Word: brezhnevs
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...months ago, Nikita Khrushchev was bounced as boss of the Soviet Union for such character flaws as "phrasemongering." There hasn't been a phrase mongered or a shoe banged within the Kremlin's henna walls since. Where flamboyant Nikita rarely made an unpublicized move, his successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, go about their business so self-effacingly that days go by without the slightest mention of them in the Soviet press...
...Dior Look. Russia's largest domestic problem has always been agriculture. Under Brezhnev and Kosygin, the collective farms have been given price increases; collective farmers have been permitted to add to their private plots, have had their income taxes reduced, their prices raised as well. Most important of all-if Moscow follows through-is a new five-year plan doubling the amount of investment in agriculture, which at $9 billion represents a massive shift in resource allocation to what has always been the stepchild of the Soviet economy...
...Kremlin is making at least a partial effort to put its own history in perspective: Stalin, while not fully rehabilitated, is no longer treated as though he did not exist. In fact, his name was cheered last week when Brezhnev mentioned the late dictator in a Moscow speech. Marshal Zhukov, in oblivion for almost eight years since Khrushchev fired him as Defense Minister, also appeared, and was photographed in full military regalia last week. A Soviet law journal published an astonishing article recently, suggesting that the time had come for Soviet voters to have not one name but a choice...
Primus Inter Pares. Brezhnev and Kosygin have done less well in foreign affairs, in which they are clearly less competent and less interested. Their primary problem, the quarrel with Peking, has hardly been softened, despite a peace-making trip by Kosygin to Red China, and the Kremlin has even less control over Eastern Europe's "satellites" than did Khrushchev in his final years. In a recent speech, Demichev went so far as to explicitly endorse the independence of every Communist state; unlike Khrushchev, the new leaders know how to keep a dignified silence in the face of Peking...
Widely regarded as a caretaker government, Khrushchev's successors have inevitably been scrutinized with gimlet eyes by Western Kremlinologists for who's on top-or likely to be. Nearly all agree that the burly Brezhnev, as party boss, is primus inter pares in a committee government including Kosygin, Podgorny, the ailing Suslov and Mikoyan-in roughly that order...