Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although the Uzbek affair began unfolding several years ago, the new disclosures seem to mark a new phase in General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's anticorruption drive. They also highlight his effort to blame former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev for the country's continuing economic problems. Brezhnev cronies and relatives are among those implicated; Son-in-Law Yuri Churbanov could face the death penalty if convicted on charges that he accepted $1 million in bribes while serving as the Kremlin's First Deputy Interior Minister...
...Leonid Brezhnev is no hero to Mikhail Gorbachev, who has dubbed his predecessor's 18-year reign the "era of stagnation." Still, there are reminders of that reign all over the Soviet Union, where everything from an icebreaker to a whole city bears Brezhnev's name. Last week, in a two- paragraph dispatch, the TASS news agency announced that three of those reminders are being eliminated...
...city of Brezhnev, on the Volga River, returns to the far more poetic Naberezhniye Chelny (Dugout Canoes on the Riverbank). The Moscow suburb of Brezhnev is once again Cheryomushky Rayon (Cherry Tree District). In Leningrad, Brezhnev Square reverts to the Krasnogvardeiskaya Ploshchad (Red Guards Square). Not since Joseph Stalin's name was wiped from the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and the country's highest mountain (now Peak of Communism) in the late 1950s has a Soviet leader been so posthumously disgraced. No word yet on whether the nuclear-powered icebreaker, the cosmonaut-training center, the military academy, the power...
...attributable to % any glittering success in agriculture. Quite the opposite: the grain harvest fell from a record 230 million tons in 1978, when Gorbachev was taking over the agriculture portfolio, to a calamitous total of perhaps only 155 million tons in 1981. Bad weather played a role. So did Brezhnev, who announced a grandiose reorganization of agriculture that seemed to create more problems than it solved. Still, it is remarkable that Gorbachev managed not only to escape blame but to advance his career amid the farming fiasco. Only a year after returning to Moscow, he became a candidate member...
...reason Gorbachev's agriculture record was not held against him was simply that the Kremlin leadership found itself in desperate need of new blood. Brezhnev's health was faltering, and his 18-year regime was sinking into a twilight of stagnation and corruption. When Brezhnev died in 1982 and Andropov came into office with plans for reform, he immediately began grooming Gorbachev to become a key lieutenant in his clean-up campaign...