As the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was a canny and careful Communist Party functionary who sought to make his country the military equal of the United States and promote its political influence around the world through the policy of detente. In domestic affairs, as General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mr. Brezhnev (pronounced BRYEHZH-nyev) ruled as first among his equals on the Politburo, not as an autocrat, and professed to want economic development of his country of 265 million people spread over a sixth of the globe's land area. Both his policy and his health faltered in these tasks in the last years of his life. Detente, which had seemed a necessity to many Western leaders after Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the liberalization of the ''Prague Spring,'' lost much of its appeal in the United States after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and President Carter imposed an embargo on grain sales and other trade curbs. After the Polish military authorities ceded to pressure from Moscow and declared martial law in December 1981, President Reagan imposed further economic and political sanctions on the Soviet Union, though not an embargo on grain sales. The Western European allies remained more reluctant to cut back their important industrial trade with the Russians, and insisted on going ahead with the deal, creating a political rift within the NATO alliance that Mr. Brezhnev obviously sought to exploit. But domestic economic stagnation had become an acute domestic problem by the end of the Brezhnev years. In this area, despite their recognition of the crisis, the aging Soviet leaders made no effective attempt to reform the rigidities of centralized economic planning. And as the standard of living declined, political repression increased. Dissidents, who had emerged openly in the mid-1970's to criticize violations of human rights, were later harassed until most had either left the country or were in prison camps by the early 1980's. Soviet Jews, who had been permitted to emigrate by the thousands a month in 1977 and 1978, found that by 1982 permission to emigrate was virtually impossible to get. In his last years, Mr. Brezhnev's speech became labored and his features pale and bloated, apparently as a result of medical treatments for a disability that was never publicly revealed. At the height of his powers in the early 1970's, in contacts with Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, he was a burly, gray-haired, black-browed figure of 5 feet 10 inches, gregarious and talkative, but powerful and very much aware of his power over associates and adversaries alike. Then he had a reputation as a lover of good food and drink, fast cars - which he collected - and hunting. Mr. Brezhnev talked extensively about his weight, which he sought vainly to keep under control, and often joked about his excessive cigarette smoking, which was thought to have aggravated his health problems. His smoking (Philip Morris Multifilters) was such a vexation that he used a box with a time lock to slow his pace. But he conceded to one visitor, ''I keep a reserve pack in the other pocket.'' Ultimately he had to give up smoking altogether. Mr. Brezhnev was long part of a coalition in the ruling Politburo of his party's Central Committee. Two other members of the coalition who for years were most visible to the West were Prime Minister Aleksei N. Kosygin, who died in December 1980, and President Nikolai V. Podgorny, who was ousted from the leadership group in 1977. In the early years, after this coalition had ousted Nikita S. Khrushchev in a bloodless coup in 1964, it operated as a troika, with none of its members seemingly more authoritative than the others. Prominent, first in support of Mr. Khrushchev and then as a member of the coalition that ousted him, was Mikhail A. Suslov, the party's ideologist. As Mr. Brezhnev encountered growing problems with his health, Mr. Suslov's authority, already enormous, seemed to grow to the point where many considered him the second-ranking figure in the hierarchy. But death removed the ascetic ideologist from the leadership on Jan. 25, 1982, at the age of 79. In the fall of 1970 Mr. Brezhnev emerged from his post as the party chief to become the personal ambassador for detente. This occurred in his first meeting with Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany and in a subsequent conference with President Charles de Gaulle of France. In these and in other meetings in 1971, the Soviet leader appeared stiff and uncomfortable, but he loosened up remarkably as his selfconfidence grew. On June 11, 1979, Mr. Brezhnev and President Carter, meeting in the ornate Hofburg Palace in Vienna, signed an arms control treaty that for the first time limited both sides to the same maximum number of long-range bombers and missiles. For millions of television viewers around the globe, Soviet-Western rapprochement was symbolized when the two leaders embraced just after the signing and, to a crescendo of applause from onlookers, Mr. Brezhnev gave Mr. Carter hearty kisses, Russian-style, on both cheeks. Despite the optimism expressed by the two men at the signing ceremony, the treaty came under criticism from a number of United States senators who believed it conferred a unilateral advantage on the Soviet Union in heavy land-based missiles. Mr. Carter withdrew the treaty from Senate consideration after the invasion of Afghanistan, and it