"The Politburo would have gone on rotating the same old 1950s waxworks - Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov."---LOL
They started it again... Putin!
I was pretty young during the '80s, but I remember my father (an ardent anti-communist; he escaped Hungary in 1956) saying at the time that the Politburo kept installing old, sick men as Secretary-General because they needed more time to plan their ulimate strategy. My dad passed on in 1990, but I often wonder what he would think of the current state of things.