Two New Men

When changes are made in the hierarchy of the Soviet Union, they often prove to be a case of strapping the same old collars onto fresh dogs. Last week the Kremlin named two men to top posts in the Soviet hierarchy, one to wield the sword and the other the pen. Though the shifts indicated no policy changes, they did produce new names and faces that the West will be hearing and seeing for some time.

>Andrei Antonovich Grechko, 63, Russia's First Deputy Defense Minister, was promoted to Defense Minister to replace Rodion Malinovsky, who died last month of cancer. His appointment abruptly ended speculation that the Kremlin, over army objections, was about to turn the defense ministry over to a civilian. Like Malinovsky, Grechko is a hardbitten, hard-drinking professional soldier who worked his way up through the ranks to become a marshal in the Red army. As Malinovsky's stand-in for the past ten years, he became proficient in the art of rocket rattling, in 1963 even claimed that "Soviet rockets can reach Polaris bases no mat ter where they are." For the past seven years, Grechko has doubled as supreme commander of the Warsaw Pact ar mies, a post that the Kremlin last week gave to another Russian general. Grechko is something of a political hero as well: among the eight rows of medals on his chest is East Germany's Gold Order of Merit, which he won for suppressing the workers' uprising in 1953.

>Sergei Georgievich Lapin, 55, a protege of Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, was promoted to director of Tass, Russia's news agency and principal propaganda organ. Tass not only serves Russian newspapers internally but has a worldwide network of 200 men in 93 countries, including four in Washington, is often accused of using them for other purposes than news gathering. A onetime Tassman (1945-55) who later switched to diplomacy and became Deputy Foreign Minister, Lapin has spent the past two years as ambassador to Red China, but has been absent from his post for months because of Chinese demonstrations against Russia. He replaced Dmitry F. Goryunov, another Brezhnev protege whose future is uncertain. With unjournalistic vagueness, Tass reported only that Goryunov has been assigned to "other work."

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