Galina Brezhneva

Galina Leonidovna Brezhneva (Russian: Галина Леонидовна Брежнева; 18 April 1929 – 30 June 1998) was the daughter of Soviet politician and longtime General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and Viktoria Brezhneva.

Life and death

Galina Brezhneva was born on 18 April 1929 in Sverdlovsk. As a teenager, she refused to become a member of the Komsomol; later, she refused to study for an academic degree.^[1] She married for the first time to circus artist Yevgeny Timofeyevich Milaev (1910–1983) in 1951. He had twin children, Alexander "Sasha" and Natalya "Natasha" (born 1948) from his first marriage to Natalya Yurchenko who died from blood poisoning during childbirth. They had one daughter, Viktoria Yevgenyevna Milaeva (1952–2018). She was married briefly to Igor Kio, a union that lasted only nine days.^{[citation needed]} By 1971, her father Leonid Brezhnev had become displeased with the way things were going in Galina's life. He wanted to arrange a marriage for her, after having her second marriage annulled. She ended up selecting Yuri Churbanov from a number of suitors. Churbanov was chosen even though he was already married and had children. By the end of Brezhnev's life, Galina was much less visible, and during the leadership of Yuri Andropov, she disappeared from the public eye altogether. Brezhneva made a public comeback during Konstantin Chernenko's short rule, and appeared in a conference commemorating International Women's Day. At the conference, she wore only one piece of jewelry, the Order of Lenin that she had been awarded by Andrei Gromyko in 1978 for her fiftieth birthday.^[2]

Later, after Churbanov had been arrested on charges of corruption, Brezhneva divorced him. She married for a fourth and final time at the age of 64, to a 29-year-old man. Before her death, Brezhneva was a guest on British television to talk about life in the USSR.^[1] In her later life, Brezhneva gradually became a heavy drinker, and her daughter placed her in a psychiatric hospital where she died on 30 June 1998, aged 69.^[3]

Personal life and rumors

Historian Larisa Vasil'eva wrote in her book that "Galina Brezhneva was an all-too-typical product of what came to be known as the

Stories such as these greatly affected Leonid Brezhnev. He said once to a party colleague that "The world respects you, but your own family causes you pain".[6] At the height of perestroika, a reform initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, many of the rumours about Brezhneva became increasingly wild and questionable; new details and information, possibly apocryphal, were increasingly included in the rumours. In popular culture, these rumours helped depict the Brezhnev era as an "Era of Stagnation".^[6] Many of the rumours stemmed from the fact that most of Brezhneva's friends and colleagues had earlier been arrested, and the majority of them had been linked to some sort of corruption or vice.^[7]

Embezzlement

In January 1982, as part of Andropov's anti-corruption campaign while Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, several prominent jewellery smugglers who all had links with Brezhneva were arrested, some of them even receiving the

• Vasil'eva, Larisa Nikolaevna (1994). Kremlin wives.
  ISBN 1-55970-260-5
  .