Word: leonid
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Unlike their Western counterparts, Soviet leaders almost never meet with foreign journalists. One of the rare exceptions occurred in 1979, when Leonid Brezhnev received Time Inc. Editor in Chief Henry Grunwald, TIME Managing Editor Ray Cave and Chief of Correspondents Richard Duncan for a formal interview. Last week, at the same long Kremlin table, aided by the same translator, the same three editors became the first Western newsmen to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev. What was new was the vigor and directness of the host. "Instead of delay, there was a definite aura of efficiency," said Cave. "The session...
Andropov, who became Soviet leader after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, continued to groom Gorbachev as a key lieutenant. After Andropov was incapacitated by kidney disease in late 1983, it was Gorbachev who reportedly shuttled daily from the Kremlin to the hospital outside Moscow where Andropov lay hooked up to a dialysis machine. "During his last months, Andropov ran the U.S.S.R. through Gorbachev," says one Soviet historian. Gorbachev's time to run the country in his own name had not yet come when Andropov died in February 1984. The Kremlin Old Guard conferred the leadership...
...meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union's nominal parliament. Gorbachev had been widely expected to use that session to assume the presidency, formally known as the Chairmanship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. That would have followed the example of his three predecessors, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Chernenko. Instead, Gorbachev rose in Moscow's columned Great Kremlin Palace to declare that his duties demanded such "intensity" that he should concentrate on the party leadership. He then nominated Gromyko, 75, who he described as an "eminent political figure" and also, significantly, as "one of the oldest party...
...blocks from the Kremlin. The General Secretary continued the haranguing of the slipshod Soviet economy that he has made his theme since he took office last March. This time, though, Gorbachev went a good deal further. As aging apparatchiks, most of them the appointees of the late Leonid Brezhnev, shifted uncomfortably in their seats, he singled out members of the Soviet bureaucracy by name to deliver a remarkable tongue lashing...
...Strategic Arms Limitation treaty, initiating a brief era of detente. Others have been less so: Nikita Khrushchev decided that John Kennedy would be a pushover after meeting him in Vienna in 1961 and a year later began installing nuclear missiles in Cuba; just six months after Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev embraced in Vienna in 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. Summitry is obviously a risky venture, but after four standoffish years, President Reagan is now eager to follow the practice of his eight predecessors...