was never approved by the Senate. Mr. Brezhnev's detente policy was further set back by the establishment of martial law in Poland in December 1981. With the intervention in Afghanistan began a hardening of attitudes in the West, including an American boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the imposition of trade restrictions by the United States and other Western countries; Mr. Brezhnev criticized these steps as a return to the cold war, but never acknowledged the Soviet Union's responsibility for provoking them. Instead, in his statements and speeches, Mr. Brezhnev sought to portray his country as still open to arms reductions talks and detente, not only with the West but also, with increasing emphasis as relations with the West deteriorated, with China. In February 1982, the Soviet leader proposed a two-thirds cut by 1990 in both sides' medium-range nuclear arsenals in Europe. He said the Soviet Union was ready to reach agreement not only on the complete termination of all tests of nuclear weapons but also on ending their further production and on the reduction and subsequent elimination of their stockpiles. Early in March he announced that Moscow was suspending its deployment of new medium-range missiles in the European part of the Soviet Union. He said this was intended to set ''a good example.'' But United States officials saw his moves as attempts ''to convey the impression of restraint while diverting attention from the enormous growth of Soviet capability.'' In a public appearance in Tashkent on March 24, Brezhnev issued a new appeal to Peking to revive the search for ways to end the Chinese-Soviet feud. ''We remember well the time when the Soviet Union and People's China were united by bonds of friendship and comradely cooperation,'' he said. Negotiations with the Chinese did resume in the fall of 1982, and Mr. Brezhnev, in a speech to an audience of Soviet generals shortly afterward, said that while the prospects of a real improvement in relations were slim, the Soviet Union had an interest in pressing for them. Regarding detente with the West, the still unratified arms control treaty with the United States entailed some Soviet concessions, but on several other issues, Mr. Brezhnev's approach to the policy - called ''peaceful coexistence'' under Mr. Khrushchev - accomplished much for the Soviet Union. These accomplishments included strategic nuclear parity with the United States; an increase in conventional military strength on land and at sea; acknowledgment by West Germany and the rest of Western Europe of the division of Germany and of Europe; recognition of East Germany and its admission to the United Nations; increasing imports of Western technology to modernize the Soviet economy, and a growing role in the Middle East and Africa. These were attained with few concessions to the West. A major concession -or certainly the most publicized - was the Soviet willingness to permit some emigration, mostly for Jews, starting in the late 1960's. The policy of allowing emigration for Soviet citizens was, however, a controversial one within the leadership, and there were periodic indications, especially from the police apparatus, of disquiet with this relaxation of traditional curbs. The most recent tightening came in 1981 in response to stiffening Western positions over the intervention in Afghanistan. In addition, there was some evidence that Mr. Brezhnev's critics in Moscow felt that he had not gained sufficient trade and credit advantages in bargaining with the United States. Efforts in Washington to make improved commercial ties dependent on further relaxation of emigration restrictions illustrated one of the practical problems of detente. Mr. Brezhnev could not explicitly lift emigration barriers because this might be construed as bowing to external pressures, and the United States could not do less than insist, owing to its domestic pressures. Although Mr. Brezhnev and American Presidents were in accord on avoiding situations that might lead to armed conflict, there were world areas where the interests of the two superpowers clashed. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union supported Arab nationalism with arms and technical experts and carried on a campaign to discredit Israel. Syria and Iraq were among the main beneficiaries of Soviet backing. When strikes and rioting in Iran in late 1978 began to build up into a revolution, Mr. Brezhnev issued a warning against ''outside interference, especially military interference'' by the United States. At about the same time, he cemented Moscow's ties with the new pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan by signing a 20-year treaty of friendship and cooperation, binding the two countries to close economic and military links. In the Horn of Africa, the power balance was reversed as Ethiopia, once a client of the United States, shifted to the Soviet camp, while Somalia, once close to Moscow, effected a rapprochement with Washington. There was also an adversary conflict over India. In Southeast Asia, Soviet military aid helped North Vietnam to victory over Americansupported South Vietnam. In Central America, the Reagan Administration charged that the Soviet Union, through its Cuban allies, was trying to expand Communist influence in Nicaragua under the Sandinist regime that came to power in 1979, and by supporting the leftist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. In Europe, on the other hand, the superpowers were