Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kosygin was clearly more polished and better educated than his colleagues. He had functioned at the upper reaches of Soviet power for more than 30 years. Brezhnev, for example, was still a middle-level party official when Kosygin had joined the top group of 20 or so Soviet leaders. On the other hand, Kosygin's capacity for survival may well have derived from the fact that he never aspired to the very summit of power. Successive leaders beginning with Stalin had valued his competence; none had seen him as a potential rival. His actions were not in service...
...little evidence of the sense of humor some of our experts had detected beneath the glacial exterior. Either my only attempt to strike a light tone backfired, or else Kosygin's humor was too subtle for me. At the end of the summit, we boarded a Soviet plane. To the considerable chagrin of our Soviet hosts, its engines refused to start. Kosygin stormed on the plane and said: "Tell us what you want to do with our Minister of Aviation. If you want him shot on the tarmac we will do so." He looked as if he might...
...price of survival included being the butt of the crude jokes of whoever was the top Soviet leader...
...slightly melancholy, like those of the beagle who has endured the inexplicable foibles of his master yet bent them to his own will. Through all this Gromyko preserved an aloof kind of dignity; he was loyal and compliant but not obsequious. He became the indispensable drive wheel of Soviet foreign policy, the consummate Soviet diplomat, well briefed, confident and tenacious. It was suicidal to negotiate with him without mastering the record or the issues. He had a prodigious memory that enabled him to bank every concession he believed we had made-or even hinted at. It would then become...
...Soviet ambassadors are the product of a bureaucracy that rewards discipline and discourages initiative; of a society historically distrustful of foreigners; of a people hiding its latent insecurity by heavyhanded self-assertiveness. With some Soviet diplomats one has the uneasy feeling that they report in a way to suit the preconceptions of their superiors...