Word: brezhnev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and assassination, was a common occurrence...
...limit nuclear testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money...
...devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars on MX missiles" in order to bargain more effectively with the Soviets...
...Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary of State the dean of the "cowardly college of Communist containment." Two decades later, the New Nixon's policy of detente ran into a buzz saw of bipartisan anti-Soviet opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon went to see Leonid Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, he refused to visit Yalta nearby, lest anyone accuse him of another giveaway. It was all for naught: the traveling White House press gleefully filed stories with the dread dateline...
When Jimmy Carter signed a SALT II treaty in June 1979, he gave Brezhnev a big kiss on the cheek. The treaty was never ratified, largely because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan six months later. In 1980 Republicans used photographs of the signing ceremony with the message to voters YOU TOO CAN KISS OFF JIMMY CARTER...