The book by Susanne Schattenberg, professor of modern history and culture at the University of Bremen, is a political biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, who held senior leadership positions in the USSR for 18 years (from 1964 to 1982). The author recreates the life path of his hero from the moment of birth in the village of Kamenskoye in December 1906. Readers are presented with an image of a politician who, in his activities at the highest party and government positions, was sincerely driven by the interests of preserving peace and improving the standard of living of the Soviet people. His personal political experience played a significant role in this. Brezhnev appears not as the hero of jokes, not as a poster character in history, but as a living person. The publication uses documents from the archives of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, as well as many Western European countries.