Word: leonid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...visit to Armenia after rushing back from New York City two weeks ago, Gorbachev asked a television interviewer, "Who is to blame for the fact that in the concrete blocks there is too little cement but more than enough sand? This means the cement was stolen. By whom?" Leonid Bibin, deputy chairman of the state building committee, launched an investigation into why so many of the more recently built homes collapsed, and said criminal charges could be brought. Pravda said the poor construction, like so many other shortcomings in the Soviet system, could be attributed to the "period of stagnation...
Gorbachev will be the first Soviet Communist Party leader to address the U.N. since 1960, when Nikita Khrushchev created an uproar by brandishing his shoe, pounding his fist and hurling insults. Gorbachev's sclerotic predecessors, Konstantin Chernenko, Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev in his last years, were too often tethered to life-support systems to venture much abroad...
...Reagan said in exasperation, "That was four leaders back before this one. I think there have been some changes." He had said in 1981 that the Soviets reserved the right to "lie and cheat and do anything else to achieve their ends." Since then, three Soviet leaders have died--Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko...
...conservative by U.S. corporate standards. Yet there is nothing modest about the man at the round table, his command central. "Captain Bob" coined by the press -- is a boulder of a man: easily 250 lbs., and 6 ft. 2 in. tall. His ruddy face is a cross between Leonid Brezhnev's and Robert Mitchum's. His abundant hair, dyed black, is slicked back '30s style to counterpoint bushy black eyebrows that can appear deceptively clownish...
...Russian-dominated leadership in Moscow can find small comfort in the fact that the Estonian itch for independence has not spread considerably farther -- yet. Under Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet nationality policy seemed to mean that national groups could organize the likes of folkloric song and dance companies, but that the major decisions affecting the welfare of national groups were made in Moscow. Bureaucratic centralization reached such absurd dimensions that, as a Lithuanian once complained, "Ivan Petrovich must rule on the opening times for toilets in towns with names he cannot even pronounce...