Russia on Saturday quietly marked 30 years since the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, an enigmatic figure whose era of "stagnation" witnessed repressions and a massive nuclear arms drive.
The burly and chain-smoking World War II veteran served from 1964 until his death in 1982 at a time when Moscow and Washington were churning out weapons of mass destruction and carving up the globe for spheres of influence.
It also saw the two superpowers boycott each other's Olympic Games -- the first in Moscow in 1980 and then in Los Angeles four years later -- and the Kremlin order tanks into Afghanistan for an ill-advised decade-long war.
