The years post Kennedy were somewhat subdued when it came to the relationship with Russia. The USA concentrated on a Hate-Hate relationship whereby nuclear weapons were the primary threat that facilitated the Vietnam War.
The Domino Effect.
Little would the USA political machines admit the Domino Effect was only effective with Dominoes. And I am not talking pizza.
There would be three Soviet leaders after Khrushchev; Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, that were primarily invisible to the American populous and history. Nikita Khrushchev and his bad behavior at the United Nations would endure as a Cold War icon until the mid-1980s.
Of those three leaders, Leonid Brezhnev would spend the most time at the top of the Soviet Union. He was there for eighteen years until his death in 1982.
Khrushchev was not disliked and removed from leadership because of his Cold War standing; it was his failing economics. He was relieved of his leadership in 1964, not quite a year after the Kennedy assassination. One has to wonder if a deeper fear of American rhetoric would cause a nuclear exchange between the two countries, hence, a change in leadership. Oswald had spent time in Russia and even applied for citizenship before returning to the USA.
Brezhnev would spend a great many years post Kennedy revitalizing the Russian economy from stagnation. His real military movement would not begin again until "The Prague Spring."
The Prague Spring of 1968 (click here) is the term used for the brief period of time when the government of Czechoslovakia led by Alexander Dubček seemingly wanted to democratise the nation and lessen the stranglehold Moscow had on the nation’s affairs. The Prague Spring ended with a Soviet invasion, the removal of Alexander Dubček as party leader and an end to reform within Czechoslovakia....
The Prague Spring was a cultural revolution. It declared greater freedoms for Czech Republic citizens. It was the rise of unions, enhanced freedom of speech and cultural changes. It was primarily a benign movement in that it was not militarized. But, Brezhnev would see it as a challenge to the Soviet culture of oppression and stable states. In 1968, the Warsaw Pact nations, the Soviet Union and allies of Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany),Hungary and Poland ,invaded Czechoslovakia.
20-08-2003 | Jan Velinger
It has been thirty-five years (click here) since Soviet troops began entering Czechoslovakia late on August 20th and early August 21st in a carefully orchestrated invasion designed to crush the period of political and economic reforms known as the Prague Spring, reforms led by the country's new First Secretary of the Communist party Alexander Dubcek. A movement viewed by Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet hard-liners in Moscow as a serious threat to the Soviet Union's hold on the Socialist satellite states, they decided to act....
But, Brezhnev, was viewed as a isolationist. It is that isolationism others would come to appreciate as the reason for poor Soviet economics. The George H. W. Bush administration would state it was economics that caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but, in actuality it was more than that. It was oppression reaching its maximum due to economic strife that would break the Soviet Union down. The movement against oppression which isolated nations causing economic strife was being leaned into culturally and subsurface since the Prague Spring. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the people were ready for it. They wanted it.
Brezhnev and Ford signing joint communiqué on the SALT treaty in Vladivostok.
Brezhnev was the pivot for both the USA and the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was the awakening of the West to a resolve to stop the USA advancement of nuclear proliferation. Brezhnev would seek only to enforce the Warsaw Pact without blinking, but, in absence of hatred of the West. He was the pivot from the Cold War to a place where Russia had standing as a country to respect. He was an outreach beyond the Cold War, or at least the beginning of it. But, the Warsaw Pact reaction to The Prague Spring was directly related to the Cold War and the stability of a counter superpower to the USA.