less at daggersdrawn. One evidence of this was the change in Western attitudes toward Czechoslovakia after 1968. In that year, Soviet-led forces went into Czechoslovakia to depose Alexander Dubcek, the Communist leader who had become an apostate from Kremlin orthodoxy. Mr. Brezhnev, defending the incursion, found his name associated with ''the Brezhnev Doctrine'' - that the Soviet Union had a right to enforce by arms its control in Eastern Europe. The bluntness of Mr. Brezhnev's interventions in Czechoslovak internal affairs was as much condemned then as the baldness of his doctrine. Ranged against him were not only a large segment of public opinion in the West, but also dissenters within two major Communist parties in Western Europe. Both the French and the Italian parties rebuked Mr. Brezhnev, and their assertion of independence from Moscow developed into the separate line of Communist development known as Eurocommunism, though it also faded towards the end of his rule. Despite the Czechoslovak episode, Mr. Brezhnev managed to maintain the cohesiveness of Eastern Europe, and only independent-minded Rumania was the odd man out in retaining cordial relations with China. But the cohesion among Moscow's allies in Eastern Europe came under strain - more even perhaps than occurred over Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 - as the rise of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland in 1980 fostered a wide-ranging liberalization of Polish life that ended in December 1981 with the imposition of martial law. With China, Mr. Brezhnev maintained strictly correct relations at the governmental level while hurling anathemas against the Peking leadership, both in the last decade of Mao Zedong's life and under Mao's successors. For a long time, the Chinese-Soviet dispute was both doctrinal and territorial, and it involved a struggle for hegemony over nationalist and revolutionary forces in the third world. Soviet policy toward the Chinese fluctuated in response to changes in the situation. At first, Mr. Brezhnev made a number of efforts to convoke a congress of adherents to Moscow's version of Communism that would read China out of the world Communist movement, but he was unable to gather a sufficiently impressive alignment. This failure was ascribed partly to an underlying distaste among Communists, even in the Soviet Union, to a formal splitting of the Communist movement; partly to Peking's stature in strategic areas of the third world, and partly to hope among substantial segments of pro-Moscow Communists that the Soviet Union and China could ultimately be reconciled. The confrontation never escalated to the point of war. When China invaded Vietnam early in 1979, Mr. Brezhnev duly warned Peking to halt its ''brazen bandit attack,'' but the statement was relatively subdued in tone. Tentative moves to improve relations betweeen the two countries followed; at the same time, Vietnam fell clearly into the Soviet sphere of influence. Mr. Brezhnev's power within the Soviet Union derived from his position as the head of the ruling party rather than from his assumption of the nation's presidency - for the second time - in 1977. In the gradual loosening of the Soviet system of one-man rule, Mr. Brezhnev was not, however, the single dominant leader, as Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev had been, and he sought, not always successfully, to reduce many of the trappings of ''the cult of personality'' that Stalin and then Khrushchev had nurtured. Because Mr. Brezhnev's power was more circumscribed than that of his predecessors, he was obliged to come to terms with often competing interests. One of the groups that Mr. Brezhnev had to take into account was the military establishment. Like their counterparts in Western countries, Soviet military leaders tended to favor large budgets, impressive displays of weaponry and conservative mentalities. But the Soviet leader was never so much at odds with his ''militaryindustrial complex'' as some Western politicians and analysts thought and hoped. In the slow-moving negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms, Mr. Brezhnev bargained carefully with American Presidents, constantly checking during the negotiations with other Politburo members, including the representatives of the military. He always seemed careful to move in tandem with the military on all significant policy issues. On the other hand, Mr. Brezhnev, by wheeling and dealing (how was never made public), altered the complexion of the Politburo over the years so that he was able to accumulate a large measure of personal power without arousing his colleagues' fears of a return to one-man rule. Shortly after the collective leadership was installed in 1964, he neutralized Aleksandr N. Shelepin, an ambitious Politburo member, by shifting him from control of the security police to the trade union leadership. And in December 1965, he persuaded Mr. Podgorny to yield a key party secretary's post to become chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a ceremonial post equivalent to that of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Mr. Podgorny was to hold the presidency for 12 years until Mr. Brezhnev himself assumed that post in addition to the party leadership. In 1971 four new men, all Brezhnev supporters, were elected to the Politburo. And two years later he eased out Pyotr Y. Shelest and Gennadi I. Voronov, both considered opponents of detente. Despite this seeming majority