... the triple succession to Leonid Brezhnev. Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership and his reform line were both confirmed at the Twenty-seventh Congress as the outcome of the triple succession. Communist Party and Andropov Communist Party congresses “Totalitarian model ” Central Committee membership age...

... in March 1985. Gorbachev tried his best to reverse the traditional relationship between the holders of power and the intelligentsia, whose role in reform and national progress he apparently acknowledged. By the end of Leonid Brezhnev's era, the continued power of the neo-Stalinist bureaucracy seemed...

...This chapter describes events in the history of Soviet theater and arts from 1917 to 1919. The period known as Stagnation—owing to the smug, stolid, and increasingly arteriosclerotic leadership of Leonid Brezhnev—also saw the most exciting upsurge in theatrical creativity since the 1920s. Audiences...

... 1980s as proof that Marxism was a failure. However, this argument has a flawed premise. Marxism had not really guided the Soviet Union for more than half a century before Leonid Brezhnev came to power. It was Joseph Stalin, not Gorbachev, who was responsible for Marxism's demise. Ideologically...

...This chapter focuses on Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev, perceived as a little more than an “apparatchik,” a Communist party man, who was an able administrator and bureaucrat but who lacked a strong personality that would make possible effective and dynamic leadership. In fact, few outside...