Word: andropov
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...cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe. This time, however, Moscow's methods differed. Rather than breaking START off completely, the Soviets had placed the talks in a more easily reversible state of indefinite suspension. Nor was the stoppage accompanied by polemical gestures from Yuri Andropov as happened after the INF breakdown, when statements were issued in the Soviet leader's name threatening military countermeasures to Western deployment...
...morning-and-evening official convoy that has not been seen for nearly four months: two black ZIL limousines, the sort reserved for the Soviet elite, protected front and rear by Volga security sedans. Atop one of the ZILs were red and blue lights, apparently an indication that Andropov was inside. He has not been seen in public since Aug. 18, a protracted absence that has been unconvincingly explained as the result of a "severe cold" and has led to widespread speculation about who is really running things in the Kremlin...
...gambit emerged as the Soviet leadership was setting a deadline for dealing with a major internal issue: the fact that Andropov, 69, has not been seen in public since Aug. 18. Last week, the official news agency TASS announced that the country's rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme Soviet, would hold its semi-annual meeting on Dec. 28. The Communist Party's Central Committee will probably hold a closed-door session one or two days earlier. Both are gatherings that Andropov would normally chair. Deepening the mystery, the Kremlin disclosed that Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, 75, would...
There was little mystery, however, to the Andropov correspondence. It was essentially a restatement of Moscow's longstanding refusal to accept a single new U.S. missile in Western Europe to counter the 243 Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted on Western Europe. While offering no new concessions, the letters pointedly referred to the missile issue as affecting "our continent." Equally pointed was Moscow's failure to include Washington in the letter-writing campaign, even though the U.S. was the Soviet Union's partner at the ruptured talks. The exclusion was consistent with earlier Soviet attempts to sow division...
Even as NATO closed ranks over the Andropov correspondence, small but increasing ripples of nuclear unease were visible in Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the official party newspaper Neues Deutschland published an open letter to Party Leader Erich Honecker last October, deploring both the NATO deployment and the threatened "retaliatory" deployment of new Soviet short-range missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the letter, Lutheran clergy and parishioners from a suburb of Dresden declared themselves "horrified by the very thought" of the dual deployment, and urged Honecker to support a Scandinavian call for a European nuclear-free zone. Open...