Brezhnev

Soviet leader. He served as the chairman of the Presidium (now the Politburo) and secretary of the Communist Party before becoming president of the USSR in 1977. In 1968 he enunciated the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserts that the USSR may intervene in any Warsaw Pact country in which the Communist government is threatened. Soviet adherence to this doctrine was evidenced by the invasions of Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1977).