Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...issue of East-West relations, Gorbachev echoed a Kremlin theme of the past year: eagerness for improvement, but on Soviet terms. And those terms show no sign of changing. Gorbachev's Kremlin, like Brezhnev's a decade ago, wants peaceful coexistence and detente, largely so that the leadership can tend to the economy. The U.S.S.R. desires recognition as a superpower, equal in status and privilege with the U.S. It also wants what Soviet spokesmen call "compensation" for various perceived or alleged geopolitical disadvantages and grievances. In practice, the twin claims of equality and compensation mean that the Soviet Union...
These were the main features of Brezhnev's foreign policy, of Andropov's and Chernenko's, and now they are surely of Gorbachev's as well. The real question is not whether he will pursue a course different from that taken by his predecessors, but whether he will pursue it more effectively. The answer is more likely to be yes than no. Since he injects the continuity of Soviet policy with a vitality that it has lacked in recent years, he may also bring to the Soviet-American competition more energy, skill and ingenuity than his recent predecessors, in their...
...demonstrated that the change he represented was very much one of style and not of substance. The preoccupying issue of Soviet-American relations in those days of late 1982 and early to mid-1983 was the prospective deployment of new U.S. ballistic and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Under Brezhnev, Soviet policy had been absolutely uncompromising, and absolutely unacceptable: the U.S., said the Soviets, had no right to deploy even a single Euromissile...
Immediately upon taking over from Brezhnev, Andropov seized that policy and made it his own. He issued a series of proposals that were almost Reaganesque in the alluring way in which they combined simplicity and ingenuity. He played numbers games with the European nuclear balance, promising subtractions from the Soviet side if the U.S. would cancel the addition of its own missiles; he offered an equation that was supposed to yield equality, but in fact would have left the Soviet Union with a significant advantage in key categories of weaponry and would have succeeded in keeping the U.S. from deploying...
Just as Andropov assumed Brezhnev's stonewalling position on the Euromissiles, Gorbachev has inherited Chernenko's adamancy on the central arms-control issue of today: space weapons and strategic defenses. The Soviets are just as determined to block the U.S.'s Star Wars program as the Reagan Administration is determined to see that it goes forward. There is no reason to expect that Gorbachev will be more yielding than Chernenko. In his inaugural speech last week, Gorbachev stressed his opposition to "the development of ever new weapons systems, be it in space or on earth...