Smoke in the face and a cigarette case with a timer: are the stories about how Brezhnev quit smoking true?

In blogs, the media and on entertainment sites you can find stories about how the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee tried, using various tricks, to circumvent the recommendations of doctors who forbade him from heavy smoking. We decided to check the authenticity of two such stories.

The first is about how, after the ban on doctors, Brezhnev asked his translator to blow smoke directly into his face, allegedly even at a meeting with US President Richard Nixon. The second is about a special cigarette case with a timer, which gave the Secretary General cigarettes only at certain intervals. For example, they write about this in blogs on the platform “Zen", V LiveJournal, on the website Pikabu and in major media: “Komsomolskaya Pravda", "RIA Novosti" And website Lenta.ru.

Was Brezhnev's long-term translator Victor Sukhodrev, who previously worked with Nikita Khrushchev, and in the 1980s with the last General Secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev. Therefore, stories about Brezhnev’s behavior during international meetings should be sought first of all in his memoirs. In 1999, Sukhodrev’s book “My tongue is my friend. From Khrushchev to Gorbachev" And it actually has a chapter called “A Cigarette Case with a Secret.”

As Sukhodrev said, at a certain point doctors forbade Brezhnev to smoke. The Secretary General obeyed, but at the same time began to force the guards to smoke near him in order to inhale at least someone else’s smoke. “Sometimes one could observe the following scene: a car drives up, the doors open, and clouds of tobacco smoke float out behind the leader as he exits the cabin,” writes the long-time translator of the head of the Soviet state.

The story about exhaling smoke directly in the face of the Secretary General at important meetings is from the same source. Sukhodrev described how this happened: Brezhnev knew that his translator smoked and asked him to smoke. “I lit a cigarette, but, naturally, I tried to blow the smoke away from him. Then Brezhnev asked again: “Well, not the same! There’s smoke on me.” The picture was surreal: during the negotiations, an interpreter sits at the head of the table, brazenly lights a cigarette, and even blows smoke in the face of the leader of his country.”

Sukhodrev also wrote about a cigarette case “with a secret.” “Somewhere in the depths of the KGB they specially made him a beautiful, even elegant, dark green cigarette case, inserting a timer with a lock into its lid. Brezhnev could open the cigarette case only after a certain period of time. He usually set the timer for 45 minutes, but already about 30 minutes before the expiration of this period he tried to open the cigarette case, and since he couldn’t do anything, he began to get nervous and look around in search of a smoker from whom he could shoot a cigarette. And yet he was very proud of his cigarette case,” said the translator.

This story could be considered a myth if it were not for a second source that appeared in 2013, which confirmed it. From 1971 to 1973 US President Richard Nixon wrote down to hidden equipment all conversations that took place in the Oval Office of the White House. In total, the US State Archives published 3,700 hours of audio recordings of meetings and telephone conversations. The last part of the recordings, from April 9 to July 12, 1973, appeared publicly available in 2013. Just at this time (from June 16 to 25) the official visit Brezhnev in the USA. AND first conversation between the leaders of the two states began with a demonstration by the Secretary General of an ingenious device. “You see, I have a cigarette case here. It has a special clock mechanism, and I can’t... I’m not able to open it for an hour,” Brezhnev told Nixon. “Oh, how do I open it?” — the US President became interested. “Look, the mechanism, the clockwork is now turned on, and I won’t be able to open it for another hour. In an hour it will open on its own,” replied the Secretary General. By the way, Viktor Sukhodrev was also present at this conversation.

Thus, the stories about Brezhnev’s requests to blow smoke in his face and about a cigarette case with a secret mechanism are confirmed by the memories of his close associates and other historical sources. Some details differ in different accounts, but in general the stories are true.

Cover photo: Brezhnev and Nixon, 1973. In the center is Viktor Sukhodrev. Robert LeRoy Knudsen/Wikimedia Commons

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