Word: khrushchevism
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...thing the West does know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution...
...that Marxism-Leninism Inc. has yet to meet that rudimentary requirement of good business, a procedure for ensuring smooth management succession. Soviet leaders love to award one another ribbons and stars and medals, but never gold watches. Retirement seems a dishonorable estate, a form of internal banishment. So Khrushchev discovered. So Brezhnev no doubt recalled as he grew feeble. Andropov after him. And then Konstantin Chernenko...
...contrast between Gorbachev's age and Reagan's: "Now if there's a | summit, it will be your old leader sitting down with our young one. You might say we are turning the tables on you after all these years, going back to the meeting between John Kennedy and Khrushchev...
...excerpts were chosen by TIME's Washington bureau chief, Strobe Talbott, who translated and edited the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. The latest project required a special approach, Talbott says, "precisely because it does come from the world of espionage, where deception and illusion are commonplace. Those of us working on the project thought it important to verify the bona fides of the author and, as far as it was possible, his story." As State Department correspondent and diplomatic correspondent during the 1970s, Talbott had covered stories about defectors, agents and double agents--and the tricky business of telling them apart...
Secret emperors, the men of the KGB exercise preventive supervision of the population and its loyalty. The KGB could not halt the alienation that grew as Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's expansive promises of well-being went unfulfilled. But the "GehBeh," as the organization is nicknamed after its initials, can report what is happening to the leadership. The more disquieting evidence it produces, the more the KGB justifies its insistence on larger budgets and greater manpower. Since there really has been trouble--a food riot in Novocherkassk in 1962, for instance--the leadership has acquiesced to the KGB's demands...