Word: brezhnevs
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...Kremlin shake-up (TIME, March 23). It is, of course, medically possible (if statistically implausible) that all are genuinely ill, especially in view of the advanced age of some of the patients: Kosygin, Podgorny and Suslov are all over 65. But many analysts speculated that Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, lately seen to be fit and cheerful, was consolidating his position, and that some, if not all, of the disabled leaders were suffering from maladies that were more political than physiological...
Signs of trouble in the Kremlin began mounting after Dec. 15, when Brezhnev made a secret speech to the Central Committee about the lagging Soviet economy. Since his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, was ousted principally because of poor economic performance, Brezhnev took care to blame economic planners and managers for the failures. To many Sovietologists, the postponement of the next Communist Party Congress from this month to an indeterminate date late in 1970 or even 1971 suggested high-level disagreements. Said Yale's Wolfgang Leonhard: "It means either that the leaders can't agree on policies or that there...
There was some evidence that Brezhnev was trying to shore up his power. He was the only Politburo member to review the massive army maneuvers in Byelorussia last month and was photographed with the Soviet Defense Minister, Marshal Andrei Grechko, prominently at his side. It seemed that, as party General Secretary, he was asserting his position as first among equals in the Politburo and pointing to the support he personally commands in the Soviet army. Kremlinologists were also struck by the fact that Brezhnev, on his return to Moscow from a three-day trip to Budapest last week...
...fills a deep domestic political-and psychological-need. "Please remember, for us Lenin is an icon," declared a ranking Soviet official. The icon, moreover, serves an up-to-the-minute function. In a year scarred by serious economic shortcomings and rumors of rifts at the top, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin have invoked Lenin's ideas to enhance their collective leadership and his image to associate themselves with the heroic struggles of the past. By emphasizing their identity with Lenin as the authentic interpreter of Marx and the innovator of Socialist power, the Soviet leaders have...
Even ruder noises have been heard abroad. The Yugoslavs have openly challenged Moscow's pretensions that the Brezhnev doctrine, which asserts Moscow's right to intervene in other countries to defend "Socialism," is a pure reflection of Leninist thought. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, far from accepting any idea of Lenin's sainthood, weighed in with a condemnation of him (see RELIGION). The Chinese line has been downright blasphemous. It was on the eve of Lenin's birthday ten years ago that Peking's theoretical journal Red Flag, in an editorial entitled "Long Live...