Leonid I Brezhnev

The late Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, written out of official history for two decades, was hailed at a Moscow meeting Sunday night as the man who sowed the seeds for Mikhail S. Gorbachev's program of reform, known as perestroika . About 2,000 people marking Khrushchev's 95th birthday in a hall near the Kremlin heard survivors of Josef Stalin's labor camps as well as Soviet intellectuals persecuted under former leader Leonid I....

Kremlin colleagues dragged a trembling Leonid I. Brezhnev to the telephone to make the call which led to him to topple Nikita S. Khrushchev as Soviet leader in 1964, according to a former KGB chief. In an interview with the weekly Argumenti i Fakti published Friday Vladimir V. Semichastny, who headed the KGB state security service from 1961 to 1967 gave an intriguing insight into the coup that ousted Khrushchev, whose flamboyant behavior and reform schemes met with mounting criticism within the leadership.

Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev awarded himself a coveted World War II medal that he did not earn and bestowed other war medals on his son-in-law, who was 5 years old when the fighting began, the newspaper Pravda said Sunday. Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982, consistently appeared in public bedecked with medals, ribbons and badges--including six Orders of Lenin, two Orders of the October Revolution and three awards as a "Hero of Socialist Labor."

Raisa Gorbachev, whose husband is seeking cooperation in modernizing Soviet industry during his visit to West Germany, showed the reason why today--her car wouldn't start. As the wife of the Soviet president chatted with a typical West German family in their modest apartment, her chauffeur battled with the ignition of her huge Soviet-made Zil limousine. Ironically, the apartment overlooked the Stuttgart works of the luxury auto maker Daimler-Benz. "They (Soviet leaders)

The government has ordered the removal from all public buildings of the names of former leaders Leonid I. Brezhnev and Konstantin U. Chernenko, including the houses in which they once lived, the official Tass news agency reported Thursday. Tass said the decision was made in response to letters and public appeals to authorities and the press.

A week of fierce fighting between anti-communist insurgents and Afghan government forces holding the strategic city of Jalalabad has killed scores of people and wounded hundreds, a guerrilla spokesman said Saturday. Guerrillas blasted Jalalabad in a relentless attack with long-range rockets and heavy artillery, said Mohammed Shoaib of the Jamaat-i-Islami insurgent group. Jalalabad is seen by the guerrillas as a stepping stone to the capital of Kabul, 75 miles to the west.

Former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, a Kremlin insider for more than four decades, has disclosed that former Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev had a serious drinking problem and ordered the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan after an emotional reaction to the assassination of a Communist leader in Kabul. Gromyko, 80, who advised every Soviet leader since Josef Stalin, made the disclosures in an interview published Sunday in the London Observer.

Kremlin leader Leonid I. Brezhnev suffered clinical death in January, 1976, but was revived and ruled in a virtual daze for six more years, a Soviet historian said today. The historian, Roy Medvedev, said Brezhnev was largely kept in power by corrupt officials in his entourage who knew they were safe while he remained as president and Communist Party general secretary.

The late Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev received a rare accolade in the press Thursday, one day after his successor's name was all but wiped off the map. The praise for Khrushchev, who was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from 1953 to 1964, came in a commentary by a local newspaper, Moscow Pravda, applauding the decision to remove the name of Leonid I. Brezhnev from a neighborhood district in Moscow, a city in the Tatar Autonomous Republic and squares in Leningrad and Moscow.

Former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko and 109 aging members of the Communist Central Party Committee were forced out today in what was viewed as a major political victory for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Eleven of the senior figures removed from the top Kremlin councils had been closely linked to Gorbachev's disgraced predecessor, Leonid I. Brezhnev. Clearly strengthening Gorbachev's position and the future of his perestroika reform program, the Communist Party's Central Committee approved the resignation of more than a third of the members of the policy-setting body who cited "reasons of health and other personal reasons."