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175 19 STABBED IN THE BACK the launch of a spacecraft was big news in moscow in 1964 when the space race with the United States was deemed of worldwide importance. Six Soviet space flights beginning with Yuri Gagarin’s on April 12, 1961, had each carried one person. Now, Voskhod—the name means “sunrise”—took three men into orbit on Monday, October 12, 1964, for what was proclaimed to be “a long flight.” This meant an even busier time than usual for the Associated Press bureau in Moscow. The three-man bureau was shorthanded. George Syvertsen, the correspondent with the most Moscow experience, was on vacation and about to pick up a new car for the bureau in Helsinki and drive it down to Moscow. Fred Coleman had just arrived on September 15 from AP New York on his first foreign assignment. I had been in Moscow for seven months, the last three and a half of them as bureau chief. In addition, Brian Calvert from AP’s London photography staff was in town on a short-term visa. Fred and I wrote articles on the launching based on reports from the Soviet news agency, TASS, and on watching television, those being our only sources because the Soviets never held briefings or allowed access to launch sites. The leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita S. Khrushchev, appeared on television congratulating the cosmonauts by radiotelephone after they reached orbit, and they replied on television. Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and premier of the government, was at his vacation estate on the Black Sea beach at Pitsunda in the Abkhazia region of Soviet Georgia. With him was a fellow member of the party’s eleven-man ruling committee, the Presidium , who was the titular president of the Soviet Union, Anastas I. Mikoyan. The televised congratulations turned out to be Khrushchev’s last public act in the role he had held since 1953 of the Soviet Union’s ebullient boss. His next act made Fred and me even busier than the space shot had already done. 176 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures It became known later that the Presidium had met in Moscow the day after Voskhod’s launch and decided to remove Khrushchev from party and government leadership. He was the victim of a Kremlin coup d’etat, stabbed in the back by his comrades and protégés. Leonid I. Brezhnev assumed the top job of party boss. While leading the Soviet Union longer than anyone except Stalin, Brezhnev dragged the country down from Khrushchev’s improvement in living standards into an era of stagnation. Brezhnev had first met Khrushchev, who was twelve years older, shortly after joining the Communist Party in 1931. Khrushchev was already a rising star in the party, which he had joined the year after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. On the Ukrainian front in World War II, Brezhnev was a political commissar working under Khrushchev, who was Stalin’s senior political commissar in the south making sure soldiers loyally did as they were ordered. From then on, Brezhnev clearly was Khrushchev’s protégé. After six months of political infighting following Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Khrushchev assumed what had been the old dictator’s key job: party leader with the title of first secretary of the Central Committee, the party group that in theory set policies and selected the Presidium, although committee members were actually selected by Presidium bosses in a top-down control system. Khrushchev gave Brezhnev jobs that led to his becoming in February 1956 a candidate, or alternate, member of the Presidium and one of the Central Committee secretaries. After Khrushchev out-maneuvered a Presidium effort to oust him in June 1957 by rallying the Central Committee on his side, he promoted Brezhnev to full membership in the Presidium. After another protégé of Khrushchev’s had fallen by the wayside, in 1960 Frol R. Kozlov won favor as Khrushchev’s right-hand man and party second secretary. Brezhnev, who had seemed to be in the running for that job, was sidelined to the powerless honor of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nation’s rubberstamp parliament. This was the job commonly described by foreigners as president of the U.S.S.R. He kept his Presidium seat but lost his party secretary job. It was in the presidency role that I first encountered Brezhnev, reporting...

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