Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even the site of this weekend's summit is dictated by the fragility of Brezhnev's health. In 1974 Richard Nixon had traveled to Moscow and Gerald Ford to Vladivostok, so protocol required that this time the U.S. play host to the Soviet leader. But Brezhnev's doctors did not want to subject him to the rigors of a transatlantic flight. The agenda for the Vienna summit has been kept as flexible as possible to allow Brezhnev maximum time for naps and ministrations by the physicians in his entourage...
...Budapest for a perfunctory meeting with Hungarian Boss Jāanos Kádár, the local press and diplomatic corps were not so much interested in what Brezhnev said as the difficulty with which he said it. Ambassadors in a receiving line compared notes afterward on the Soviet leader's flaccid handshake and his shuffle as he mounted the steps to a speaker's platform. Brezhnev's public appearances are becoming primarily chances to examine the patient...
...both the Soviet and American summiteers hope, Brezhnev has a series of good days this weekend, he and Carter might conduct negotiations that would be-in fact as well as in the parlance of the communiquės-frank, businesslike and useful. But if, as both sides fear, Brezhnev has a relapse, the meeting could be little more than an anticlimactic signing ceremony, tediously stretched out over four days. It would also be a lost, probably last opportunity for these two men, who are meeting for the first time, to thresh out some of their differences in a period...
There certainly is nothing new about the almost pathetic spectacle of an infirm Soviet leader clinging to power rather than wielding it. In Vladimir Lenin's last years a series of strokes partially paralyzed both his body and his ability to act decisively. Lenin's incapacity contributed to the rise of his successor Joseph Stalin. At the end of his life Lenin, who had been so ruthlessly effective in his prime, was reduced to whining about Stalin's "rudeness" and "suggesting" that his comrades on the Politburo remove Stalin from the post of Party General Secretary...
...there anything exclusively Soviet about the phenomenon of a leader who tries to govern-and negotiate-despite the encroachments of a fatal illness. During the Paris Peace Conference in April 1919, Woodrow Wilson succumbed to severe fever and gastrointestinal illness. He tried to conduct diplomatic business from bed, but issued irrational and contradictory orders and thought the French servants waiting on him were spies. The episode may well have presaged the massive stroke six months later that left him physically and, to a large extent, politically disabled. For the rest of his presidency-and indeed his life-Wilson...