Word: brezhnevs
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...protested in public and largely to ignore the disaffected millions of Soviet citizens who went through the motions of their jobs while seething with resentment. That "hidden constituency" for reform even included young Communist Party officials who saw that the society was as decrepit as its bemedaled leader, Leonid Brezhnev...
Much of the judgment will rest on what actually happened in late 1981, when spreading unrest had made Poland almost ungovernable. Brezhnev was in power in Moscow, and the doctrine he had formulated allowed the Soviet Union to intervene militarily should its interests in Eastern Europe be threatened. It may be hard to imagine today, but nine years ago, the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were still powerful reminders of Soviet resolve...
Ivashko has been described in the unofficial Ukrainian press as looking more like "a balding accountant in a collective farm than a man who manages people's destinies" -- but appearances are obviously deceiving. When Ukrainian party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky, a Brezhnev-era holdover, refused to be dislodged from his post, Moscow eased Ivashko, an ethnic Ukrainian, into the job of second secretary in 1988. Within a year Ivashko had replaced Shcherbitsky...
...joke is making the rounds in Moscow. It may not be a knee slapper, but the times make it worth retelling. Shifts in Soviet leadership have historically moved from the bald to the hirsute: from the chrome-dome Lenin to the brush-cut Stalin; from Khrushchev to Brezhnev; from Andropov to Chernenko. Which brings everyone to Mikhail Gorbachev, who is nearly as bald as a darning egg, and to the upstart Boris Yeltsin, whose mane of graying locks ruffles conspicuously these days in the winds of change...
Aleksy, like all bishops who emerged during the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period, had to bite his lip and say nothing about the constant persecution of the church, but he managed to avoid outright dishonesty. A pre-election article by Aleksy in a church journal mingled traditional views with support of Gorbachev's reforms and ecological activism. In a sermon last month at the Valaam monastery, Aleksy eloquently lamented communism's mass murder of clergy and destruction of churches...