Word: ogarkov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...before the dramatic announcement, Ogarkov had been seen in public at a farewell ceremony for the Finnish Chief of Staff. Exactly a year ago, the marshal had proved to be a confident and tough spokesman for his country when he presented the Soviet explanation for the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in an unusual press conference. Such indications of Ogarkov's growing prominence had led many Kremlin watchers to view him as a possible successor to Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, and there was initial speculation last week that his "reassignment" might be part of sweeping changes...
Judging from the way the Soviet press covered the news, it seemed more likely that Ogarkov had been abruptly sacked and left in limbo. The official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda ran a large photograph and biography of the new Chief of Staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, 61, on the front page and relegated Ogarkov to a few lines of tiny print. Pravda buried the announcement of his departure on the back page...
...pragmatic professional, Ogarkov joined the army the year before World War II began and rose in the ranks to become his country's highest military officer in 1977. The marshal is known to have clashed on several occasions with the conservative Soviet military establishment, and the consensus among the British government's top Soviet specialists was that he had fallen from grace primarily because of a longstanding dispute over weaponry. Ogarkov, they said, had strongly argued the case for concentrating Soviet efforts on the development of advanced weapons that could match the American arsenal, while the majority...
Some U.S. analysts speculate that the marshal may have got the boot because he was too staunch an advocate of arms-control negotiations with the U.S. Ogarkov served as the Soviet Union's chief military representative to the first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks at a time when the Soviet leadership was convinced of the need to check American advances in weaponry at the negotiating table. Ogarkov is thought to have pushed for the start of talks in Vienna this fall on limiting the arms race in space, but he may have run up against opposition from...
...Kremlin passed over more senior-ranking officers and chose Akhromeyev, Ogarkov's longtime deputy and a former tank commander, as his replacement. Like Ogarkov, the new Chief of Staff represents a younger generation of better-educated officers who, in the words of a Washington analyst, are "not frightened by computers and technology." U.S. Congressmen who met Akhromeyev in Moscow last year describe him as "a tough, hard-nosed, thoroughly professional officer, who was clearly the man in charge...