Word: vitalis
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...Vitali Vorotnikov, 58, a party bureau crat whom Brezhnev once banished to the Soviet embassy in Havana, advanced rapidly under Andropov. But he is too new to the Politburo to figure prominently in this race. The handful of men who govern the Soviet Union now stand at a great historical and psychological divide. Most of them can measure the history of the Communist regime by the decades in their lives. They were born and reared amid revolution, reached maturity during despotism and global war, and grew old building a fortress nation second to none. As they choose a successor...
...apparatchik who benefited most from Andropov's favor was Vitali Vorotnikov, 57, the second new member on the enlarged 13-man Politburo. Appointed deputy premier of the Russian Republic in 1975, Vorotnikov was shunted off to Cuba as ambassador in 1979 after he apparently angered Brezhnev by calling for a crackdown on official corruption. Four months before Brezhnev's death, Vorotnikov was summoned home. At last June's Central Committee meeting, he was awarded a nonvoting seat on the Politburo, only to catapult last week into the inner circle ahead of five more senior men. Said...
Western criticism only served to make the Kremlin more defiant. Soviet newspapers have run cartoons depicting Reagan as a blind cowboy and a bloody-fanged gorilla. Vitali Kobysh, a Kremlin information official, gave a five-minute TV commentary in which he said: "It is likely that no one will ever know details of the assassination of President John Kennedy or black civil rights fighter Martin Luther King, but everything is already known about the [airliner]." The outrageous implication was that U.S. secret services had staged all three tragedies and covered their tracks successfully in the Kennedy and King deaths...
Even Soviet police officers were told to shape up. Interior Minister Vitali Fedorchuk announced that some of the country's men in gray were being purged because they were "immature in an ideological and moral way." There had been complaints from Soviet citizens, he said, concerning "late reaction to hooliganism and theft, and time lags in investigating crimes." Fedorchuk also denounced alcoholism as a "great social evil." He said that drinking accounted for almost half of all crimes committed in the Soviet Union and warned that the police would "not be liberal toward drunkards...
...Vitali uses one recent incident to illustrate the women's reception at the club. He describes the reaction when a woman member brought her baby into the dining room. "The baby started to cry and at the first wail all the members turned around and stared in complete silence. Then when the baby cried again, they let out a big cheer," he says...