Word: brezhnevs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...trip were Czechoslovakia's Communist Party officials. Under their heavy hands, the Prague Spring of 1968 quickly gave way to sullen winter as the country became one of the most rigidly orthodox in the East bloc. Party Leader Gustav Husak, 74, installed by former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev as Dubcek's replacement, has symbolized the backward-looking government's unimaginative face...
...Soviet side, they cite Brezhnev's support for communist revolutions in Indochina, the 1973 Egyptian and Syrian attack on Israel, Cuban involvement in Angola and the Marxist coup in Afghanistan as examples of "unilateral" actions. And for the U.S.? Only America's exclusion of the Soviet Union from the Middle East peace process...
...physical traces remain from last December's rioting at the place where it began, a bleak expanse of concrete aptly named Brezhnev Square. Three officers in a yellow-and-blue militia bus keep watch over the few cars and pedestrians passing through on an icy evening. Club-carrying civilian police auxiliaries patrol nearby streets where, on the night and morning of Dec. 17-18, mobs of Kazakh youths smashed windows and torched cars. In some parts of the square, new trees have been planted, apparently to replace those damaged by demonstrators...
...Moscow last week seemed like scenes from a world turned upside down. Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who recently returned from seven years of internal exile, was invited to a nuclear disarmament conference at the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Soviet police arrested Yuri Churbanov, the son-in-law of former Leader Leonid Brezhnev, and jailed him on bribery and corruption charges. In addition, officials freed more than 40 political prisoners, the largest dissident group to be released in three decades, and announced that some 500 people, most of them Jews, have been granted exit visas. Only 900 people were allowed to emigrate during...
Still, the Kremlin had plenty of invective left for its enemies at home. In arresting Churbanov, 50, Brezhnev's son-in-law and First Deputy Minister of the Interior from 1980 to 1984, Moscow continued its crackdown on official misdeeds. Gorbachev has repeatedly attacked lax ethical standards under Brezhnev, who died in 1982, and has given top priority to rooting out corruption. If convicted, Churbanov could face 15 years in prison or even death for accepting bribes...