Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...which Gorbachev has adapted Western-style political techniques to Soviet politics and how he has applied them to the organization of the conference. Perhaps surprisingly for a man who was born in the closed society of Stalin and rose to prominence in the closed-minded society of Leonid Brezhnev, Gorbachev knows about the straw man, the trial balloon and the bandwagon effect, and has used them in a subtle and effective campaign to make sure that he can win next week's game of perceptions...
What a change! For decades, while Soviet leaders went about the business of state, their spouses remained virtually invisible. The wives of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko rarely appeared in public. It was not known for sure that Yuri Andropov even had a wife until she showed up to mourn him at his 1984 funeral...
...strong willed. But she was a prominent revolutionary before she married and never played the part of First Lady. Contemporary examples elsewhere in the Communist world are uninspiring: in Rumania Nicolae Ceausescu's widely reviled wife Elena; in China the disgraced Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's widow. Leonid Brezhnev's daughter Galina, once hailed as the East bloc's answer to Jacqueline Kennedy, later achieved notoriety by associating with shady characters...
...postwar predecessors, that four decades of accumulated realities have given a continuity to Soviet-American relations that even the most ideological of Presidents cannot discard. Not only have Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held four summits in the past 2 1/2 years, besting the record of Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, but, in Helsinki on his way to Moscow last week, Reagan hinted that he would also welcome a fifth meeting...
Whatever the motivation, Soviet expansionism was widely seen as a major threat to vital Western interests and world peace. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, like Stalin's, would not feel entirely secure until all other nations felt entirely insecure. Predatory or paranoid, the old men in the Kremlin seemed determined to continue playing the "Great Game" much as Rudyard Kipling had described it a hundred years before, when Czarist Russia and the British Raj maneuvered for influence among the tribes of the Hindu Kush...