Word: andropov
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...college days, master of the one-line quip, a man who entered politics in early middle age after winning fame in that all-American institution Hollywood. He rose to the presidency largely because he was able to articulate a personal ideological view on television more forcefully than anyone else. Andropov is the consummate Communist Party operative, a nearly faceless toiler in the political establishment of the U.S.S.R. all his adult life, head for 15 years of that quintessentially Soviet organization the KGB, a man who attained power by sophisticated backstage maneuvering in the ingrown, secretive Politburo...
...that they are a study in contrasts is to put it most mildly. The two leaders are of comparable age. Reagan will turn 73 in February; Andropov will be 70 in June. Apart from having their fingers on the nuclear button, they share one other similarity: Reagan has never been inside the Communist world and Andropov has never been outside it. Otherwise, they differ in almost every...
...office, Reagan has become as vivid a figure to millions around the world as he has long been to U.S. citizens, dominating TV screens not only domestically but at times internationally. Andropov has become very nearly a ghost. He has been ill for much of his single year as Party Secretary and has been absent from public view since Aug. 18. He is suffering from a kidney ailment and is rumored variously to have diabetes and pneumonia. Though diplomats believe that Andropov has visited his office several times recently and is working daily at home or in a hospital...
...meetings of the Party Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet this week: his continued absence would signal physical weakness that could have substantial political consequences, including Politburo discussions as to whether he is strong enough to stay on the job. On the other hand, if the truth is that Andropov is simply continuing to recover from a debilitating illness, his failure to appear would have far less meaning. Few things underline the difference between the U.S. and Soviet political systems so strikingly as the contrast between the regular, detailed medical bulletins the White House issued after Reagan...
...Andropov has put much less of a personal stamp on foreign policy, and on the minds of his adversaries, than Reagan. Not only was he a somewhat unknown figure to those outside the Kremlin even before illness removed him from public view, but some of what the West thought it knew about him was wrong. The picture of Andropov as a Westernized intellectual, fond of American music and books, that circulated widely in the months before he assumed power following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 was mostly the product of wishful thinking, possibly aided by deliberate Kremlin...