as Boris the Gypsy, who was only 19 when the middle-aged Galina became enthralled with him.
Jealous and possessive, she bought him a fancy apartment and a Mercedes, got him admitted to a university and took him on her vacations.
Their escapades, including nasty public scenes, soon became legend in gossip-loving Moscow. Eventually, Buryatse died in prison, accused of corruption by the Andropov regime.
Galina also became involved with a diamond smuggling ring that spirited jewels out of the country inside equipment used by the traveling Moscow circus.
Her uncle, Semyon Tsvigun, a top KGB official, tried but failed to cover up this scandal and, as a result, committed suicide.
For all the heartbreaks their children caused them, the Brezhnevs themselves enjoyed a loving relationship, according to the widow.
They met as college students in the Ukrainian city of Kursk. She fell in love with him almost immediately, attracted by the same unusual facial feature that later became the staple of Brezhnev caricatures.
“He had thick, charcoal black eyebrows,” Viktoria Brezhnev recalled. “I could recognize him from far away by his eyebrows.”
During his years in power, Brezhnev had a reputation as a prolific womanizer. But his widow said he was always kind and attentive to her.
He never drank “more than two shots of vodka a day,” the widow maintained-unless he was very upset about something.
“When his granddaughter Vitussya divorced her husband,” Mrs. Brezhnev said, “he was grief-stricken and we had to keep a close eye on him for about a month.”
Today, she said, she rarely gets visits from her children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
“I have no gifts left for them,” she complained. “These kids just take what they want. They took everything I had.”
