Word: brezhnevs
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Vitali Vorotnikov, 58, a party bureau crat whom Brezhnev once banished to the Soviet embassy in Havana, advanced rapidly under Andropov. But he is too new to the Politburo to figure prominently in this race. The handful of men who govern the Soviet Union now stand at a great historical and psychological divide. Most of them can measure the history of the Communist regime by the decades in their lives. They were born and reared amid revolution, reached maturity during despotism and global war, and grew old building a fortress nation second to none. As they choose a successor...
Unlike Leonid Brezhnev, who loved to wear row upon row of medals, Yuri Andropov kept his army general's uniform in the closet. But if the late Soviet leader gave every appearance of being a civilian, his ties to the military Establishment came under increasing scrutiny during his brief tenure. Andropov, it was believed, owed a debt to the military because Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov had backed him in the race to succeed Brezhnev. In what many saw as a disquieting sign of the brass hats' growing power, it was the military's Chief of Staff, Nikolai...
...Vladimirovich Andropov confounded such predictions when he assumed control of the country's Communist Party in November 1982. Within seven months, Andropov had also secured the important title of Chairman of the Defense Council and been elected President of the Soviet Union. It had taken his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, 13 years to accumulate all the same trappings of power. The new Soviet leader, it seemed, was a man in a hurry...
Compared with the exuberant bear-hugging Brezhnev, Andropov appeared stern, almost ascetic in his thick glasses. He impressed Western visitors to the Kremlin with his command of facts, his sharpness of mind and his sardonic sense of humor. But somehow a sense of his true personality always seemed to elude them. The Soviet leader, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson remarked after a trip to Moscow in February 1983, was "extraordinarily devoid of the passion and human warmth" that he had encountered elsewhere in the country...
...photographs. Given Andropov's years at the helm of the Committee for State Security (in Russian, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or KGB), some of his countrymen feared that he would turn out to be a reconstructed Stalinist, intent on imposing order on a society grown lax and corrupt in Brezhnev's final years. Others wishfully thought that he might emerge as a liberal, eager to improve relations with the West and reform the Soviet Union's cumbersome system of centralized planning. Andropov proved to be neither. Having taken hold of the reins of power late in life...