Word: brezhnevs
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...young party chief's reputation pleased two important spa guests: Mikhail Suslov, then the chief Soviet ideologist, and KGB Chief Yuri Andropov, both austere figures disgusted by the corruption of the Brezhnev era. When Kulakov died in 1978, he left vacant the position of Communist Party Central Committee Secretary in charge of agriculture. To fill it, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, presumably acting on the advice of Suslov and Andropov, chose a man he had evidently met only recently: Gorbachev. That meeting occurred on Sept. 19, 1978, at the tiny railroad station in Mineralnye Vody, where Brezhnev's train stopped...
...attributable to % any glittering success in agriculture. Quite the opposite: the grain harvest fell from a record 230 million tons in 1978, when Gorbachev was taking over the agriculture portfolio, to a calamitous total of perhaps only 155 million tons in 1981. Bad weather played a role. So did Brezhnev, who announced a grandiose reorganization of agriculture that seemed to create more problems than it solved. Still, it is remarkable that Gorbachev managed not only to escape blame but to advance his career amid the farming fiasco. Only a year after returning to Moscow, he became a candidate member...
...reason Gorbachev's agriculture record was not held against him was simply that the Kremlin leadership found itself in desperate need of new blood. Brezhnev's health was faltering, and his 18-year regime was sinking into a twilight of stagnation and corruption. When Brezhnev died in 1982 and Andropov came into office with plans for reform, he immediately began grooming Gorbachev to become a key lieutenant in his clean-up campaign...
...Soviets like to say, "no accident" that in the same month as Brezhnev's Tula speech, Nikolai Ogarkov became chief of the Soviet general staff. Marshal Ogarkov was a controversial choice among the top brass. He had been the top military representative to SALT. The civilian leadership apparently picked him because he too believed in sufficiency, parity and stalemate. He also favored Soviet-American agreements as a means of regulating the arms race...
...says a Soviet official with close ties to the military: "Our generals were more determined than ever to get the American missiles out and to keep them out. The general staff concluded that Brezhnev really blew it by provoking the U.S. into installing the Pershing IIs in the first place and then not having the wit to make a deal to get rid of them...