Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...self-assurance and complete command. He had reason to. Unless the evidence that has been accumulating for weeks is completely illusory, Brezhnev is now on his way to gaining control of the Soviet Union's enormous power as no one man has been since the forced retirement of Nikita Khrushchev nearly six years...
...Congresses, for example, he said that he intended to keep the armed forces "fully provided with all that is needed for the vital task of national defense." If Brezhnev feels under any obligation to the military, however, his position could become uncomfortable. As the chief exponent of "goulash Communism," Khrushchev frequently sought to divert money and materials into consumer industries, away from the military men and what he called "the metal eaters"?the managers of heavy industry. But while Khrushchev tried, often unsuccessfully, to keep the military men on relatively short rations, Brezhnev may feel obliged to keep them...
...Since Khrushchev's one-man show came to an end, his successors have replaced his shoe-pounding, maxim-spouting ebullience with deliberateness that has long since crossed over the border into dullness. Conservative, guarded, suspicious, they exemplify a whole generation of bureaucratic middlemen. Writes British Kremlinologist Robert Conquest: "Vacillation, the attempt to combine contradictory drives, has been the pattern. The predominant motive seems to be a desire to avoid all change and reform in the hope that no crisis will spring up and that the contradictions within their society and economy will go away...
...Brezhnev junketed around the country in connection with the Lenin celebrations, he enjoyed a sudden burst of publicity that struck many Western diplomats as extremely unusual. Three times in four days Brezhnev appeared prominently-and usually alone-on Soviet television. Nothing like it had been seen in Russia since Khrushchev's days. While Brezhnev spoke in a Kharkov tractor factory, where he awarded the Order of Lenin to the workers, the cameras flashed back and forth from his face to huge portraits of Lenin hanging in the hall. As sustained applause greeted the very mention of his name...
Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia's present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin's closest Bolshevik comrades-Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev-were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin's death in 1924 through Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father...