Word: brezhnevs
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Central Asia and Siberia, and was lucky enough to be able to proclaim a bumper wheat crop for 1956. In 1960 he succeeded Marshal Kliment Voroshilov in the post of Soviet President. Brezhnev took advantage of the undemanding job to travel widely outside the U.S.S.R. as a spokesman for Khrushchev's foreign policy. In 1964 he was a member of the conspiracy against his former mentor that forced Khrushchev into retirement. Brezhnev's reward: the high-ranking post of First Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1966 Brezhnev assumed the grander title of General Secretary that had been...
...Historian Bertram Wolfe unwisely described Brezhnev as "an insignificant transition figure in a new interregnum." Initially, Brezhnev shared authority in a triumvirate with Premier Alexei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny. By 1973 he had elbowed aside any rivals for power. He placed allies in principal positions in the party hierarchy and increasingly emerged as chief spokesman for the Politburo. On trips abroad he was treated as head of state, even though he did not formally assume that title again until after Podgorny's dismissal...
...Brezhnev, at first with Kosygin's assistance, began dismantling many of Khrushchev's more quixotic experiments, especially those that weakened the power of the Communist Party. Restrictions on private farming were eased, and wages were increased. At the same time, Brezhnev subtly moved back toward some policies that were reminiscent of the Stalin years. Arrests and deportations gradually extinguished the dissident movement. Some future historians may mark Brezhnev's expulsion in 1974 of Nobel-prize-winning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as one of the most significant events of the Soviet leader's long reign...
Regrettably, Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev had never talked. The half a dozen letters that Reagan received from Brezhnev were stiff and cool. He remained in the eyes of Reagan a Communist bully. Richard Nixon, who spent days with the Soviet leader, caught the glint of a realist in Brezhnev, a man struggling within his own system to cool hot heads, a man sometimes mellowed by the memories of his father's admonition to bring peace to the world. There was a human bond...
Khrushchev evidently decided Kennedy could be pushed around, and so he ordered nuclear missiles placed in Cuba. Khrushchev badly misread Kennedy. Eighteen years later Brezhnev measured Jimmy Carter during the Vienna summit of 1979; he subsequently decided that the Soviets could invade Afghanistan without serious consequences...