Word: kremlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reference to the fact that a Fury-run Russia would be hipper and more laid back about things like spelling. At first I was thinking of writing myself into the show, maybe as a rock star who finds love and the meaning of Christmas in the backrooms of the Kremlin...
Events in Moscow last week seemed like scenes from a world turned upside down. Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who recently returned from seven years of internal exile, was invited to a nuclear disarmament conference at the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Soviet police arrested Yuri Churbanov, the son-in-law of former Leader Leonid Brezhnev, and jailed him on bribery and corruption charges. In addition, officials freed more than 40 political prisoners, the largest dissident group to be released in three decades, and announced that some 500 people, most of them Jews, have been granted exit visas. Only 900 people were allowed...
...developments in the Soviet Union last week were typical of the now- you-see-it, now-you-don't liberalization taking place under Gorbachev. The invitation to Sakharov to attend a Kremlin disarmament forum this week could provide Gorbachev with a prestigious ally in his antinuclear campaign. Thus, it will be a good platform to show off the new Soviet openness in a way that also serves Moscow's interests...
Simultaneously, the Kremlin was also putting forth an unusually hard propaganda line against the U.S. This included publication of a book charging that the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 religious cultists took their lives by drinking cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid, was the work of the CIA. TASS also resurrected totally fantastic and absurd allegations that the AIDS virus was created by U.S. scientists in a Maryland germ-warfare laboratory...
Still, the Kremlin had plenty of invective left for its enemies at home. In arresting Churbanov, 50, Brezhnev's son-in-law and First Deputy Minister of the Interior from 1980 to 1984, Moscow continued its crackdown on official misdeeds. Gorbachev has repeatedly attacked lax ethical standards under Brezhnev, who died in 1982, and has given top priority to rooting out corruption. If convicted, Churbanov could face 15 years in prison or even death for accepting bribes...