Because he ousted Khruschev and adopted a "neutral" policy toward Stalin, the Western imperialist press reviled him as harboring Stalinists. Although he replaced Khruschev, he kept the Soviet Union on a course to the right of Mao Zedong in China. Indeed, under Brezhnev, the phony Soviet Union actually carried out a border war against China and asked Nixon for permission to drop nuclear weapons on China.
Brezhnev's rule was known as a time of superpower contention with the United $tates. He pushed detente, but he also provided "aid" to Third World liberation struggles willing to adopt his party's revisionist theses. At the same time, people like Yeltsin and Gorbachev thrived under Brezhnev's rule and later came to criticize it for "stagnationism."