Word: leonide
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last week. With one stroke, he strengthened his position on the ruling Politburo by increasing the number of voting members from eleven to 13, the highest count since October 1982. The two new men, presumed to be Andropov supporters, had been blocked from advancing further in their careers under Leonid Brezhnev. Andropov also promoted an old KGB comrade to candidate membership in the party council and gave greater authority to a like-minded technocrat on the Central Committee Secretariat. Andropov's address to the party plenum conveyed a similar feeling that he was in command. In language not heard...
...even before illness removed him from public view, but some of what the West thought it knew about him was wrong. The picture of Andropov as a Westernized intellectual, fond of American music and books, that circulated widely in the months before he assumed power following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 was mostly the product of wishful thinking, possibly aided by deliberate Kremlin disinformation. He does, however, have a reputation as the best-informed and most sophisticated Soviet leader since Lenin. Western diplomats who visited him in Moscow early in his tenure were impressed by his command...
During the Moscow summit in 1972, Nixon and Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT I pact and in a joint communiqué pledged to refrain from "efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly." The high point of détente, in a literal sense, came in 1975, when Soviet and American spacemen linked up and shook hands 140 miles above the globe during a joint space mission. Meanwhile, troubles back on earth threatened to end the era of good feeling...
...public and official Soviet answer to that question is a resounding no. Leonid Brezhnev declared several times that a nuclear war would be "unwinnable" and "madness." Just five months before his death in 1982, he sent a formal message to the United Nations declaring that the Kremlin "assumes an obligation not to be the first to use nuclear weapons." Brezhnev challenged everyone else to make a similar pledge, a challenge that the U.S. promptly declined. (According to U.S. nuclear doctrine, it is only the longstanding American threat to use nuclear weapons against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe that deters...
...Soviet Union was predictably harsh in its criticism of the U.S. action. Declared Leonid Zamyatin, the Kremlin's chief spokesman: "We condemn this act of aggression. We condemn the actions of the U.S. and Israel, and will give support and aid to those who are countering aggression in that region." But his comments stopped well short of specific threats. The assumption was that unless the U.S. attacked Syria itself, the Soviets would not risk a military response...