Word: brezhnevs
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Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev's assurance that the 3000 Soviet troops in Cuba would not be converted from a training unit into a combat force was a "modest, but nonetheless important achievement" for Carter, Dominguez said...
Among our own experts Kosygin had the reputation of being more liberal than Brezhnev. I considered that a superficial judgment. As Prime Minister, he was in operational control of day-to-day activities of the Soviet government-outside of the security and foreign policy fields...
Kosygin was clearly more polished and better educated than his colleagues. He had functioned at the upper reaches of Soviet power for more than 30 years. Brezhnev, for example, was still a middle-level party official when Kosygin had joined the top group of 20 or so Soviet leaders. On the other hand, Kosygin's capacity for survival may well have derived from the fact that he never aspired to the very summit of power. Successive leaders beginning with Stalin had valued his competence; none had seen him as a potential rival. His actions were not in service...
Khrushchev once boasted to a foreign visitor that if Gromyko were asked to sit on a block of ice with his pants down, he would do so unquestioningly until ordered to leave it. Brezhnev's humor, though less brutal, made the same point...
...Moscow summit got under way, Brezhnev proposed that there be a signing ceremony each afternoon for agreements reached beforehand. Nixon fell in step, observing that the Moscow morning papers would thus have something to report, while in the U.S. the signings would make the evening television shows. What Brezhnev thought of the proposition that the Moscow journals needed Nixon's help in finding news must be left to his autobiography...