Word: brezhnevs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seemed quite normal for John, but it was evidence for me that people no longer lived here the way they used to. Stalin began the practice of giving privileges to the leadership: special foods, dachas fenced off from those belonging to ordinary mortals, apartments in the best-built houses. Brezhnev expanded these privileges. How many hunting and fishing "lodges" were built and furnished with Finnish furniture and rugs so thick you could tumble into them up to your waist! This inequality in a society declaring equality caused great indignation...
Here was a new generation of 30- and 40-year-olds who went unnoticed in the capital: young Gorbachevs from the provinces who had survived the Brezhnev years with some of their ideals intact. They certainly bridled at being cast as backwater party bureaucrats...
Almost 20 years earlier, at the start of the Brezhnev era of economic stagnation and recurring rounds of repression, I was assigned to TIME's Moscow bureau. I took up residence with my family in an apartment block reserved for foreigners and set out to cover what was, despite the depressing realities of Soviet life, a fascinating story. Then, on a May morning in 1970, I received a phone call from an official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. "Your work here is finished," he said. There were no accusations, no explanations, just "Your work here is finished," and a departure...
Having justified itself for two decades and more as a medium of political expression -- obliquely during the Brezhnev years, sometimes rantingly during the current thaw -- the Soviet stage sees itself as needing to rediscover its true concern, the human soul. Audiences apparently agree. While theatergoers continue to clap for lines of topical invective, they seem to respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love, betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe...
...Gorbachev is wondering how Soviet history will judge him, he will do well to remember that the country's leaders tend to die twice: once in body and soul, and later in public opinion. While Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev were accorded elaborate state funerals, their reputations since then have changed quite markedly. Stalin is viewed negatively by 62% and positively by only 7%, though that rating is almost double among people who see perestroika as a deviation from Marxism-Leninism...