Word: brezhnevs
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...scene in the Great Kremlin Palace amounted to an anticlimax before the show had even begun. On the rostrum before 1,517 obedient delegates to the Supreme Soviet, Russia's puppet parliament, Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin huddled and chatted with studied amiability. Then Brezhnev rose and nominated Kosygin for another term...
Delay & "Democracy." Nor was there any hint of change in Soviet policies. The session rubber-stamped a proposal originally made by Brezhnev that the regime be "democratized" by increasing the number of the Supreme Soviet's standing committees from three to nine-which in substance meant nothing. Kosygin revealed no fresh policy to cope with Russia's lagging economy; instead, he disclosed that the new five-year plan, scheduled to have gone into effect last January, was still not ready, possibly because of wrangles over a new pricing structure designed to permit limited fluctuation in response to supply...
...rambling, 18-page declaration issued from Bucharest's erstwhile Royal Palace, there was not a word about a strengthened command structure-clear evidence that Rumanian Leader Nicolae Ceauşescu had once again thwarted Soviet designs. Instead, the declaration reiterated Brezhnev's call for a pan-European "security conference" aimed at the simultaneous dismantling of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. When Brezhnev first proposed the conference in March, he wanted to keep the U.S. out of any European settlement. This time, the U.S. role was purposely kept ambiguous. In any case, there was no indication in Western capitals...
...Brezhnev did succeed in forging a front of European Communist unity. The pact partners issued periodic blasts throughout the week at the "imperialist" U.S. and even vowed to send "volunteers" to Viet Nam if Ho Chi Minh called for help. All of the pact members had made such offers before, but Ho has yet to take them up. Unity was maintained-on the surface at least-right up to the moment that Brezhnev boarded his Aeroflot Ilyushin-18 to fly back to Moscow. After kissing a row of little girls and accepting a spray of red gladioli, Brezhnev heartily embraced...
Avtorkhanov concedes that Brezhnev and Kosygin have granted what amounts to unprecedented concessions to democracy. Russian industry has introduced the profit motive. The Red army, which played a hand in Khrushchev's fall, has been given political rights and powers that, for the first time, crack the monolithic power structure of the state. But Avtorkhanov warns that none of these alterations should give much comfort to the West. Russian Communism, he says, comes perilously near to being self-perpetuating, proof against every perturbation beneath it: "The party apparatus is superior not only to the state but to the party...