Word: brezhnevs
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Under normal circumstances, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev might have arrived in East Berlin for last week's summit meeting of 29 European Communist leaders by train. But instead of making the leisurely 27-hour railway journey across Poland to Germany, Brezhnev flew to the summit by Ilyushin jet. Out of view but scarcely out of mind was the huge jumble of rails ripped from the tracks near Warsaw late last month by rioting Polish workers. Indeed the mass strikes protesting food price hikes that swept across Poland provided a fitting background for the uneasy, restless mood...
Common Ideology. Brezhnev sat stone-faced through these declarations of independence. Ironically, he originally intended the summit to serve as the capstone to his career. The Soviet leader, 69, first proposed the conference three years ago; since then he has tirelessly cajoled and pressured foreign party chiefs into agreeing to the meeting. Having enforced Soviet domination of Eastern Europe by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev hoped that the summit would strengthen the Kremlin's traditional political and ideological authority over the parties in Western Europe...
Virtually the only way Brezhnev could assert Moscow's erstwhile primacy in the Communist movement was to speak for 65 minutes-more than twice the time allotted other delegates. Evidently aware of his failure to achieve his original aims, Brezhnev deftly shifted emphasis to a display of Soviet reasonableness. He assured his listeners that the U.S.S.R. had no wish to reinstitute a Communist "organizational center" or Cominform-which would be impossible in any case. This was apparently a conciliatory gesture to Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, 84, who participated in an international Communist conference for the first time since...
...Mostly, Brezhnev developed the timeworn theme of the struggle between the Soviet "peace forces" and the "aggressive forces of imperialism," thus diverting attention from conflicts among Communists. Still, the mood of the conferees obliged the Soviet leader to ac knowledge the right of all parties to "suit their tactics and strategy to specific situations in their respective countries." The Italians were jubilant. Sergio Segre, the chief of the Italian party's foreign department, said that Brezhnev's remarks meant that "Communism has stopped being a closed system...
...launching last year of the Indian satellite Aryabhata from a Soviet cosmodrome. The Russian-language publication in Moscow of a collection of Mrs. Gandhi's articles and speeches. At a Kremlin dinner during which he delivered a speech in defense of dtente, Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev endorsed the Indian state of emergency ("Your government's actions against internal and external reaction met full understanding in the U.S.S.R.") and concluded: "May the tree of Soviet-Indian friendship strengthen and blossom." In reply, Mrs. Gandhi assured her hosts that Indo-Soviet cooperation was "a striking example of how two peoples...