Word: leonid
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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...
...career as a 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...
Optimists argue that Russia is used to a sick President. It endured the lingering of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. Mitterrand's France is cited as a hopeful parallel. But this argument is flawed, says Sergei Blagovolin, director general of ORT, the largest TV company in Russia, and a member of the President's advisory council: "France was not on the very edge of a crisis...
...publicly at least, that Yeltsin is firmly in charge and overseeing the latest game of Kremlin musical chairs with some skill. In Moscow, however, his frequent disappearances reinforce the perception that the country has already entered the post-Yeltsin era, with the enfeebled President--like the Soviet-era leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko--wielding power in name only. This in turn deepens the fear, often voiced in Western capitals and in Russia, that chaos in the Russian Federation is always lurking just below the surface of daily life. Even the top echelons of Russia's government are concerned. According...
TIME, like most Western media, still buys the myth that Yeltsin is a reformer and a democrat. But face it, he was never the initiator of democratic reforms in Russia. On the contrary, he relies heavily on the old apparatus. Yeltsin made a party career under Leonid Brezhnev, attempted a power grab in a military coup and finally was able to establish himself as a semi-dictator. Since then he has started a war with Chechnya and dismissed all its critics. Yeltsin is responsible for the continued killing of thousands of civilians, including children. Is this the democrat the West...