19th century at least. In this more general usage, however, much precision has
been lost. For example, in its general usage there is scarcely a more bourgeois
figure than the middle-class professional, a doctor or lawyer, with a relatively
luxurious life style. Yet in Marxist theory such people, not being owners and
controllers of the means of production, are actually marginal in class relations,
and are ultimately doomed to be crushed by the true property-owning
bourgeoisie just as are the workers. As a brief definition of its position in
Marxist thought, the bourgeoisie is a class, partially corresponding with the
middle class, or upper-middle class of Anglo-Saxon terminology, whose social
attitudes are characterized byconservatismand fear of its own potential
political insecurity, but is dominant in both running the economy and polity,
and in setting standards of decent behaviour. As such it is aped by the petit-
bourgeoisie, those who occupy even less secure positions intermediate
between the new capitalist ruling class and the traditional manual workers,
beset by pretensions and anxieties and bent on an upward social mobility.
Outside a proper Marxist theory the term bourgeois has little or no value.
Sociologists have much more precisely-defined categories of the classes, and
modern culture lacks the value stock to need the phrase, but it lingers on,
almost entirely as a pejorative comment.
Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev (1906–82) was the effective leader of the Soviet Union from
the fall ofKhrushchevin 1964 until his death. His fame depends on his being
the last ruler of the country in the mode set byLeninandStalin, with
complete autocratic power based on manipulation of theCommunist Party
of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The two leaders of the Soviet Union between
his death and the rise of MikhailGorbachevin 1985, Yuri Andropov and
Konstantin Chernenko, were both too weak, physically and politically, and too
aware of the impending crisis in Soviet economics and politics, to assume the
power Brezhnev had wielded. He was a classicapparatchik, too young to
have taken part in the revolution itself, but already in the party and the party-
controlled state apparatus less than ten years later. Like so many of his cohort,
he rose through the party ranks on the coat-tails of a patron, in his case
Khrushchev, for whom he first worked in 1938, after proving himself by taking
part enthusiastically in Stalin’s destruction of the Russian peasantry. His career
followed Khrushchev’s, including his wartime service as a political commissar,
but ultimately he was responsible for engineering Khrushchev’s fall.
His rule over the Soviet Union was characterized by complete inertia in
industrial and economic matters (his own practical experience was entirely in
the agricultural sector), a return to cultural and human rights repression after
Khrushchev’s mild liberalization, and an aggressive and adventurist foreign
Brezhnev