Word: andropov
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Ahead lie big battles over the budget and tax reform and the much ballyhooed summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan would have seemed a whippersnapper next to Leonid Brezhnev or Yuri Andropov, but now the comparison may cut the other way. Reagan's visitor points out that the new man in the Kremlin is young and healthy. "Yes," grins the convalescing President, "but I'll try not to take advantage...
...critics of Reagan's foreign policy have pointed out, however, that as the Soviet Union started to fray, there was a real chance it would end with a nuclear bang rather than a whimper. Had the U.S.S.R. not been lucky enough to draw Mikhail Gorbachev instead of, say, Yuri Andropov as its last leader, the odds are high the outcome would have been very bad. All any U.S. President could do with that nightmarish regime was restrain it from further expansion while praying that when it finally did collapse, it would somehow manage to do so peacefully--which, finally...
...Soviet dissidents who in 1968 participated in a risky demonstration in Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia; of a stroke; in Moscow. The linguist and human-rights activist, who spent four years exiled in a Siberian woodworking plant, once wrote an open letter to KGB chief Yuri Andropov to inform him that she was keeping a record of Soviet oppression...
...Afghan department in the Soviet foreign ministry was one of the quietest spots in the U.S.S.R.'s diplomatic service. But when Afghanistan's nonalignment policy began to slip, the Soviet leadership panicked. Three members of the Kremlin inner circle--Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, KGB chief Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov--feared that the Afghans would tilt toward the U.S. unless stern "measures" were taken. Late on the night of Dec. 12, ailing Communist Party chairman Leonid Brezhnev called the three to a secret meeting to hear their proposal. To keep the U.S. from installing a friendly regime, they...
...predecessor and my mentor, Yuri Andropov, had told me before he himself got seriously ill that I must be prepared to assume the highest responsibility one day. I knew what he meant. He tried to ensure that event. In December 1983, two months before his death, Andropov sent a written message to the Central Committee plenum, suggesting that "Gorbachev should be entrusted with actual leadership." I did not know that he did this. And neither did the plenum. In 1988, I learned that Chernenko had simply cut off that part of the message and concealed it. And so he became...