Word: brezhnevs
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...real surprise came the next day when Soviet citizens lined up at newspaper kiosks to buy Pravda. The front page of the Communist Party daily was not dominated by a black-bordered picture of the late Soviet President, as had been the case when Brezhnev and Andropov died; readers had to turn to the second page for a glimpse of Chernenko. Instead, the front-page space was devoted to the official portrait of the new leader, a balding, round-faced man, and the announcement that Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, had been chosen by the Central Committee as General Secretary...
...indeed appear that the Soviet Union wanted to put the world on notice that the era of drift, of weak and enfeebled leadership that began in Brezhnev's declining years, had come to an abrupt end. A small circle of aging leaders, men whose careers spanned most of their nation's history, had handed over power to someone from the younger generation, an event as monumental in its way as the death of Stalin in 1953. The Kremlin no longer could be viewed as the domain of ailing and absent rulers; its boss was now a man of vigor...
...most details, the Chernenko funeral differed little from the final rites for Brezhnev and Andropov. The crack gray-uniformed honor guards, goose- stepping beside the red and black-bedecked gun carriage, each balancing his rifle on one hand, seemed as coldly perfect as a precision gear wheel put through one more rotation. Portraits of Chernenko bobbed above the crowds in a regular pattern as the cortege made its way into Red Square...
...long focus, Anna Chernenko kissed her husband's cheek and repeatedly bowed her head against his shoulder until she had to be drawn away from the casket. Fog horns and sirens keened as the coffin was lowered into a plot on the Kremlin Wall terrace, opposite to where Brezhnev and Andropov are buried. As the national anthem sounded, the red and gold hammer-and-sickle flag above the Kremlin was hoisted back to full staff and troops marched briskly past the Lenin Mausoleum to the sounds of a military march. The old era had ended...
...flown to the Soviet Union on the heels of a 13,000-mile tour of Africa with a stop-over in Geneva to address a United Nations conference on that continent's famine, hand-delivered a special message to Gorbachev from President Reagan. The President had attended neither Brezhnev's nor Andropov's funeral, but, given the significance of the latest change in the Soviet leadership, there was some thought in the White House that a quick Reagan visit to Moscow for the Chernenko burial would constitute symbolic assurance of U.S. concern for better relations. At 9:30 a.m. Washington...