(((Ah for the long, golden years of Brezhnev, a stable time when one could live well and make a solid career with the State and Party....
This is the Russian equivalent of that mournful modern American bumper sticker, "I never thought I'd say I miss Nixon.")))
COMMUNISTS MARK FORMER LEADER'S CENTENARY. Former CPSU Politburo member Yegor Ligachev and Gennady Zyuganov, who heads the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), led a commemorative meeting in the Moscow Electric Lamp Factory's House of Culture on December 19
to mark the 100th birthday of Leonid Brezhnev, who led the CPSU from
1964 until his death in 1982, Russian media reported. Recent polls suggest that a majority of Russians middle-aged and older have a positive view of the Brezhnev era as a stable time when one could live well and plan for the future. One poll conducted in 2005
indicated that 39 percent of respondents prefer life under President
Putin, while 31 percent favor the Brezhnev era. Only 1 percent would like to return to the times of President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, according to that survey. In the late 1980s, the Brezhnev era was dubbed "the era of stagnation." ITAR-TASS wrote on December 19 that
"during the last years of his rule, Brezhnev was the whole nation's laughingstock, and his senility angered many, intellectuals first and foremost. But in today's ocean of publications in the mass media and
TV productions, he appears as a 'hero of our time' again." PM