in the Politburo, which was further consolidated in subsequent years, Mr. Brezhnev was subject to scrutiny on such matters as the performance of the economy, the size of the grain harvest, corruption in the party machinery and the development of Siberia. In addition, of course, the detente policy was examined from time to time in terms of specific Soviet advantages, political and commercial. One of Mr. Brezhnev's dreams was to oversee the rapid development of Siberia with the aid of outside credits and technology. Blocked by United States reluctance to commit substantial capital to the venture, he turned increasingly to Western Europe and Japan for partners in Siberian development projects. The ebullience Mr. Brezhnev displayed abroad or to foreign visitors was in contrast to his staid and conservative deportment in Soviet public life. There he was very much the Communist in the gray flannel suit, proper and formal and serious. The air he projected was one of realism, calmness and stability. He was not much in the public view, except on ceremonial occasions. Nonetheless, there seemed to be a conscious effort to humanize him in official photographs that showed him, for example, in shirtsleeve talks with Chancellor Brandt of West Germany, greeting women factory workers in Yugoslavia with a kiss on the lips, hoisting up young children in Poland, or wearing dark glasses and an opennecked windbreaker and leaning against the gunwales of a yacht. Although Mr. Brezhnev appeared to enjoy the limelight, he was careful to let a share fall on his principal colleagues. Both Mr. Kosygin and - while he was President - Mr. Podgorny journeyed abroad from time to time, and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, who was elevated to Politburo membership under Mr. Brezhnev, remained the principal Soviet spokesman abroad. Mr. Brezhnev's attitude toward expressions of dissent in the Soviet Union was firm. A number of intellectuals, artists and scientists opposed the Kremlin's ideological policies in whole or in part, and there was restiveness among Soviet youth. Outspoken dissidents in the Brezhnev years often found themselves committed to prison, mental institutions or deprived of their jobs. Some were deported to the West, notably Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the novelist. Those who remained, including Andrei D. Sakharov, were denounced as lacking in socialist consciousness, which meant a refusal to place their talents at the disposal of the ruling ideology. As Mr. Brezhnev described his views a couple of years ago: ''People who fall for self-publicity, ready to make a name for themselves not through work for the homeland but by any politically dubious means - and not disdaining to praise our ideological opponents - sometimes fall into their net. The Soviet public harshly denounces the abominable deeds of these double-dealers. ''Renegades should not expect to get away unpunished. The country's enemies clutch with great tenacity at any manifestations of ieological immaturity or hesitation among the intellectuals.'' Mr. Brezhnev left the formulation of ideology to others, chiefly Mr. Suslov, the party ideologist and Politburo member whose close association with the party leader grew in the years after the ouster of Mr. Khrushchev in 1964. Mr. Brezhnev's speeches were often more pragmatic than ideological, although earlier he had studded his remarks with Marxist references to the decline and corruption of capitalism. But he avoided the flourishes that were associated with Mr. Khrushchev, who once promised ''to bury capitalism.'' Nor did Mr. Brezhnev contend, as his predecessor did, that the Soviet Union would become a wonderland of material satisfactions while the United States and other capitalist societies were developing into wastelands for their citizens. Mr. Brezhnev and his colleagues displayed some uncertainties in handling Soviet public opinion, especially regarding Stalinism. Whereas Mr. Khrushchev had pursued a clear-cut policy of de-Stalinization after denouncing Stalin's excesses in l956, the Brezhnev group tempered the policy on the ground that it was undermining the authority and unity of the Communist system. The Stalin issue, with which the Soviet Union has not come fully to terms, was hushed up, but a nostalgia for some aspects of Stalin's rule was permitted to revive. His leadership in World War II was occasionally mentioned; his face reappeared on movie screens; and his bust was mounted on his grave behind the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square. The memory of Mr. Khrushchev was, on the contrary, long drowned in official silence. The anniversaries of his death were not noted, nor was his regime recalled in panegyrics. But Mr. Brezhnev, in reminiscences published in November 1978 in the Soviet magazine Novy Mir, gave Mr. Khrushchev some credit as an administrator of agricultural policy - although he also described him as having been petulant, stubborn and apt to use strong language. When Mr. Brezhnev came to power after Mr. Khrushchev's ouster, his hold on the Communist party seemed a little uncertain at first. In recent years, however, he appeared to accept greater deference as due his position as both the nation's President and the party's chief. For Red Square parades, for instance, he usually mounted to the reviewing stand on the top of the Lenin Mausoleum ahead of other members of the Politburo. When the crowd applauded, he sometimes doffed his hat, waved and smiled