During the Khrushchev years Brezhnev had supported the leader's denunciations of Stalin's arbitrary rule, the rehabilitation of many of the victims of Stalin's purges, and the cautious liberalization of Soviet intellectual and cultural policy. But as soon as he became leader, Brezhnev began to reverse this process, and developed an increasingly conservative and regressive attitude. In a May 1965 speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of defeat of Germany, Brezhnev mentioned Stalin positively for the first time. In April 1966, he took the title General Secretary, which had been Stalin's title until 1952. The trial of the writers Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966—the first such trials since Stalin's day—marked the reversion to a repressive cultural policy. Under Yuri Andropov the state security service (the KGB) regained much of the power it had enjoyed under Stalin, although there was no return to the purges of the 1930s and 1940s.
The first crisis of Brezhnev's regime came in 1968, with the attempt by the Communist leadership in Czechoslovakia, under Alexander Dubček, to liberalize the Communist system (see Prague Spring). In July, Brezhnev publicly criticized the Czech leadership as "revisionist" and "anti-Soviet" and, in August, he orchestrated the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the removal of the Dubček leadership. The invasion led to public protests by dissidents in the Soviet Union. Brezhnev's assertion that the Soviet Union had the right to interfere in the internal affairs of its satellites to "safeguard socialism" became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, although it was really a restatement of existing Soviet policy, as Khrushchev had shown in Hungary in 1956.
Under Brezhnev, relations with China continued to deteriorate, following the Sino-Soviet split which had broken out in the early 1960s. In 1965, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Moscow for discussions, but there was no resolution of the conflict. In 1969, Soviet and Chinese troops fought a series of clashes along their border on the Ussuri River. Brezhnev also continued Soviet support for North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. On January 22, 1969, a Soviet Army officer, Viktor Ilyin, tried to assassinate Brezhnev.
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