Word: brezhnev
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Shura, 37, a bearded artist in a faded sheepskin coat, a fur hat tipped to one side of his head. He beckoned toward a darkened doorway before speaking: "Lenin was the only one who thought about us; all the leaders who followed him were ambitious. That is why Brezhnev let us live our own lives; he lived a pretty nice one himself, eh? I have a friend who knows people in the Central Committee. He says that Gorbachev knows what he is about, that he is with it. Say, let's sneak off for a drink. Why huddle here discussing...
Familiarity is said to breed either contempt or children, but it is not supposed to enhance a mystery. The West has grown familiar with Soviet transferals of power in the past 28 months: Brezhnev became Andropov became Chernenko. Last week the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, strode under Western eyes in the now easily recognizable setting of a Moscow funeral for a head of state: Soviet citizens lined up and bundled up in what seems an eternal freeze; Chopin thudding in the background; gray-coated soldiers marching stiff legged like a row of A's; a body laid out like...
...does know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution, it is incapable...
...Leninism Inc. has yet to meet that rudimentary requirement of good business, a procedure for ensuring smooth management succession. Soviet leaders love to award one another ribbons and stars and medals, but never gold watches. Retirement seems a dishonorable estate, a form of internal banishment. So Khrushchev discovered. So Brezhnev no doubt recalled as he grew feeble. Andropov after him. And then Konstantin Chernenko...
...members over the terms that should be written into the 30-year-old treaty's extension. Roska also observed that pact members are "independent and sovereign countries that without exception respect the principle of nonintervention in (one another's) internal affairs." That comment clearly referred to the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, formulated after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, under which Moscow reserves the right to intervene in Eastern Europe wherever socialism is threatened...