Word: khrushchevism
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Working at the highest levels of the Soviet government before his appointment as ambassador, Dobrynin had exposure to many of the Kremlin's murkier minds, like Khrushchev and Brezhev. His clear discussion of their decisions and their ways of handling power yields an insight that could only have come from experience...
...Building, he spoke with animation of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, sounding a bit like an aging star reliving his most memorable role. He told TIME's editors two little-known facts about the crisis, one never previously recorded. He said a lone Russian commander in Cuba--not Nikita Khrushchev or anyone in Moscow--held the authority to launch tactical nuclear weapons in case of a U.S. invasion. Castro also claimed that Khrushchev inadvertently read him a letter sent by John F. Kennedy to the Kremlin during the crisis. In the letter Kennedy promised to quietly withdraw U.S. missiles from...
...next stop, in Moscow, would have shocked most members of TIME's first Newstour, in 1963, in which Khrushchev was interviewed. We visited a budding stock exchange and splashy Western stores. We met opposition parliamentarians as well as Chernomyrdin. Standing beneath the crest of the Czars--a huge gold double-headed eagle--he criticized Washington's plans for expanding NATO, affirmed he "was on the same team as President Yeltsin," despite speculation that they might both run for President next year, and asked the West to be patient in helping Russia modernize. "You can never go to sleep...
From 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev sent him to Washington, until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev brought him home, the warm, wary and perceptive Dobrynin saw the cold war from an extraordinary vantage point: as the main conduit for a quarter-century of Kremlin-White House secret negotiations. As dubious exposes and skimpy memoirs poured out of the Soviet Union following its 1991 collapse, Dobrynin's remained the great untold story. Now the diplomat who had such confidence in his memory that he never took notes until meetings were over has put it all down in writing and delivered...
...always was one, Dobrynin insists, though some days it must have been difficult. During the Cuban missile crisis, Moscow told him "absolutely nothing at all" of plans to place the missiles, then made him "an involuntary tool of deceit" by maintaining that they were defensive only. Khrushchev's lack of a fallback plan once the missiles were discovered was a lesson, Dobrynin notes, that was forgotten by his successors when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Ignoring warnings from his generals and ambassador, Brezhnev told Dobrynin not to worry: "It'll be over in three to four weeks...