Word: brezhnevs
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...case generated waves from Moscow to Manhattan. As soon as Soviet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev returned to the Soviet capital from his three-day visit to Yugoslavia, he took the extraordinary step of convening an emergency meeting of the 15-man Politburo right on the premises of Vnukovo Airport. The high-level conference, which forced a 24-hour delay of a state dinner in honor of India's visiting Premier Indira Gandhi, might have dealt with the still-mysterious goings-on in China. But it might also have dealt with the difficult problem of how the Kremlin should react...
...Soviet secret police, of course, have a dual function. At home they were never busier than during the Stalin era, when they organized and executed the purges and ran the labor camps. Today the KGB is headed by Yuri Andropov, 57, a Brezhnev Protégé who is clearly subordinate to the political arm of the party. A powerfully built man over 6 ft. tall, Andropov proved his ruthlessness in Hungary as ambassador at the time of the 1956 uprising. It was he who encouraged a delegation of Hungarians to meet with top Soviet officers in Budapest to talk about...
...speech to 2,000 workers in an electronics plant outside Belgrade, Brezhnev lauded the right of each country to build its own form of Communism. Then he turned around and implied that the Soviets reject the Yugoslav system of self-management, which grants considerable local initiative and democracy in contrast to the rigid, centrally controlled Soviet setup...
Breathing Space. In his private talks with Tito and the five-man Yugoslav delegation, Brezhnev irritated the Yugoslavs by praising at length the attitude of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. While welcoming any easing of East-West tensions, the Yugoslavs are apprehensive that Brandt's Ostpolitik might be interpreted as an acceptance of Soviet overlordship in Eastern Europe-an idea the Yugoslavs strongly reject...
...After Brezhnev flew back home via Budapest and Sofia at week's end, the two sides issued a reassuring communiqué about mutual respect and cooperation based on the principle of noninterference. The communiqué also disclosed that Tito has accepted a return invitation from Brezhnev to visit Moscow, but almost certainly not before he comes to the U.S. in late October. While neither side had made any binding promises or dramatic shifts in posture, and while the Yugoslavs clearly had no illusions about the present Soviet leadership's regard for diplomatic niceties, the political atmosphere in Belgrade...