Attempted assassination of Leonid Brezhnev

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On 22 January 1969, Viktor Ilyin attempted to assassinate Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Ilyin, a deserter from the Soviet Army, fired shots at a motorcade carrying Brezhnev and celebrated cosmonauts of the Soviet space program into the Kremlin. A driver was killed and a guard and several cosmonauts were injured, while Brezhnev was unhurt. Ilyin was arrested and claimed that he tried to kill Brezhnev to provoke political change in the Soviet Union after witnessing extreme poverty in the countryside. Ilyin was sent to a psikhushka and the incident was subject to a strict news blackout, which was maintained by the Soviet government for two decades thereafter. Ilyin was released in 1990 and knowledge of the incident became public after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was the first direct assassination attempt on a Soviet leader since Fanny Kaplan's attempt to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in August 1918.

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