Forbidden romance of Brezhnev's niece: Why a relative of the Secretary General was not allowed to marry

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Her life has never been easy, and her relationship with the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee did not at all guarantee her a happy life or some unthinkable privileges. But she received slaps and slaps from people quite often, and not always in a figurative sense. Lyubov Brezhnev has long lived in the United States, but still remembers with bitterness the times when she desperately fought for her feelings, which were never allowed to develop into something more than a romance.

Fight for life

Lyubov's parents met during the war in Magnitogorsk, where Yakov Brezhnev, a metallurgical engineer, was evacuated together with a metallurgical technical school from Dneprodzerzhinsk. His fiancée did not even know that Yakov was married, but found out about it when she was already in her ninth month of pregnancy. As a result, the baby was born a month ahead of schedule, and the doctor who delivered the baby even decided that the baby was dead and sent the newborn immediately to the morgue. Fortunately, she was saved by the caretaker, who saw the baby blinking his eyes.

After the maternity hospital, Lyubov's mother moved to her aunt's house, she never returned to Yakov. The brother of her failed husband, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, regularly helped the family by transferring food with military aircraft to the Urals. Lyubov was 5 years old when he persuaded the girl's mother to bring her niece to Dneprodzerzhinsk to meet her personally. From that meeting, little Lyuba retained the memory of a large, handsome man, on whose shoulder she slept so comfortably. He had kind blue eyes and very warm hands.

When Leonid Ilyich moved to Moscow, he gradually moved all his relatives to the capital, including his younger brother Yakov. And in 1964, Lyubov went to enter the Moscow Institute. She dreamed of theatrical, and her father wanted her to enter foreign language. At first, the girl lived with family friends, before entering her father, Lyubov settled in the Moscow hotel. Much later, the girl realized that her number was used as a conspiratorial number, where her father and uncle met with their supporters during the preparation of a conspiracy against Khrushchev.

Her father discouraged her from the idea of becoming an actress for a very long time. As a result, Lyubov nevertheless entered the Institute of Foreign Languages, and settled in a dormitory of Moscow State University in a separate room with a telephone, because conditions in the foreign language for students were very poor.

Forbidden love

On November 8, 1965, Lyubov, along with his father, went to visit the director Roman Carmen. There the girl first saw Helmut. The young man studied at the military academy in Moscow and was a colonel in the German army. He clearly liked love: all evening he did not leave her a single step and promised to get tickets for the best seats in the Bolshoi Theater tomorrow. The good places did not surprise her, but Helmut was attractive to her.

After the very first act of "Boris Godunov" young people went to the hostel to Helmut. Love appeared in her room only three days later. Since then, she was least of all interested in studies: she flunked tests and did not appear at the institute for several days. As if anticipating the quick end of this crazy happiness, Love and Helmut tried to spend as much time together as possible.

When she showed up at the dormitory for foreign students, she left her student card or passport on duty. And at that very moment, the girl's father, Yakov Ilyich Brezhnev, was already finding out to whom his daughter had come. After she left, the next bell rang. Helmut came to her at the dormitory of Moscow State University, where the attendant not only reported where necessary about the guest of Brezhnev's niece, but also overheard all the conversations of the lovers at the door.

Nevertheless, for several months no one bothered the young people. Then searches began in her room. Lyubov Brezhnev, every time after returning, found in the room a mess and the loss of some things. She tried to contact the Moscow State University's operative detachment, which was responsible for order on the territory of the university, and demanded an explanation from the head. Naturally, he was not going to report, only said: Love must stop meeting with her German. And he added that this is what they want "at the top".

The girl was not going to give up her love. The searches continued, once she even found operatives who had long ceased to hide in the room. In a fit of indignation, she managed to get nasty on the boss, and Lyubov was simply beaten. At some point, Love fainted from pain. She woke up late at night in a pool of blood. Huge black bruises were on the student's body for a long time.

A sad ending

After that, the spies more than once visited Lyubov Brezhneva's room. They made a showy mess in her things, filled her things with sugar, did not hesitate to delve into her underwear. When meeting with Leonid Brezhnev, the girl had the impression that the high-ranking uncle knew absolutely nothing about what was happening in her life.

But it was then that she realized that she had no protection. Even her father, without hesitation, will betray her. Brezhnev at parting promised to order not to touch her. But even after that, the persecution did not stop. And later Leonid Brezhnev told his niece in plain text that he would not let her out of the country.

She continued to meet with Helmut, and "visitors" regularly visited her room. When Helmut defended his dissertation, Lyubov no longer had any hope of a happy ending to the novel with a wedding. The day after the defense, he came to his beloved and said: he was summoned to the Special Department of the Ministry of Defense. And they were faced with a choice: Love or a military career.

For a while, the young people still met, but in the summer Helmut returned to Germany. As a keepsake, Lyubov has only a modest ring that was once brought by her beloved for their future wedding. A wedding that never happened and never will.

In the late 1960s, Lyubov Brezhneva married a scientist, gave birth to two sons. In 1990 she emigrated to the United States, where she published her book "The Secretary General's Niece." It seems that even then the pain of lost love did not let her go.

Many people remember Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev as he was in recent years - an almost helpless old man who only cares about his own awards and regalia. However, those who were next to the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee for many years remembered him as completely different. For 13 years, next to Brezhnev was his personal photographer Vladimir Musaelyan, whose memories of the secretary general are strikingly different from the image outlined by the biographers of Leonid Ilyich.