Word: brezhnev
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...among us has not mocked a mime? Those mordant, white-faced pierrots, especially of the Russian variety, are usually about as funny as Dostoevsky, as buoyant as Brezhnev. Even passionate Cirque fans - who love the company's acrobats and plate-spinners, its mix of traditional circus and modern theatrical sorcery - have wished that the clowns would be sent out, and the Mime Safety Board called in. Over the years, in seeming response to public disfavor, the Cirque brass has severely reduced the time given to clowns. They were prominent in early traveling shows like Saltimbanco and Alegria, then mere supporting...
...public apology, saying, "How do you make a public apology - run up and down Pennsylvania Avenue shouting, 'I'm sorry?'" After the Post story came out, a former executive editor of the New York Times revealed that he had once caught Soviet security guards meticulously checking then-Premier Leonid Brezhnev's room for hidden recording devices during his 1973 visit with Nixon. (You know, just in case...
...Olympic torch as a symbolic weapon in 1980, pulling out of the Summer Games in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had planned a propaganda show reminiscent of Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. America's boycott delivered a body blow to President Leonid Brezhnev and his communist system and prevented Moscow from enjoying a world-class triumph...
...Life of Ivan Denisovich, his searing account of the Soviet--labor camp experience, found favor during Khrushchev's thaw and was published in 1962. By the time the temperature chilled again, Solzhenitsyn's international fame was such that he could not be altogether dispensed with. In 1974, when the Brezhnev regime decided it would not tolerate the foreign publication of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and put on a plane. He breathed a little easier when the plane took off westward and not toward Siberia...
Still, we're far from a Manichaean showdown. Russia is too weak to wage a cold war. Outside Moscow, St. Petersburg and a handful of other cities, most Russians live in Khrushchev- and Brezhnev-era hovels. The economy is diversifying but not diversified; for now, the oil and gas markets largely decide how much money flows into the Kremlin coffers. And the military is a wreck; Lucas points out, for instance, that the navy now has just 20 seaworthy surface ships...