in response. Mr. Kosygin and others looked at the throng but refrained from responding to its acclaim. In contrast to the endless anecdotes illuminating Mr. Khrushchev's jaunty and unpredictable personality, little humor surrounded Mr. Brezhnev or his colleagues. But Soviet citizens quietly exchanged jokes about the Soviet leader, most of them unflattering. He rode around Moscow in a ZIL limousine, modeled after the 1965 Lincoln Continental, and he was often observed riding out of the Kremlin on a Sunday afternoon through crowds of visitors. He was in the front seat beside the driver with only one security guard in the back and no escort vehicles. The crowd looked at him blankly, and he looked back in the same fashion. Because of his position, he had a choice of good housing, but he continued to live in his old apartment on Kutuzov Prospekt. In moments away from his office in the Kremlin, he seemed to enjoy earthy amusements and glad-handing. Once at a circus performance, women performers in scanty costumes presented him with bouquets of flowers. He thanked the first few with kisses. Then a few more. And then he made certain that those at the rear were not omitted, for they, too, received hearty, full-faced busses. Finally, he donned his glasses and settled back to watch the performance, with the pleasure of one who finds a circus more entertaining than the ballet or an opera. Mr. Brezhnev's broad face with its dominating eyebrows often lost some of its impassivity at cocktail parties, once he could down an impressive number of cognacs or straight vodkas. In the last few years, though, he was under physicians' orders to cut down on drinking. Before he assumed the party leadership in 1964 and when he traveled abroad on good-will missions during a previous stint as President, he liked to unbend in toasts. On a visit to Iran in 1963, after toasting a seemingly endless list of worthy objectives, he lifted his vodka glass to exclaim: ''Down with protocol! Long live freedom!'' In some private conversations he displayed a certain candor. In 1963, while talking with Glenn T. Seaborg, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, he conceded that most Soviet buildings were hideous and suggested that the Soviet Union might profit by sending some of its young architects abroad to study. Although Mr. Brezhnev did not have much time for hobbies, he was known to enjoy hunting, swimming and watching soccer. He also collected antique watches and was an ardent ornithologist, reputed to have one of the finest collections of live birds in Moscow. He had an interest in agriculture and land reclamation. Before his rise to eminence as Mr. Khrushchev's protege, Mr. Brezhnev was not conspicuous in Soviet life. Of Great Russian parentage, he was born Dec. 19, 1906, in Kamenskoye, now Dneprodzerzhinsk, in the Ukraine. His father was a steelworker. The boy began his working life at 15 in the local steel mill. Starting in 1923, he went to school nights and was graduated four years later from a land survey and reclamation school in Kursk. In this period he joined the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, and at the age of 25 he was accepted as a member of the Communist Party. At the same time he entered the steel engineering school in his hometown. He was graduated in 1935 and worked as an engineer for two years. In May 1937 he was elected deputy mayor of Dneprodzerzhinsk, his first post in government. Having impressed party leaders with his abilities, he was promoted the following year to a party secretaryship of Dnepropetrovsk Province at a time when Mr. Khrushchev headed the party in the Ukraine. Their friendship is believed to have begun at that time. In World War II Mr. Brezhnev served with the Red Army as a political commissar with the 18th Army in a beachhead on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, in the Crimea and in the Ukraine. On his 60th birthday Soviet authorities reviewed his war record and said: ''In the period of severe trials during the Great Patriotic War against Hitler's aggressors, while directing the army's political department and the southern and fourth Ukrainian front's political boards, you played a direct part in devising and conducting combat operations; you experienced such historic engagements as the battle of the Caucasus, and the liberation of Crimea and the Ukraine. The fighting men and commanders of the Soviet Army know you as an outstanding political worker and a man of great spirit and courage.'' Mr. Brezhnev's wartime exploits were also romanticized and effusively praised in biographical articles that began appearing in the late 1970's. By then, he also carried to honorific title of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Mr. Brezhnev's war experience was the foundation for his many friendships among Soviet military men, who were one of the chief sources of his later influence in party and government affairs. Mr. Brezhnev, returning to civilian life in 1946, was named to a series of responsible party posts in the Ukraine, supervising postwar reconstruction, and was then brought to Moscow in 1950 for further seasoning in the Central Committee's secretariat. In the middle of 1950 he was sent to the Moldavian Republic as party leader, a post he held for two years. Simultaneously, he was elected a member of the national Central Committee and a candidate member of its Presidium, as the Politburo was then called. He was also named a national secretary, a position he occupied