Leonid Brezhnev New Year's Address (1979) [Subtitled]

Have you heard the joke where Brezhnev is showing his elderly mother around the Kremlin? He's showing her the expensive paintings on the wall, the fine china, the authentic oak desk he uses and the Mercedes the gov provides for him. "Look mother, look at all we have achieved!" His mother replies "Yes, yes, Leonoid that is all fine and well but what if the Bolsheviks come back?"

"I remember the blizzard. Your grandmother and I had to wear... hats... and ear muffs... and galoshes... and scarves... and... oh, those didn't exist then. But it was... a cold winter. I used to have to... use a shovel... and things like that..."

Of course they would pick the most charismatic person they could find to deliver the speech.

At this point in time he had already suffered a stroke. Brezhnev was incredibly vain. Wonder what the ordinary Soviet citizen thought of their General Secretary with his extremely slurred speech?

He sounds drunk

On these times he was the best friend of Bulgaria and that's why we will always love him. Many people speak bad for the komunism but for my country I can say that in the time of comunism we rised the population from around 3,5 milions to 9 milion population. The comunist countries as Bulgaria and USSR had the best holiday systems, the best sport model and the best health polytic and the best social polytic and the best education system and the education was absolutely for everyone rich or poor or poorest! Also the people in Bulgaria did not know what does narcotic mean until year 1989. Can you even imagine entire country without narcotics? By this time the people in the "democratic"countries were dying from drugs and in the same time the people in BG did not know what that mean. But the problem was that the communism needed very very big changes needed to be improved and needed to give the people to make their own business. For examp look the chinese model but even this model needs improvements. All we can be sure that the communism is not dead.

December '79: the beginning of soviet afghanistan war

He was in pretty bad shape at this point.

I think this guy contributed a lot to the demise of the Soviet Union......here he can barely carry on a speech...making decisions for a country was out of the question....here lies the fundamental problem of the communist system

poor grandpa

Fellow looked like he was ready to keel over while speaking!

THOSE BROWS 😓

Earlier that month,the USSR invaded Afghanistan.

God bless Leonid Brezhnev!