Word: grechko
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...downcast as they stood by the flower-covered bier in Moscow's imposing Trade Union House. While a string orchestra played funeral dirges, thousands of workers, soldiers and bureaucrats filed past the medal-bedecked dais for a last look at the jut-jawed countenance of Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko, Soviet Defense Minister and architect of the Kremlin's modern-day military might...
...Grechko had died suddenly and unexpectedly at 72 in Moscow of an apparent heart attack. After lying in state for 24 hours, he was interred in the Kremlin wall, the burial spot for Soviet heroes. Grechko had been the chief mover in Russia's shift over the past decade from a primarily defensive military machine built around big, nuclear-tipped missiles to the balanced, varied -and growing-land, air and sea force that now gives sleepless nights to NATO planners, and has become an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign...
After he became Defense Minister in 1967, Grechko presided over the program of rapid diversification and modernization that catapulted Soviet forces into a situation of overall near parity with the U.S. He reorganized the officer corps, introduced advanced technology to the armored forces, and successfully tested new conventional weapons -notably air defense missiles-in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Probably the Grechko achievement that worried Western commanders most was the strengthening and integration of Warsaw Pact forces...
...Grechko Fresco. In Western capitals, the bear-size Grechko (6 ft. 2 in., 220 lbs.) was usually regarded as an archfoe of détente and disarmament. Although his precise role in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia has long been a matter of debate, many East Europeans are persuaded that he played a decisive part. Grechko apparently argued that Czech Party Chief Alexander Dubček's political liberalization program was unacceptable from Moscow's point of view and that only a military intervention would keep the country in the Communist orbit. Even today the bullet-riddled...
...such maneuvers, East or West, Okean 1975 had another aim as well. Gorshkov, whose code name during the exercise was "Seagull," observed it aboard a warship in the Barents Sea, along with Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko. They obviously meant to impress the Politburo as well as the West with the capability and reach of Soviet forces. One fallout from the first Okean exercise, for instance, was the decision to upgrade the Soviet carrier forces. Their third and most sophisticated carrier, the 35,000-ton Kiev, is now outfitting in the Black Sea port of Nikolayev and will undergo...