Word: politburo
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Though Chinese politics is forever a mystery to Westerners, one can make out its outlines. Supreme power lies in the six-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. The Politburo of 25 men is where politics shifts and simmers; below it is the 210-member Central Committee, where younger people, engineers, technicians, provincial party leaders voice the growing pressures from below. Outside them all is the army - wary, suspicious, slowly being subordinated by the Standing Committee to the government...
Then comes Chen Yun, 78, a shy man who was elected to the Politburo as far back as the Long March in 1934. Once a soldier, he later served as Chairman of the State Financial and Economic Commission and has become China's leading economic thinker, the man who insists that China's people need consumer goods and the state must loosen its controls to provide them. This sets him against Li Xiannian, who thinks that China must focus on infrastructure and capital goods...
Between them, members of the Politburo share enough foreign policy savvy to have realized the consequence of destroying an unarmed passenger jet, particularly since memories of the world's revulsion after the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of Solidarity are still fresh. Surely Yuri Andropov would not discard his hopes for Western European neutralism, or the Soviet Union's image among impressionable Third World countries, in order to flex his military muscle. In all probability, Andropov and Co. were not even consulted about flight 007. Instead, a general on the ground followed standing instructions to the hilt and ordered...
...point, Ogarkov's presentation confirmed the speculations of Western Kremlinologists: the order to shoot down the plane was a military decision, not checked with Andropov, who was reported to have been on vacation in the Caucasus, or other Politburo members. The order was given, Ogarkov said, by a commander in the Soviet Far East. Without exactly saying so, Ogarkov indicated that he had been informed only after the Korean liner had been destroyed. That raises a terrifying question: Are Soviet military forces under firm enough control by the Kremlin civilian leadership to prevent their obvious hair-trigger mentality from creating...
...quarter Jewish. Since Stalin's death there has been an unwritten Kremlin rule that the party chief must be an ethnic Russian. In Medvedev's view, the tactics used by Chernenko's supporters were mere pinpricks to Andropov, who had gained the crucial support in the Politburo of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov...