Word: brezhnev
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Boris Yeltsin just has a cold, says the Kremlin. (Colds are dangerous in Russia. Leonid Brezhnev had a "cold" and it turned out he was gravely ill, addicted to sedatives and barely functional; Konstantin Chernenko had a "cold" and vanished behind Kremlin walls; Yuri Andropov had a "cold" and was dead in weeks.) Well, maybe flu. (Last time Yeltsin admitted to "flu" it was really pneumonia, and he was out of action for two months.) But there's no cause for alarm, officials claimed last week: the President will keep working while he is resting for 10 or 12 days...
Michael Dobbs saw the death of the Soviet system foretold in the bloated face of President Leonid Brezhnev one day in 1980. Brezhnev was having trouble focusing on what was going on, Dobbs writes, and "clung to Andrei Gromyko, his indispensable Foreign Minister, like a child clings to his nanny." The Kremlin's world, Dobbs thought, was beginning to crumble...
...distinguished journalists, former colleagues and Moscow hands at the Washington Post (Remnick is now at the New Yorker), have taken dozens of such scenes from their notebooks to produce two very different but complementary books. They depict Russia's course as it stumbled and slid from a moribund Brezhnev to a self-promoting Kryuchkov--and possibly a moribund Boris Yeltsin. Dobbs' report, Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Knopf; 502 pages; $30), carries the still astonishing story of the fall of communism, from the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 to the collapse...
Dobbs has written a straight-ahead narrative that makes good use of the documents coming out of newly opened East bloc archives. He reveals, for example, that in spite of their threats and military maneuvers, Brezhnev and Co. never intended to invade Poland, short of an anticommunist rebellion. Dobbs is always clear and persuasive, but he tries so hard to be everywhere--Poland, Yugoslavia, China, Russia--and to explain everything, that his survey ends up feeling disappointingly two-dimensional...
...revolutionary fighter. In other words, he's not Deng. But none of the other members of China's collective leadership are either. Today's top Politburo members are bureaucrats and engineers. In Soviet terms, Jiang would not even be Nikita Khrushchev; rather, he's more like Leonid Brezhnev. The others are no different, and that works in two ways. They may have no more claim to greatness than Jiang, but now that Deng is gone they can easily go after their present leader. "So long as the old man was still breathing," says Kenneth Lieberthal of the University of Michigan...