Word: politburo
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...gifted Communist Youth League activist. Even before the Communist takeover in 1949, Hu Qili was recruited for the league's secretariat while a student at Peking University. ! There he attracted the attention of Hu Yaobang. Hu Qili is now the General Secretary's protege and, according to Politburo Member Peng Zhen, the likely successor. Hu Qili is described as a smooth and charismatic man. "He is what we call both Red and expert," says a middle-level party cadre. "He has good party credentials and is an intellectual...
Soviet workers, from pipefitters to Politburo members, receive state- subsidized vacations that differ as dramatically as the jobs they perform. Prominent members of the Communist Party and leading scientists luxuriate in secluded, heavily guarded mansions, supplied courtesy of the state. Even second-rank officials usually have a country house at their disposal. Tens of millions of their less exalted countrymen employ their wits and their blat (arm twisting and family connections) to gain entry to beachfront hotels, often located on the former estates of the prerevolutionary Russian aristocracy. Another much sought- after holiday choice for active trade-union members...
...decades younger than the leader of the U.S. Jokes about Gorbachev's relative youth abound. One has a worried Raisa asking Gorbachev why he has developed a red splotch on his face to match the birthmark on his forehead. Gorbachev supposedly replies, "It's those old geezers on the Politburo who keep pinching my cheek and saying, 'Nice going...
...mixed signals. He knows the world outside the U.S.S.R. better than nearly any of his predecessors did on coming to power. Even in his Stavropol days Gorbachev made official trips to Italy, West Germany, Belgium and France, a rare honor for a young provincial Soviet administrator. As a Politburo member, he led Soviet delegations to Canada in 1983 and Britain in 1984 and submitted to sometimes hostile questioning by members of the Parliaments of both countries. Gorbachev on those occasions showed flashes of a quick temper. When a British Tory asked him about religious freedom in the U.S.S.R., Gorbachev testily...
When he remarks, for example, that he and his colleagues are "quite exacting and self-critical," is there the faintest suggestion of dissent in the Politburo and perhaps of shuffles soon to come? He teases the Reagan Administration about how it should "deal us yet another propaganda blow, say, by suspending the development of one of your new strategic missiles. And we would respond with the same kind of 'propaganda.' " Is that a veiled offer to scrap the U.S.S.R.'s threatening new multiple-warhead ICBM, the SS-24, in exchange for cancellation of the American...