Word: communist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan to prop up a Moscow-installed Communist regime in 1979, more than 20,000 Soviet fighters have died. An estimated 1 million Afghans have lost their lives. Weary of such bloodshed, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Rogachev said last November that Moscow had made the "political decision" to pull out its 115,000 troops, but a timetable remains to be worked...
...follow shortly. According to one line of Pentagon speculation, the Soviets "may be creating the circumstances to declare victory and go home." But even if they do precisely that, the rebels seem determined to maintain their supply routes from Pakistan and to secure enough weapons to continue fighting whatever Communist government the Soviets leave behind. The rebels may end their siege and melt into the rugged countryside around Khost, but they are virtually certain to return...
...Gorbachev getting restless with provincial posts? Perhaps. Mlynar, who was rising toward the top levels of the Czech Communist Party, visited his old classmate in 1967 and recalls that Gorbachev complained about excessive interference by Moscow in local affairs. Mlynar described the sweeping reforms that Alexander Dubcek was then beginning in Czechoslovakia. He remembers Gorbachev saying, with a sigh, "Perhaps there are possibilities in Czechoslovakia because conditions are different." The Czech reforms, however, were crushed by Soviet tanks the following year, and Mlynar went into exile; he now lives in Austria. The two old friends talked and drank through that...
...young party chief's reputation pleased two important spa guests: Mikhail Suslov, then the chief Soviet ideologist, and KGB Chief Yuri Andropov, both austere figures disgusted by the corruption of the Brezhnev era. When Kulakov died in 1978, he left vacant the position of Communist Party Central Committee Secretary in charge of agriculture. To fill it, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, presumably acting on the advice of Suslov and Andropov, chose a man he had evidently met only recently: Gorbachev. That meeting occurred on Sept. 19, 1978, at the tiny railroad station in Mineralnye Vody, where Brezhnev's train stopped...
...little fellow on the left was four years old $when he sat for this photo with his grandparents $in the Russian village of Privolnoye. Today, at $56, he is General Secretary of the Communist $Party of the U. S. S. R. and one of the world' s $most formidable leaders. He has begun to shake $the Soviet economy from decades of lethargy, $open the machinery of government to greater $public scrutiny and inject a new flexibility into $Soviet behavior abroad. Millions of television $viewers around the world have grown $accustomed to his face -- and welcomed the $December agreement he signed...