Word: brezhnevs
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Like many Western governments, France was curious about the exact state of Leonid Brezhnev's health during his final years. Marenches found an ingenious way to get information. "He was staying at the Hotel d'Angleterre in Copenhagen during a state visit," the count recalls. "Our people rented the suite under his and dismantled all the plumbing. They intercepted his toilet flushings and sent the samples to Paris for analysis." This unpleasant bit of trade craft revealed that Brezhnev, a vodka lover, had suffered severe liver damage. "The old boy didn't last long after that," says the count, raising...
...home searches without a court order, protects the privacy of mail and telephone communications and explicitly forbids the use of torture. But words on paper do not make a law-governed state. Russians remember grandiloquent provisions on human rights contained in constitutions written for Stalin in 1936 and Leonid Brezhnev in 1977 -- rights they never enjoyed. Without stable government institutions in place to enforce the constitution, this document might suffer the same fate...
...even criticism of the cynical policy proclaimed by Russia's Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, at the United Nations: "Russia realizes that no international organization or group of states can replace our peacekeeping efforts in this specific post-Soviet space." This is nothing less than an abbreviated version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted Moscow's right to intervene in the former Communist world...
...cows twice, that when you have huge amounts of data coming in, it's very easy to lose count as simply as that. But the failure of common sense is absolutely weird in its stupidity. Any good journalist who'd been living in Moscow in the later years of Brezhnev would know that nothing worked anymore. The knight was dying inside his armor, and somehow that human perception never made itself felt in intelligence analyses...
...bloc before communism collapsed. As East | Germany's security chief, he supervised construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He supported the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of neighboring Czechoslovakia. And newly publicized Kremlin documents show that Honecker wanted to do the same against Poland. A letter from Honecker to Brezhnev on Nov. 26, 1980, denounced the Solidarity movement and appealed for a Warsaw Pact invasion to prevent "the death of Socialist Poland." Brezhnev, embroiled in Afghanistan, refused -- a decision that may have begun the unraveling of communism...