Word: mikhail
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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...
...third is a tough fighter against corruption who once reportedly fell into disfavor and was sent packing to Cuba as Ambassador. And the fourth is a former KGB chief from the Muslim south. This is the quartet of crucial players who will determine how smoothly and how quickly Mikhail Gorbachev will be able to accumulate power...
...Soviet President, as had been the case when Brezhnev and Andropov died; readers had to turn to the second page for a glimpse of Chernenko. Instead, the front-page space was devoted to the official portrait of the new leader, a balding, round-faced man, and the announcement that Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, had been chosen by the Central Committee as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...sometimes brisk-mannered man who asks lots of questions and soaks up detail. His style, so different from the stolid, intensely private behavior of most Soviet leaders, was captured at a Moscow polling station during last month's national elections. There, under the glare of television lights, stood Mikhail Gorbachev. Instead of keeping his family away from the spotlight, he had brought along his wife Raisa, 52, their daughter Irina and granddaughter Oksana. After sealing his ballot, Gorbachev carefully placed it in the box. When photographers asked him to repeat the scene, he declined, jocularly noting he was allowed...
...some ways Gorbachev owes his rise to hometown connections. The future Soviet leader was born in 1931 in the fertile Stavropol region of southern Russia, where Yuri Andropov also was born and where Mikhail Suslov, the country's leading ideologist until his death in January 1982, had worked for several years. Gorbachev's first job was driving a tractor. In 1950 he made a significant leap forward by gaining entrance to Moscow State University. Admission is notoriously hard to win; unless a student is exceptionally talented, he needs family influence to enter. The farm boy apparently got his boost from...