Word: politburo
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...wrong, however, to underestimate the spy machine that the new man in the Kremlin built during his years at Dzerzhinsky Square. Andropov has received more raw information about things at home and abroad than any of his predecessors. He has had access to the KGB's dossiers on his Politburo colleagues. If he has resorted to repression as an instrument of social reform at home, he has shown subtlety in exploiting divisions in the Western alliance to further Soviet interests abroad. Predicts London-based East European Expert Leopold Labedz: "Andropov will prove to be a dangerous combination of strategic ruthlessness...
...nation's most notorious secret police chiefs, Lavrenti Beria. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the tiny Georgian with the trademark pincenez tried to bully his way to power by incorporating the Ministry of the Interior into his vast security empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary socialist legality." The KGB would be run by political appointees answerable...
...efficient police apparatus, and second, to transform it into a modern, effective instrument of the party. He succeeded on both counts." What the security operation lost in brute force it more than made up in political power under Andropov. In 1973, he was granted full membership on the Politburo, the Central Committee's ruling inner circle...
...random arrest, but the KGB still moves with brutal swiftness to suppress dangerous displays of "nonconformity." One innovation was the creation of a KGB directorate to control political, nationalist and religious dissent. The directorate has achieved results without great social disruption, something that Andropov's conservative comrades on the Politburo clearly value. The democratic movement within the Soviet Union that first surfaced in the 1960s and gained impetus from the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Human Rights has been all but crushed. Punishment for dissent has been selectively tailored for the dissidents: some are expelled, as outspoken Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...comrades-in-arms still in power; after a long illness; in Zagreb. A Croatian lawyer and a Communist Party member since 1933, he joined Tito's partisan army during World War II and served as its political commissar, later rising to membership in the party's ruling Politburo. Under the rotating system of collegial presidency in use since Tito's death, Bakaric was due to become chief of state this spring...