I know there was a huge state-orchestrated mourning period for "the Lenin of Today," like there was whenever a Soviet leader died, except Khrushchev, who didn't even get buried in a place of honor -- John Reed and Bill Bill Haywood are in the Kremlin wall, and Nikita Sergeyevich had to settle for a burial place that's not even in the city center. Things got sort of screwed up when B's coffin collapsed during the burial ceremony.
I think there was a lot of genuine mourning. A good friend of mine cried when Brezhnev died. I would say a lot of this wasn't because B was genuinely loved -- he wasn't -- but because he had been in power forever and his image was everpresent on TV, the radio, newspapers, posters, and so on, and so matter who cynical you are about propaganda, some of that seeps in.
I know a guy from Siberia who now teaches mathematics in Pasadena. He was back here recently visiting his then-fiancee, now wife, and he told me that what was going on in the States made him nostalgic for his childhood in the 70s-early 80s -- that it brought back very strong memories of the Brezhnev era.
Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote: Chris Dos - or anyone with some knowledge of this - could you ask some Soviet old-timers what it was like when Brezhnev died? Was there a week of force-fed mourning and hysterical canonization in every newspaper and broadcast outlet? Or are our nominally "private" and "free" media doing better work than the state media in a one-party state ever did?
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