Heroic Exploits

Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev spent World War II as a political commissar with the 18th army, rising in rank from colonel to major general. His primary task was to ensure the political probity of his fellow officers, but, the Soviet press now reports, he also had a harrowing and even heroic combat career.

New Times, a Soviet foreign-language weekly, has recently recounted a number of previously unreported exploits by Brezhnev. During the Kiev campaign in 1943, New Times reported, he took the place of a machine gunner who had been killed and rallied the defenders to beat off a German attack. On another occasion, he led an assault on a German barracks near Berdichev--against the wishes of a superior officer who had ordered him to leave the area. "My place is wherever the situation requires it," Brezhnev is reported to have said.

The sudden publicizing abroad of Brezhnev's military career has puzzled many Western observers in Moscow. One guess is that the party chief's record is being recalled now because of the visit by Richard Nixon, scheduled for May. As a Navy lieutenant in World War II, Nixon helped set up forward landing strips in the Pacific; he was cited for meritorious activities during the 1943-to-1944 battle for the island of Bougainville, where for nearly one month he was subjected to almost daily bombardment.

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