Every man must be made to realize that further retreat is impossible. He must realize with his mind and heart that this is a matter of life and death of the Soviet state, of the life and death of the people of our country...the Nazi troops must be stopped now, before it is too late.
Statement made in World War II, as a commissar on the southern front, as quoted in "Leonid I. Brezhnev: Pages from his Life" by Academy of Sciences of the USSR, p. 49, 1978.
