Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...alien words in the official Soviet vocabulary, and organized crime was considered an inevitable by-product of decadent capitalism. No longer. Inspired by Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign for greater honesty and openness, criminal investigators have begun unraveling a web of crime and corruption, dating back to the Brezhnev years, that stretched from the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan to the highest levels of government in Moscow...
This week the most famous defendant netted in the five-year Uzbek investigation will go on trial before the military tribunal of the U.S.S.R.'s Supreme Court in Moscow. Yuri Churbanov, 51, Brezhnev's son-in-law and a former First Deputy Minister of the Interior, stands accused of accepting more than $1 million in bribes from Uzbek officials during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Eight other officials will be in the dock, including the former Uzbek Interior Minister and several regional police chiefs. If found guilty, the defendants could be sentenced to death. Churbanov's wife Galina...
Despite public demands that the trial be turned into an expose of the Brezhnev era, Defense Lawyer Andrei Makarov last week denounced any attempt "to try to judge Brezhnev under Churbanov's name...
Nonetheless, high-level indignation over the Churbanov affair and the moral decay of the Brezhnev years was registered last week in Pravda. In a scathing article titled "The Son-in-Law and His Clan," Churbanov was depicted as a vain and ambitious man of limited abilities who exploited his connection with Brezhnev to climb up the hierarchy of the Soviet police. The newspaper made clear that he was only a tool in the hands of others, who were operating a mammoth racket in Uzbekistan to falsify cotton-production reports and swindle the state...
Organized crime first began to flourish on a large scale during the Brezhnev years in what has come to be known as the "shadow economy." Underground businessmen, who amassed wealth by siphoning off funds from the state budget for lucrative private ventures, proved an easy target for blackmail by small- time thugs. After gangsters began to demand "protection" money, a deal was reportedly cut at a conference in the northern Caucasus in the mid-1970s, with the illegal millionaires agreeing to pay 10% of their income to the crime lords...