Word: brezhnev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...part of a continuing overall Soviet design for the conquest of the world. More moderate experts, like Diplomat and Historian George Kennan, the father of the doctrine that the U.S. and its allies must "contain" Soviet expansionism around the globe, had another explanation. They believed that Leonid Brezhnev and the other Kremlin gerontocrats were seeking a buffer zone against Islamic ferment in Iran, much as Joseph Stalin had erected the Iron Curtain to protect the U.S.S.R. against its enemies in the West after World...
During his long career as a party functionary, Ligachev has earned a reputation as an efficient, incorruptible manager. After a four-year stint in Moscow as a deputy director of the propaganda and party organs for the Russian Republic, he spent the Brezhnev years as local party boss in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Brought back to Moscow by then Party Leader Yuri Andropov in 1983, Ligachev was named to Gorbachev's Politburo two years later. All along, Ligachev has insisted he does not oppose perestroika. In an extraordinary interview with the Paris daily Le Monde in December he said...
...troops home will mean an end to Soviet casualties -- an estimated 30,000 men killed in action over the past eight years -- and to growing antiwar sentiment in the Soviet Union. More important, Gorbachev hopes the move will help burnish Moscow's international image, which was tarred by Leonid Brezhnev's decision in 1979 to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Thus it was perhaps no coincidence that Gorbachev wanted to see the withdrawal begin before President Reagan arrives in Moscow for a summit meeting...
...Soviet regime have been an underground art form since the early days of Stalin. But those with their wits about them kept their barbs to themselves. Comedian Arkady Raikin went about as far as any comic could when, in the late 1970s, he publicly poked fun at Leonid Brezhnev's bushy eyebrows. A year before Gorbachev came to power a Moscow comedian was banned from television for a year for making fun of an unnamed KGB general. But when Mikhail Zadornov, a Leningrad satirist and television personality, submitted his story to Theater, the editors apparently thought the mock letter...
...Mikhail Gorbachev, a figure of gravitas among world leaders, achieves his effect precisely by reversing the Slavic inevitabilities: opening the windows, airing out the old system. The earlier generations of Soviets (Leonid Brezhnev, for example) sat upon the world's stage like dark boulders. Weight is not enough. Gravitas is weight with complexities of life and intelligence...