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

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

The first - about how, after the ban on doctors, Brezhnev asked his translator to exhale smoke directly in the face, supposedly even at a meeting with US President Richard Nixon. The second is about a special cigarette case with a timer that gave the Secretary General a cigarette only after certain intervals. For example, they write about this in blogs on the platform "Zen", V Livejournal, on the site Pikabu And in large media: "Komsomolskaya Pravda","RIA Novosti" And site Lenta.ru.

Brezhnev’s long -term translator was Viktor Sudotrev, who had previously worked with Nikita Khrushchev, and in the 1980s-with the last Secretary General of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev. Therefore, stories about Brezhnev’s behavior during international meetings should be sought primarily in his memoirs. In 1999, the Book of Tudokrev was published "My tongue is my friend. From Khrushchev to Gorbachev". And in it there really is a chapter called "Corgister with a Secret."

As Sudotrev said, at some point, doctors forbade Brezhnev to smoke. The Secretary General obeyed, but at the same time began to force the guard to smoke near him in order to inhale at least someone else's smoke. “Sometimes it was possible to observe such a scene: a car drives up, doors open, and puffs of tobacco smoke come out of the cabin,” writes a many -year -old translator of the head of the Soviet state.

The story of the exhalation of smoke directly into the face of the Secretary General at important meetings - from the same source. Sudotrev described how this happened: Brezhnev knew that his translator was smoking, and asked him to smoke. “I lit a cigarette, but, of course, tried to let smoke away from him. Then Brezhnev again asked: "Well, not the same! Smoke on me." The picture was surrealistic: the translator is sitting at the negotiations at the head of the table, brazenly lit a cigarette, and even smoke lets the head of his country in the face. ”

Sudotrev also wrote about the cigarette case "with a secret." “Somewhere in the bowels of the KGB, he specially made a beautiful, even elegant, cigarette case of dark green in color, inserting a timer with a lock into its lid. Brezhnev could open a cigarette case only after a certain period of time. He usually set the timer for 45 minutes, but already 30 minutes before the expiration of this period he tried to open a porkiger, and since he did not succeed, he began to get nervous, look around in search of a smoker who could shoot a cigarette. Nevertheless, he was very proud of his cigarette case, ”the translator said.

This story could be calculated by a myth if the second source that confirmed it did not appear in 2013. From 1971 to 1973, US President Richard Nixon Recorded On hidden equipment, all the conversations that were carried out in the oval office of the White House. In total, the US State Archive published 3700 hours of audio recordings that recorded meetings and telephone conversations. The last part of the records, from April 9 to July 12, 1973, appeared Open in the publication in 2013. Just at this time (from 16 to 25 June) Official visit Brezhnev in the USA. AND The first conversation Between the leaders of the two states began with the demonstration of the Secretary General of a cunning device. “See, I have a cigarette case here. He has a special clock mechanism, and I can’t ... I am not able to open it for an hour, ”Brezhnev told Nixon. "Oh, how to open it?" - the US president became interested. “Look, the mechanism, the clock mechanism is now turned on, and I can’t open it for another hour. An hour later, he himself will open, ”the Secretary General answered. At the same time, Viktor Sudokrev was present, by the way.

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

Photo on the cover: Brezhnev and Nixon, 1973. In the center - Viktor Sudokrev. Robert Leroy Knudsen / Wikimedia Commons

Is it true

What do our verdicts mean?