Word: brezhnevs
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Familiarity is said to breed either contempt or children, but it is not supposed to enhance a mystery. The West has grown familiar with Soviet transferals of power in the past 28 months: Brezhnev became Andropov became Chernenko. Last week the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, strode under Western eyes in the now easily recognizable setting of a Moscow funeral for a head of state: Soviet citizens lined up and bundled up in what seems an eternal freeze; Chopin thudding in the background; gray-coated soldiers marching stiff legged like a row of A's; a body laid out like...
...does know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution, it is incapable...
...Leninism Inc. has yet to meet that rudimentary requirement of good business, a procedure for ensuring smooth management succession. Soviet leaders love to award one another ribbons and stars and medals, but never gold watches. Retirement seems a dishonorable estate, a form of internal banishment. So Khrushchev discovered. So Brezhnev no doubt recalled as he grew feeble. Andropov after him. And then Konstantin Chernenko...
...issue of East-West relations, Gorbachev echoed a Kremlin theme of the past year: eagerness for improvement, but on Soviet terms. And those terms show no sign of changing. Gorbachev's Kremlin, like Brezhnev's a decade ago, wants peaceful coexistence and detente, largely so that the leadership can tend to the economy. The U.S.S.R. desires recognition as a superpower, equal in status and privilege with the U.S. It also wants what Soviet spokesmen call "compensation" for various perceived or alleged geopolitical disadvantages and grievances. In practice, the twin claims of equality and compensation mean that the Soviet Union...
These were the main features of Brezhnev's foreign policy, of Andropov's and Chernenko's, and now they are surely of Gorbachev's as well. The real question is not whether he will pursue a course different from that taken by his predecessors, but whether he will pursue it more effectively. The answer is more likely to be yes than no. Since he injects the continuity of Soviet policy with a vitality that it has lacked in recent years, he may also bring to the Soviet-American competition more energy, skill and ingenuity than his recent predecessors, in their...