Legacy
The incident immediately revealed the wide gulf that existed between Western and Soviet media. In its aftermath, news was scant and slow to emerge, and it took two full days for an official Soviet press statement to be made; even then the given details were so unclear that reporters could not even determine if the shooter was a man or a woman. However, even without official confirmation, observers at the time confidently recognized the event as an assassination attempt on Brezhnev.
Years later, the cosmonaut Leonov recounted how Brezhnev confided to him after the incident: "Brezhnev took me aside and told me, 'Those bullets were not meant for you, Alexei. They were meant for me, and for that I apologize.'" But until the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the KGB had kept information about the shooting to a bare minimum. The entire incident was "so effectively hushed up" that it is sometimes cited as a classic example of Soviet obfuscation and disinformation.
Read more about this topic: Brezhnev Assassination Attempt
Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)