Word: brezhnevs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Soviets themselves now look back on the almost two decades of Leonid Brezhnev's rule as the era of "stagnation." Harsh as that word sounds, it is actually a euphemism; it really means general decline. Gorbachev personifies to his own people, and should personify to the outside world, a damning revelation about Soviet history: Russia made a huge mistake at the beginning of the 20th century, one that it is trying to correct as it prepares to enter the 21st. Having already missed out on what the 18th and 19th centuries offered in the way of modernity, including much...
...administrative methods," and bureaucracy has stultified Soviet society, economy and culture. Gorbachev is trying to introduce the economic mechanisms and democratic political institutions that have been developing in the West while the Soviet Union has been trudging down its own dead end, particularly during the lost years of the Brezhnev period...
...deathblows inflicted upon Sakharov and his subsequent resurrection reads like a gripping secular sequel to the Russian Orthodox Lives of the Saints. Sakharov had certainly not been expected to survive the frightful ordeal that began in the mid-1970s, when he was targeted by the regime of Leonid Brezhnev as the nation's most dangerous dissident. Vilification in the press, together with threats of imprisonment and assassination, was a common occurrence...
...limit nuclear testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking apple-flavored tea, he dispensed precious counsel and gifts of money...
...devastating critiques of Soviet policies cut deep. In his books, which were published only in the West, he repeatedly pointed to the failure of Soviet society to fulfill the promise of Communist ideology. Sakharov's writings on domestic affairs irked the leadership almost as much as his criticism of Brezhnev's foreign policy, which he characterized as imperialist and expansionist. His mistrust of Kremlin intentions was so strong that he said in 1983 that it might be best for the U.S. to "spend a few billion dollars on MX missiles" in order to bargain more effectively with the Soviets...