Word: brezhnevs
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Isolated Incident. The Soviet action was a serious, though probably not fatal blow to detente. Both Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have long stressed that the normalization of trade relations was a prerequisite for Soviet-American cooperation on such contentious issues as nuclear arms control and peace in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Last week, however, Kissinger presented the Soviet cancellation as an isolated incident in the general course of detente. He characterized Moscow's move as merely an "interruption"-not "a final break." Shortly thereafter, the official Soviet news agency...
...this point, some of the arcane details dear to Kremlinologists began to assume significance. It was noted that Brezhnev had not been photographed, televised-or seen by foreigners-since Dec. 29. The Kremlin's New Year's greeting to the Soviet people, which traditionally has been broadcast by a ranking party leader, was read by a radio announcer in 1975. These incidents could be explained by the death of Brezhnev's 87-year-old mother over the New Year holidays. Indeed, the Soviet press agency Tass reported that Brezhnev had attended the funeral last week. Nonetheless, there...
...Failures. Knowledgeable Soviet-affairs experts in Washington and European capitals prudently dismiss the swirling speculation that Brezhnev's uncertain health presages his imminent retirement or a stage-managed ouster by his Kremlin competitors. Unless it is proved that Brezhnev is mortally ill, they believe that he will remain in office at least until the 1976 Communist Party Congress when, as one British foreign office expert put it, he might choose to bow out "in a spasm of glory...
Some Kremlin watchers are not so sure. British Sovietologist Leopold Labedz contends that any Brezhnev illness would be bound to touch off a power struggle in the Kremlin, if only because the Russians have never solved the problem of how to transfer authority in an orderly succession. According to this logic, competing factions in the Kremlin would try to exploit Brezhnev's physical weakness by pinning any recent policy failures on him as a pretext to seize power. Columbia University Political Scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as many Moscow-based diplomats, speculate that the party chief has already come...
Moscow's custom is to ignore foreign speculation about possible leadership changes. But last week Tass went out of its way to denounce the stories about Brezhnev as "groundless inventions." TIME Correspondent John Shaw cabled from Moscow that if Brezhnev is physically well, he can successfully defend his policies and his pre-eminent position. "Still, there is a sense of unease in Moscow; diplomats here feel that something is stirring in the Politburo, as if the ground had shifted slightly but unmistakably...