Word: brezhnevs
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...week. With one stroke, he strengthened his position on the ruling Politburo by increasing the number of voting members from eleven to 13, the highest count since October 1982. The two new men, presumed to be Andropov supporters, had been blocked from advancing further in their careers under Leonid Brezhnev. Andropov also promoted an old KGB comrade to candidate membership in the party council and gave greater authority to a like-minded technocrat on the Central Committee Secretariat. Andropov's address to the party plenum conveyed a similar feeling that he was in command. In language not heard since...
Since Andropov succeeded Brezhnev more than a year ago, he has moved slowly in putting his stamp on the ruling elite, but last week the long-anticipated changes finally began to take shape. Mikhail Solomentsev, 70, a former premier of the Russian Republic, was given a voting position on the Politburo commensurate with his new job on the Party Control Commission. The plenum confirmed the importance of the KGB in inner Kremlin councils by elevating the KGB chief, General Victor Chebrikov, 60, to candidate membership in the Politburo. Yegor Ligachev, 63, a technocrat from Siberia who shares Andropov...
...apparatchik who benefited most from Andropov's favor was Vitali Vorotnikov, 57, the second new member on the enlarged 13-man Politburo. Appointed deputy premier of the Russian Republic in 1975, Vorotnikov was shunted off to Cuba as ambassador in 1979 after he apparently angered Brezhnev by calling for a crackdown on official corruption. Four months before Brezhnev's death, Vorotnikov was summoned home. At last June's Central Committee meeting, he was awarded a nonvoting seat on the Politburo, only to catapult last week into the inner circle ahead of five more senior men. Said...
...public and official Soviet answer to that question is a resounding no. Leonid Brezhnev declared several times that a nuclear war would be "unwinnable" and "madness." Just five months before his death in 1982, he sent a formal message to the United Nations declaring that the Kremlin "assumes an obligation not to be the first to use nuclear weapons." Brezhnev challenged everyone else to make a similar pledge, a challenge that the U.S. promptly declined. (According to U.S. nuclear doctrine, it is only the longstanding American threat to use nuclear weapons against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe that deters...
...official Soviet posture has not changed since Yuri Andropov came to power. A few weeks after he was named to succeed Brezhnev, the Soviet party chief declared, "A nuclear war, whether big or small, whether limited or total, must not be allowed to break...