Word: brezhnev
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...filled by his lieutenant Yakov Sverdlov. But the Communist Party leader, as Chairman of the Cabinet, held real executive power. The same was true of Joseph Stalin and his titular Head of State, Mikhail Kalinin. Nikita Khrushchev combined the offices of the Gensek and Prime Minister, while Leonid Brezhnev combined his leadership of the party with the role of head of state, because he desired the 24-gun salute and red carpet treatment on his foreign visits. In March 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev became the first and last President of the Soviet Union - but his power continued to derive from...
...Physically and psychologically, the town is stuck in a strange twilight between the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union and the modern European Union. In Minsk, the capital 250 miles away, the government retains the sheen of its totalitarian past. In 2006, Aleksandr Lukashenko, a Soviet-era official who claims to have been the only member of the Belarus legislature to vote against the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, was elected to his third term as president. With his command of 84% of the vote and a tight leash on opposition parties, he has good reason to expect that he will...
...elaborate charade of feigned friendship between Putin and President George W. Bush, begun several years ago when Bush testified to the alleged spiritual depth of his Russian counterpart's soul, hasn't helped. The fact that similarly staged "friendships"--between F.D.R. and "Uncle Joe" Stalin, Nixon and Brezhnev, Clinton and Yeltsin--ended in mutual disappointment did not prevent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from boasting not long ago that U.S.-Russian relations were now the best in history. Surely it would be preferable to achieve a genuine, sustainable improvement before staging public theatrics designed to create the illusion that...
...Czech parliament approves plans to deploy a U.S. missile shield facility in the nearby hills, U.S. personnel are unlikely to be welcomed as the Red Army once was. The village that has yet to shake off its Brezhnev Village nickname is hardly ready to be dubbed Bush Town...
...Whitewash signs reading "Brezneves," (Brezhnev's Village, after the Soviet leader) appeared on Zajecov walls overnight, and neighboring villagers refused potatoes "the boys" had helped to harvest. But since the fall of communism, the potato fields gave way to grasslands, and the locals are reluctant to talks about this less than glorious chapter of their village's past...