Word: zil
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...scene was shocking, but it was an aptly ironic image of the times. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize shot by soldiers?his own?wielding Soviet AK-47s (market price: $750), who had jumped from a Soviet Zil truck (price: $18,000) that was towing a North Korean antitank gun ($35,000). In the background American-made M60 battle tanks ($2 million each) rumbled on in the parade of Egyptian military might, while six French Mirage jet fighters ($2.5 million) flew overhead in tight formation...
...ambulance that was the tipoff. Few Czechoslovaks paid much heed last week when they glimpsed a sleek, Soviet-made ZIL 114 limousine speeding through the streets of Prague with dark green curtains drawn over the rear and side windows-especially not with a Communist Party congress under way. Senior party officials often travel in such cars with drawn curtains. But the limo was followed closely by an obviously well-equipped Mercedes-Benz ambulance. That was a dead giveaway that the VIP passenger was none other than ailing, 74-year-old Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev, whose battle with the infirmities...
...Soviet leadership. For weeks billboards had gone up all over Moscow exalting the party as THE MIND, HONOR AND CONSCIENCE OF OUR EPOCH and trumpeting GLORY TO THE HEROES OF LABOR. Food supplies in Moscow stores and restaurants improved, red banners waved along the main thoroughfares, and fleets of ZIL and Chaika limousines roared down reserved lanes...
Politburo members and other top political officials, for example, live in exclusive apartment enclaves and speed to work in chauffeur-driven ZIL limousines. Although their salaries are relatively modest, they have little need for money: not only are they housed by the government, they also receive a special Kremlin ration that allows them to feed their families well for a nominal monthly fee of 50 to 70 rubles. (An average family of four in Moscow might spend 180 to 200 rubles a month on food...
FORSYTH MOVES THE action around the globe every few paragraphs until we learn that the Soviet grain crop has failed almost completely because the red bureaucracy fouled up. The folks in the Zil limousines, especially the Brezhnev-clone Soviet premier, Maxim Rudin, are not amused, and Rudin's Kremlin rivals want to use the crisis to get the old curmudgeon bounced. Back in Washington, Bill Matthews and Assistant for National Security Affairs, Stanislaw (read Zbigniew) Poklewski, and Secretary of State David (read Cyrus) Lawrence want to use the shortage to wring concessions out of the Russians...