Word: brezhnevs
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...Soviet regime have been an underground art form since the early days of Stalin. But those with their wits about them kept their barbs to themselves. Comedian Arkady Raikin went about as far as any comic could when, in the late 1970s, he publicly poked fun at Leonid Brezhnev's bushy eyebrows. A year before Gorbachev came to power a Moscow comedian was banned from television for a year for making fun of an unnamed KGB general. But when Mikhail Zadornov, a Leningrad satirist and television personality, submitted his story to Theater, the editors apparently thought the mock letter...
...Mikhail Gorbachev, a figure of gravitas among world leaders, achieves his effect precisely by reversing the Slavic inevitabilities: opening the windows, airing out the old system. The earlier generations of Soviets (Leonid Brezhnev, for example) sat upon the world's stage like dark boulders. Weight is not enough. Gravitas is weight with complexities of life and intelligence...
Although the Uzbek affair began unfolding several years ago, the new disclosures seem to mark a new phase in General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's anticorruption drive. They also highlight his effort to blame former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev for the country's continuing economic problems. Brezhnev cronies and relatives are among those implicated; Son-in-Law Yuri Churbanov could face the death penalty if convicted on charges that he accepted $1 million in bribes while serving as the Kremlin's First Deputy Interior Minister...
...Leonid Brezhnev is no hero to Mikhail Gorbachev, who has dubbed his predecessor's 18-year reign the "era of stagnation." Still, there are reminders of that reign all over the Soviet Union, where everything from an icebreaker to a whole city bears Brezhnev's name. Last week, in a two- paragraph dispatch, the TASS news agency announced that three of those reminders are being eliminated...
...city of Brezhnev, on the Volga River, returns to the far more poetic Naberezhniye Chelny (Dugout Canoes on the Riverbank). The Moscow suburb of Brezhnev is once again Cheryomushky Rayon (Cherry Tree District). In Leningrad, Brezhnev Square reverts to the Krasnogvardeiskaya Ploshchad (Red Guards Square). Not since Joseph Stalin's name was wiped from the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and the country's highest mountain (now Peak of Communism) in the late 1950s has a Soviet leader been so posthumously disgraced. No word yet on whether the nuclear-powered icebreaker, the cosmonaut-training center, the military academy, the power...