Word: sovietologists
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Following the missiles, fear and alarm. "The second cold war has begun," shrilled the Italian weekly Panorama. French President François Mitterrand warned that the situation was comparable in gravity with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or the Berlin blockade of 1948-49. American Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer, who has just returned from Moscow, where he had extensive interviews with Soviet officials, observes that "a test is coming between the superpowers. The Soviets are frustrated, angry. They have to reassert their manhood, to regain the influence in the international arena that today only America enjoys...
...Moscow. Lynn Hansen, of the Center for Strategic Technology at Texas A & M, doubts that anyone below a three-star colonel-general, such as a Far East-theater air-defense deputy commander, "could make that weighty a decision; they're all scared of that responsibility." Georgia Tech Sovietologist Daniel Papp warns that "if we assume it went all the way to Moscow, then there are very grave questions as to Soviet intent. If it was a general who decided it was time to show that they meant business, that is far less serious in its policy implications...
According to Marshall Goldman, a leading Sovietologist and professor of economics at Wellesley College, the Soviets began moving aggressively to increase their world market share as far back as 1981, months before sinking spot prices began to herald the end of the $34 OPEC bench mark. "By late 1981," says Goldman, "the Soviets were becoming cutthroat price cutters." Most of the cutting was done quietly; officially prices stayed in line with those of OPEC...
...uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance with Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, a crucial maneuver in his rise to the top. Says French Sovietologist Hélène Carrère d'Encausse: "Andropov came to the KGB with a double mission: first, to rebuild an 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...
Andropov's foreign debut may have seemed devoid of drama, but his low-key performance merited close attention. Said a French Sovietologist: "Basically, there is nothing "new, but there is a much more skillful use of language, adapted to the different audiences to which it is addressed." Long accustomed to monotone and heavyhanded Kremlin pronouncements, Western leaders are fast learning that in the future they will have to evaluate messages from Moscow with increasing sophistication...