Word: brezhnevs
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...fundamental weaknesses: the Soviet Union is heavily reliant on Poland and other resentful, potentially mutinous satellites for supply lines and soldiers. Moreover, 49 divisions totaling more than 500,000 troops, nearly a quarter of the Soviet army, are tied down on the Chinese border. When Brezhnev took over from Khrushchev, there were only 17 divisions in the Far East...
Thus the Soviet Union over which Andropov now presides is vastly more powerful, both in the absolute and by comparison with the U.S., than it was two decades ago. That is thanks largely to Leonid Brezhnev. But while the Soviet ability to exert force on the world has grown, so have the external dangers and internal defects with which its new leaders must cope. That too is Brezhnev's legacy...
While the Soviet standard of living nearly doubled during Leonid Brezhnev's rule, he left behind an economy slipping into deep trouble. Factories are faltering. Farms cannot feed the people. Oil production is peaking and may soon fall. After decades of steady progress, growth has seriously slowed. Still harder times may lie ahead...
...Reagan Administration believes it can influence the orientation, and possibly even the composition, of the leadership that has succeeded Leonid Brezhnev. That belief, whether it proves right or wrong, is a variation on an old theme: a stubbornly recurring but usually frustrated American desire to effect some change for the better in the system that poses the most serious military threat and political challenge facing the West...
Supreme power in the U.S.S.R. has changed hands only four times before. Vladimir Lenin died in 1924 and made way for Joseph Stalin, who died 29 years later, to be replaced briefly by Georgi Malenkov, who was outmaneuvered by Nikita Khrushchev, who in turn was ousted by Brezhnev in 1964. The changeovers in Moscow might as well have occurred on another planet. U.S. statesmen of those years had little understanding of what had happened, much less any anticipation of what was going to happen next, and still less any sense of what the U.S. could do about...