Galina Brezhneva was born on 18 April 1929 in Sverdlovsk, Russia, the first child of Leonid Brezhnev and Viktoriya Petrovna Denisova.

To support the family her father worked several day jobs, including as stoker and steam engine lubricator and fitter, and by night he studied to become a metallurgist.

During this period the USSR endured devastating and widespread famine, but by virtue of her father's being a Party functionary, even if only a low-ranking one, the Brezhnev family had sufficient access to food and avoided starvation.

Benefits granted in connection with the Moscow Victory Day Parade held to celebrate the end of WWII included his being allowed to send for his family and spend a week with them.

He flew to Dnepropetrovsk to fetch his family and they settled in Chernovtsy before moving to Zaporizhzhia, where Galina would attend school and graduate in 1947.

Galina began pursuing a history degree in Dnepropetrovsk, but later abandoned her studies, instead joining her parents in Kishinev in 1951.

She subsequently enrolled at Chișinău State University[2] and began studying literature and philosophy, ultimately earning her degree.

Once she and her friends took a taxi to a secret military base in Chișinău, but as soon as the guards there recognized her as Brezhnev's daughter, they turned a blind eye out of fear of provoking trouble.

She nonetheless made a public comeback during Konstantin Chernenko's short rule and appeared in a conference commemorating International Women's Day.

At the conference, she wore just one piece of jewelry, the Order of Lenin that she had been awarded by Andrei Gromyko in 1978 for her fiftieth birthday.

[9] Why and how Brezhneva received her diamonds was unknown to the majority at the time, though according to a former director of Yuvelirtorg, the state-run jewellery company in the USSR, all jewelry and valuables seized from criminals were given to members of the nomenklatura.

[10] Many of the rumours stemmed from the fact that most of Brezhneva's friends and colleagues had earlier been arrested, and the majority of them had been linked to some sort of corruption or vice.

[11] In January 1982, as part of Andropov's anti-corruption campaign while Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, several prominent jewellery smugglers who all had links with Brezhneva were arrested, some of them even receiving the death sentence.

[13] When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary, the criminal investigations against Brezhneva and her brother, Yuri Brezhnev, were resumed.