Word: brezhnevs
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...before the campaign officially began last week, Giscard was coming under heavy fire for what many considered to be lapses of diplomatic judgment. Chief among them was his sudden decision last May-taken without consulting his allies-to fly to Warsaw for an impromptu meeting with Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev. Giscard now says that the purpose of his trip was to tell Brezhnev in no uncertain terms that "détente would not survive another blow similar to the invasion of Afghanistan." His critics charged that he looked like an appeaser. "It was a serious diplomatic blunder," Mitterrand said...
...against obstreperous satellites. Soviet tanks quelled riots in East Berlin in 1953 and crushed the rebellion in Hungary in 1956, an episode that cost the lives of more than 25,000 Hungarians. And in justifying the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet press proclaimed the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine: the U.S.S.R. reserves the right to use force in any "fraternal country" where it deems "socialism" to be in jeopardy. None of those interventions, whether in time of cold war or thaw, elicited from the West meaningful political and economic sanctions, to say nothing of military retribution...
...Palm Sunday, the big red machine had not yet rolled across the Polish border, so for the time being at least the world was breathing easier. In fact, there has been easier international breathing for over a week now, ever since April 7, when Leonid Brezhnev, his chest heavy with medals, stood in Prague's Palace of Culture and informed 1,700 attentive delegates to the 16th congress of the Czechoslovak Party that he was confident that the unruly Poles would come to their senses after all. TASS then announced that the three-week-old Warsaw Pact military exercises...
...from the days when their leaders made threats by banging their shoes. Every threat worth the name needs a history of action to back it up, and the Soviets have gone to a great deal of trouble in past years to establish a high credibility rating. Even Brezhnev's conciliatory speech replaced one form of threat with another. In case anyone on earth might miss the point of his choosing Prague as the site for his remarks, he said: "I am sure we have a common stand with Czechoslovakia, just as with the other countries of the socialist community...
...full pardon if they fear punishment, and if they are apprehensive for their liberties, he should assure them that he is not the enemy of the public good, but only of a few ambitious persons in the city who oppose it." Machiavelli would have been much pleased by Brezhnev's speech. It singled out the ambitious "enemies," and was rich in references to "genuine patriots," "Poland's independence," the people's "genuine interest," "honor" and "security"-all the attributes in fact that the Soviets would like to keep as far away from Poland as possible. Yet such...