The Stand-in

While the Chinese were ratifying their own leadership, rumors continued to circulate about the health and status of Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. Amidst official denials that anything was amiss, Soviet diplomats conceded privately that Brezhnev was suffering from pneumonia and recuperating in a dacha outside Moscow. They expressed confidence, however, that he would recover sufficiently to receive British Prime Minister Harold Wilson on his scheduled state visit to Moscow in mid-February. Meanwhile, the official party newspaper Pravda referred frequently and reverently to Brezhnev, as if to underscore his political wellbeing.

One flurry of speculation was touched off when the Press Trust of India issued a story stating that Brezhnev had temporarily "taken leave of his responsibilities." Misinterpreting this dispatch, the French news agency AFP reported that Brezhnev had actually resigned. This sent Moscow-based correspondents scurrying round the capital, vainly trying to obtain confirmation. Just as the resignation rumors were subsiding for lack of evidence, another one surfaced when an unidentified Communist diplomat in Warsaw was quoted as saying that Brezhnev had suffered a heart attack last month--just before he vanished from public view. Some Kremlin watchers favored yet another popular diagnosis: leukemia. A London Kremlinologist reported that Brezhnev had developed a "moonface," or puffiness of the cheeks and jowls, a typical side effect of cortisone treatment for some kinds of cancer.

Although these reports seemed based on journalistic crystal gazing, there was no doubt that Brezhnev was indisposed and incommunicado. If Brezhnev should be too sick to rule, who would replace him? The answer may prove as problematical as the tangled mechanics of the transfer of power in the U.S.S.R. Although a General Secretary is supposedly elected by the 241 full members of the Central Committee, in practice he is designated by 27 men, members of the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat. In the past, this elite has scarcely been inclined to invest real power in any single individual. The death or ouster of every top leader in Soviet history has been followed by a long period of "collective leadership" until one man sufficiently consolidated his position to take over fully. Although Brezhnev became party chief after Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, he did not actually assume complete personal power until five years later.

Logical Choice. Specialists in Washington and Europe believe the most logical choice to succeed Brezhnev would be Andrei Kirilenko. During Brezhnev's present illness, Kirilenko is presumably standing in for his chief in the Politburo. In recent years he has often filled this role when Brezhnev was sick or traveling abroad. Thus Kirilenko would make an ideal transitional figure for a few years. At 68, Kirilenko represents no real threat to the younger members of the 16-man Politburo and ten-man Secretariat of the Central Committee, who would be jockeying for power under his titular leadership.

Others are often suggested: Premier Aleksei Kosygin, 70, whose age would make him, too, a stopgap candidate but who lacks a power base in the Communist Party structure; Politburo Member Alexander Shelepin, 56, a former secret police chief who now heads the trade unions and is known as a shrewd strategist and unabashed opportunist; Fyodor Kulakov, 56, the agricultural chief who by virtue of his relative youth could be a second-stage successor to Brezhnev; Kiril Mazurov, 60, a smooth party functionary who serves as Kosygin's deputy; and Secret Police Chief Yuri Andropov, 60, whose image would have to be "laundered" in some more respectable position first. But Kirilenko is in the strongest position.

Ethnic Russian. A small (5 ft. 6 in.) and relatively shadowy figure, Kirilenko is known as a follower rather than as an initiator of policy. In his 15 years in the Politburo, he has been mainly concerned with maintaining party controls in Soviet industry. Trained as an engineer, he spent the first 20 years of his political career in the Ukraine as a party bureaucrat in industrial areas. One of his important qualifications for party boss is that he is a full Politburo member and also a Secretary of the Central Committee.

In spite of his Ukrainian-sounding name, Kirilenko is an ethnic Russian --virtually a requirement for the job of party chief since the death of Stalin, a Georgian. Three months older than Brezhnev, he is believed to suffer from arteriosclerosis. Said one Soviet political scientist: "He's not well--you have to keep reminding him of things." Since 1968, Kirilenko has made trips to a dozen Western and Soviet bloc countries. His views on domestic and foreign affairs are as yet unclear. Still, one U.S. Soviet affairs expert conceded last week: "For all we know, he could turn out to be a Pope John or an Adenauer."

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