Word: yuri
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...know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution, it is incapable...
...twelve years, they are Gorbachev's contemporaries, members of the long-awaited new generation of Soviet leaders. The generational distinction may mean less in the future than it has in the past, however, largely because Gorbachev shrewdly deferred to his elders during the transition from the leadership of Yuri Andropov to that of Konstantin Chernenko and avoided an old-young confrontation. As a Western diplomat in Moscow puts it, "Gorbachev was smart not to push Chernenko out. He just waited for the old man to drop...
...Soviet leader had died. The suspicion was all but confirmed when regularly scheduled broadcasts during the following six hours were replaced by nature films and classical music. Having mastered the macabre code used to signal the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 and that of his successor Yuri Andropov only 15 months later, millions of Soviet citizens were fully prepared for the announcement, which was finally broadcast simultaneously on radio and television at 2 p.m.: "Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Presidium...
...Central Committee the day he took office. He offered no strikingly new programs or proposals. His emphasis was on continuity. Said Gorbachev: "The strategic line, worked out at the 26th Party Congress (and) at the subsequent plenary meetings of the Central Committee with the vigorous participation of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov and Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, has been and remains unchanged...
...some ways Gorbachev owes his rise to hometown connections. The future Soviet leader was born in 1931 in the fertile Stavropol region of southern Russia, where Yuri Andropov also was born and where Mikhail Suslov, the country's leading ideologist until his death in January 1982, had worked for several years. Gorbachev's first job was driving a tractor. In 1950 he made a significant leap forward by gaining entrance to Moscow State University. Admission is notoriously hard to win; unless a student is exceptionally talented, he needs family influence to enter. The farm boy apparently got his boost from...