Word: gradual
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...orbital platform for military and scientific ventures. Lacking a reusable space shuttle like Challenger to ferry men and material, the Soviets have been forced to send their crews up for longer and longer periods. Declares Anatoli Alexandrov, president of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences: "The strategy of a gradual increase in man's stay in space has justified itself completely. It means that even longer space expeditions are quite feasible...
...West as a sensitive liberal with a fondness for Scotch whisky and the Glenn Miller sound. Now, after most of the disinformation and half-truths have been sifted out, Andropov remains an unknown quantity. What is clear is that his rise to power has coincided with the gradual evolution of the Soviet Union as a modern police state in which the physical terror of the Stalin era has been largely replaced with subtler forms of control. The KGB has developed into an increasingly sophisticated instrument for advancing national interests around the world. As head of the KGB, Andropov had much...
Some Western analysts speculate that Andropov's election as party chief reflects the gradual gravitation of political power in Communist countries toward the military and security sectors. Andropov's first round of appointments certainly suggests that he wants to use KGB men and methods to run the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB agent in Iran who defected to the British last June, insists that Andropov has been and remains a loyal party man. As Kuzichkin told TIME: "In the West people talk about the KGB as if it were an independent body. It is an instrument...
...former Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov was chosen by Brezhnev in 1967 to continue the gradual "politicization" of the KGB. He took over a security service still demoralized after several reorganizations. Andropov set about winning friends among the power groups hostile to the secret police. The military, for example, has been a traditional KGB rival. Security police ruthlessly purged the military high command on Stalin's orders in 1937, and uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance...
...hardly a love letter, but after more than two decades of rancorous relations, the message to the Soviet leadership on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union was remarkably warm. Expressing hopes for the gradual normalization of ties, the Chinese government urged both countries to "jointly work for the realization of this goal through negotiations, concrete actions and the removal of obstacles." Although the vaguely worded message promised nothing, it confirmed earlier signals that China was serious about improving relations with the Soviet Union. Says a top Washington analyst: "It is another step forward in the atmospherics...