Soviet Articles Condemn Brezhnev Vanity, Mistakes

MOSCOW —  Former Kremlin chief Leonid I. Brezhnev was condemned today as a vain figure with delusions of grandeur who led the country into a mire of corruption and political errors at home and abroad.

Brezhnev was assaulted in articles by Moscow political commentators, historians and officials in a wide range of publications as the Soviet Union prepared for next week’s landmark Communist Party conference.

In his last years, said commentator Alexander Bovin, “Brezhnev began to collapse and fall apart as a personality and a politician. . . . He totally lost any self-critical control over his actions and believed in his own greatness.”

In defense policy, said party historian Oleg Obichkin in the monthly Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn, “realism and common sense were lost” when Moscow began to drive for numerical parity with the West in armaments and missiles during the 1970s.

Under Brezhnev, said Editor Nikolai Kapchenko, the country “went through a period of national abasement” as the already incompetent leader became the object of a public “orgy of glorification . . . and bootlicking ran riot.”

Soviet analysts leave no doubt that the new focus on the Brezhnev years, from 1964 when he led a leadership coup against Nikita S. Khrushchev until his death in 1982, is aimed at driving home the need for radical political reform.

A program for breaking the system established under Josef Stalin from 1924 to 1953 and revived under Brezhnev is to be put to the conference by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Tuesday.