Word: brezhnevs
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Sometimes, when he went for a walk, Father would meet vacationers and regale them with stories about the past. Or he'd comment on current international affairs. They all listened attentively and asked a lot of questions. Father answered them expansively. But if the questions were about Brezhnev and his policies, he responded jokingly, "I'm retired now. My job is to take walks and not criticize. Let them figure things out on their...
...summer of 1967, when Father seemed almost completely forgotten, his name suddenly cropped up again. An American news network decided to make a biographical film about him. But the Soviet side interpreted it as a provocation, a hostile move. Brezhnev couldn't bear any mention of Khrushchev's name. People like him, who are soft and weak on the one hand and vain on the other, have a peculiar way of perceiving and "processing" their bad deeds. Having done something wrong, they project their guilt onto their victim, trying in this way to justify their actions to themselves...
Instead of abandoning his memoirs after the uproar over the TV film, Father redoubled his efforts. The authorities became aware of those efforts in the winter of 1967-1968. Brezhnev was greatly upset. How to make Father stop work on the project? Should they search his dacha and seize the tapes? That would trigger a scandal, leaving Brezhnev looking like a tyrant and Khrushchev a martyr. So what was to be done? The choice was to call Khrushchev in and persuade him to cease work on his memoirs and turn over what he had written to the Central Committee...
...Brezhnev had no desire to speak to his former boss. So he instructed his first deputy in the Central Committee, Andrei Kirilenko, a rude and high- handed man, to summon Khrushchev and get him to drop the memoirs. Arvid Pelshe, the chief of the party Control Commission, attended to add pressure; everyone knew the Control Commission wasn't to be trifled with...
...only TIME representative who was present for both interviews -- and also for a session with Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 -- is the Moscow bureau's Felix Rosenthal. "Although Gorbachev in 1985 was a vivid contrast to Brezhnev -- young, smiling, talkative -- you could still sense a successful provincial party boss," he says. "Gorbachev in 1990 is polished, quite at home in his Kremlin office with the modern furniture that fits his image...