until the death of Stalin in 1953. When the party leadership was reorganized after the dictator's death, Mr. Brezhnev was dropped from the secretaryship and from the Presidium, apparently because he was not in the confidence of Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Georgi M. Malenkov and others who took over from Stalin. After a brief return to political work in the Ministry of Defense as the chief political commissar of the armed forces, Mr. Brezhnev resumed his rise in the party hierarchy in July 1957, when Mr. Khrushchev ousted some of his rivals from the leadership. For his loyalty to Mr. Khrushchev, Mr. Brezhnev was rewarded with the leadership of the republic of Kazakhstan. His job was to supervise Mr. Khrushchev's virgin lands project, which brought vast acreage into productive use. In two years 87 million acres were placed under cultivation. Mr. Brezhnev had proved the program a success, confounding experts who had forecast its failure. The project later ran into difficulties, but not until Mr. Brezhnev had earned a splendid reputation as an administrator, a man who could accomplish the impossible. After being called back to Moscow, Mr. Brezhnev was made President of the Soviet Union in 1960, replacing Marshal Kliment Y. Voroshilov. As President, Mr. Brezhnev became a traveling saleman for the Soviet system, visiting Italy, North Korea, Finland, Morocco, Guinea, Ghana, Yugoslavia and Iran. His travels and his friendship with Mr. Khrushchev convinced many observers that he was being groomed as the party leader's successor. That speculation increased in 1963, when Mr. Brezhnev combined his job as President with that of second national secretary of the party, in charge of personnel selection. Then, in the summer of 1964, he stepped down as President to devote full time to his party tasks. Suddenly that fall, criticism of Mr. Khrushchev within the party councils came to an abrupt climax, and he was obliged to retire, ostensibly because of his age (he was in his 70's) and his health. Although there was no official bill of particulars, it became known that he had been ousted on accusations of bungling the Cuban missile crisis with the United States in 1962, mishandling the Soviet rift with China, mismanaging the Soviet economy and supporting a cult of personality. Although he defended his policies, his removal from office by the Central Committee's Presidium was confirmed by the committee itself. In his stead the collective leadership of Mr. Brezhnev, Mr. Kosygin and Mr. Podgorny took over. Four days later Mr. Brezhnev and his associates appeared atop the Lenin Mausoleum at a celebration for three astronauts, the first to circle the earth in a multiseat spacecraft. Speaking in a deep baritone and reading his address through darkrimmed glasses, Mr. Brezhnev promised to spur the economy, lift living standards and insure social democracy. In foreign matters, he said, the Soviet Union would continue efforts toward peaceful coexistence with capitalist states. Seeking to assure the Soviet public, to which he was virtually unknown, he also promised that the party's new leaders would ''constantly feel the pulse of the people's life.'' Mr. Brezhnev subsequently became, of course, well known to the Soviet public, and in recent years the state of his health became a continual subject of speculation in the Soviet Union as elsewhere. A United States intelligence report, early in 1978, that he was suffering from gout, leukemia and emphysema was not officially confirmed, but by February 1979 it was evident that he was ailing. He seemed to lack stamina, to have become unable to put in the long work days that his position required, to be leaning more heavily than in the past on such aides as Konstantin U. Chernenko, who became a full member of the Politburo in November 1978. At the same time several other allies of Mr. Brezhnev were promoted to the inner circle of the Soviet leadership, but the shifts gave no hint of who his eventual successor might be. Mr. Brezhnev's apparent ill health was in evidence during his meeting with President Carter in June 1979, which was the first Soviet-American summit meeting since late 1974. While in Vienna, Mr. Brezhnev was seen to stumble on a couple of occasions, and he shut his eyes from apparent fatique while President Carter made a short public statement on the day the treaty was signed. And in his trip to East Berlin in October 1979, Mr. Brezhnev's condition seemed to have deteriorated even further as he frequently slurred his words during his 35-minute address to the East German Parliament. Mr. Brezhnev held a number of decorations. In 1961 he was made a Hero of Socialist Labor ''for outstanding services in the development of rocket technology and in guaranteeing the successful flight of man into outer space in the Sputnik spacecraft 'Vostok.' '' The citation did not elaborate on his contributions to that flight, nor did his official biography specify his role. He also held five Orders of Lenin and was twice given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, on his 60th and 70th birthdays. In keeping with Soviet practice, little of Mr. Brezhnev's family life was in the public domain. It was known that he and his wife, Viktoriya, had three children; two sons, one of whom, Yuri, is a First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, the other a student at Moscow University; and a daughter, Galina, who works as a journalist at Novosti, the Soviet news feature agency.