Quotes About Brezhnev

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before.

This is about systemic, institutional corruption, not personality. To ask the Democratic leadership to clean things up would be like asking the old Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev to reform itself. It ain't going to happen.

He glanced at his e-mail, saw the box was full of unread messages, missives, requests, and adds for cheap, Internet Viagra. Apparently, Abba Contiga Brezhnev, Contessa of some country he'd never heard of, had a few million bucks she needed laundered, and had gone straight past hello and howdy-do and on to calling him her dear.

He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a "big-toothed cretin." In 1980, when we were still in Kabul, the U.S. announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. "Wah wah!" Baba exclaimed with disgust. "Brezhnev is massacring Afghans and all that peanut eater can say is I won't come swim in your pool.

I can recall photographs of Comrade Ulbricht being embraced by Comrade Brezhnev, which must have been like putting your arms around Grant's Tomb.

Elliot," the President pleaded with him as the Attorney General entered, "Brezhnev wouldn't understand if I didn't fire Cox after all this." Nixon urged Richardson to delay.

By 1981, the seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, hobbled by a series of strokes and barely able to function, could be seen drooling on himself on his rare appearances on Soviet television. Rather than removing him, however, the Politburo merely nominated him for still more medals. Lenin—the "incandescent" Lenin, as Churchill called him—would have been appalled.

Word spread about us in what was then the Soviet Union and we received an invite from President Brezhnev to perform there, which no other Western act had previously done.

All that is very relevant to Afghanistan. To a startling degree, the Politburo's 1979 deliberations about how to deal with it mirror the Bush administration's close-minded and secretive decision-making that led to its invasion. The Bush White House might have modeled itself on the Soviet gerontocracy under Brezhnev that brushed aside warnings from military and regional experts who knew the situation in Afghanistan to be far more complicated than the Politburo stated.

Brezhnev. It was Brezhnev who proved to be Stalin's most important successor, because he redefined the Soviet attitude to time: he buried the Marxist politics of inevitability, and replaced it with a Soviet politics of eternity.

Czechoslovakia spoke of "normalization," which nicely caught the spirit of the moment. What was, was normal. To say otherwise in Brezhnev's Soviet Union was to be condemned to an insane asylum.

Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.