Word: tasse
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...announcement from the Soviet news agency TASS was deferential in tone. Nikolai Tikhonov, it said late last week, had resigned as Premier of the U.S.S.R. In a letter to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, TASS reported, the 80-year-old Politburo member, who has held the premiership since 1980, declared that his health had "considerably deteriorated lately" and his doctors suggested retirement. Named to replace Tikhonov was Nikolai Ryzhkov, 56, a rapidly rising star who was appointed to the ruling Politburo only last April. He is its second-youngest member after Gorbachev...
Moscow let this offer pass, while barely containing its glee over Gorbachev's urbane performance. The main Soviet evening TV news program, Vremya, devoted a full hour to reading the interview text, while TASS, the official news agency, rounded up favorable comments from as far away as Zimbabwe. The U.S.S.R.'s state publishing house put on sale, at ten kopecks (12 cents) each, 200,000 copies of a 30-page booklet containing the text of the interview as compiled --and slightly censored--by TASS. The agency deleted a joking allusion to an aged Soviet Finance Minister and a glancing mention...
...censorship did not go unnoticed. TASS PURGES GOD jeered a headline in the Milan daily Il Giornale. But otherwise the reaction in Western Europe, a prime target of Gorbachev's comments, was both impressed and worried. A common opinion among political analysts there was that "the charm offensive of Gorbachev," as the Paris daily Le Matin called it, might succeed in putting Reagan on the defensive at their November meeting in Geneva. The Bonn daily General-Anzeiger noted the "knowledge of details" that Gorbachev had demonstrated in the interview and added delicately that Reagan "is not known for having...
Moscow brandished its stick 24 hours later. TASS portentously declared itself "authorized to state" that if the U.S. goes forward with an impending test of an advanced antisatellite (ASAT) weapon, which Gorbachev considers a potential component of a Star Wars defense, "the Soviet Union will consider itself free" not just to test but to deploy its own ASAT. The stick, however, was not especially menacing. The State Department pronounced the Soviet threat to have "little practical meaning" since the Soviet ASAT is already operational; in any event, American experts consider it crude and slow. The Pentagon announced that it would...
...last week over the death of Samantha Smith, the American girl who visited the U.S.S.R. on a peace mission at the invitation of Yuri Andropov in 1983, the Soviet media hinted that her plane crashed as a result of foul play. No lie is too big: the news agency TASS blithely reported last October that the Pentagon was poisoning the Amazon River. The Soviets still regularly use forgeries to discredit the U.S. Last July the Soviet press published a letter to Chile's President Augusto Pinochet, purportedly from a U.S. Army general, welcoming Chilean troops to fight in El Salvador...