Word: nikolais
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...habitual corruption. Since assuming office, he has reshuffled some 20 top officials and summarily dismissed six others. He pointedly chose Crime Buster Geidar Aliyev, 59, former party boss and KGB chief in Azerbaijan, as Deputy Premier. He also fired Leonid Brezhnev's crony and Interior Minister, Nikolai Shchelokov, and replaced him as head of the bribe-prone civil police with his successor at the KGB, General Vitali Fedorchuk...
Last week Andropov showed more of his housecleaning intentions by sacking Mikhail Mikhailov, 53, a deputy minister of the aviation industry, and S. Andriasov, his deputy in charge of foreign relations. Neither was accused of any crime, but one of their subordinates, Nikolai Laikov, responsible for organizing aviation exhibitions abroad, was found guilty of misappropriating the equivalent of $80,000 in foreign currency. While Laikov was sentenced to 15 years in prison and his property confiscated, his two bosses were sacrificed for neither stopping nor spotting the swindle. Their example serves as a warning that even faint contact with corruption...
...DIED. Nikolai Podgorny, 79, the Soviet Union's President from 1965 to 1977 who traveled the world on ceremonial missions, projecting the preferred Soviet image of stolid gray; in Kiev. The son of a foundry worker, Podgorny had a lackluster early career as a bureaucrat in the Ukraine before being brought into the Politburo in 1960 and into the Secretariat of the Central Committee in 1963. As Nikita Khrushchev's loyal protégé, he seemed his probable successor, but following Khrushchev's 1964 ouster, Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev elbowed Podgorny into the largely powerless presidency...
...self-confident leader who already felt himself to be in full control of Soviet policy. After the meeting the Vice President issued a conciliatory statement that said, "The challenges, while enormous, are far from insurmountable." Soviet officials below Andropov voiced even more soothing words. The most notable came from Nikolai Tikhonov, who holds what in the U.S.S.R. is the subordinate title of Premier. Said he: "The Soviet Union has been and is for normal and, even better, friendly relations with the United States. There were such relations in the past, and they can again become a reality...
...decade of his life was detente. Of course, he was deeply disappointed by the sharp change of policy of the U.S." After speeches by Andropov, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, Academy of Sciences President Anatoli Alexandrov and a factory worker, pallbearers led by Andropov on the left and by Premier Nikolai Tikhonov on the right carried the coffin to another bier behind the mausoleum. There the family bade its last farewell to Brezhnev. His widow Victoria was overcome by emotion as she kissed her husband's face according to the Russian tradition. As an artillery salute boomed...