Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...young party chief's reputation pleased two important spa guests: Mikhail Suslov, then the chief Soviet ideologist, and KGB Chief Yuri Andropov, both austere figures disgusted by the corruption of the Brezhnev era. When Kulakov died in 1978, he left vacant the position of Communist Party Central Committee Secretary in charge of agriculture. To fill it, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, presumably acting on the advice of Suslov and Andropov, chose a man he had evidently met only recently: Gorbachev. That meeting occurred on Sept. 19, 1978, at the tiny railroad station in Mineralnye Vody, where Brezhnev's train stopped...
Since then much has changed. Brezhnev and two successors have gone to their graves by the Kremlin wall. All three angrily denounced the zero option as patently one-sided. So did many Western strategists. The U.S. was asking the Soviets to give up real weapons, already deployed at great expense, in return for the U.S.'s tearing up a piece of paper. Washington wags said it was like the Redskins trying to persuade the hated Dallas Cowboys to trade Tony Dorsett for a future draft pick. Administration officials privately conceded that the zero option was not intended to produce...
...doubts about whether more and more nuclear weapons like the SS-20 necessarily meant more security and power for the U.S.S.R. The Kremlin initiated a gradual shift in emphasis away from nuclear weaponry to conventional weaponry as instruments of Soviet influence and intimidation, particularly in Europe. In January 1977 Brezhnev gave a speech at a World War II commemorative celebration in Tula, a city south of Moscow. The Soviet leader laid down what became known in the West as the "Tula line." In that speech and subsequent elaborations, Brezhnev said nuclear superiority was "pointless," it was "dangerous madness" for anyone...
...Soviets like to say, "no accident" that in the same month as Brezhnev's Tula speech, Nikolai Ogarkov became chief of the Soviet general staff. Marshal Ogarkov was a controversial choice among the top brass. He had been the top military representative to SALT. The civilian leadership apparently picked him because he too believed in sufficiency, parity and stalemate. He also favored Soviet-American agreements as a means of regulating the arms race...
...says a Soviet official with close ties to the military: "Our generals were more determined than ever to get the American missiles out and to keep them out. The general staff concluded that Brezhnev really blew it by provoking the U.S. into installing the Pershing IIs in the first place and then not having the wit to make a deal to get rid of them...