A Plunge into Oblivion

Tacked on to the end of a long-winded account in Pravda of the latest Central Committee meeting was a laconic one-line communique: "Comrade A.N. Shelepin has been relieved of his position as a Politburo member at his request." Thus did Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin, the Kremlin's star ascendant of the 1950s and '60s, plummet last week into the particular oblivion reserved for disgraced Soviet leaders. No one was fooled by the official contention that the most ambitious, the most artful and potentially the most powerful man in the U.S.S.R. had willingly relinquished his post in the ruling 16-member Politburo. Indeed, few doubted that he would soon be stripped of his other post as trade union chief.

Sovietologists agreed that the shake-up was highly significant--but of what? Some Western commentators jumped to the conclusion that it was a triumph for Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's middle-of-the-road policies at home and detente abroad as against Shelepin's supposedly hard-lining Stalinism. Actually, Shelepin has consistently praised Brezhnev not only for his "vast personal contribution" to economic and political cooperation with the West but also for his handling of key domestic issues.

A Mere Stripling. In Moscow, the consensus among foreign diplomats was that Shelepin's fall had not been caused by policy differences but by power politics. According to one scenario, Shelepin was caught organizing a faction that would have seized power when the ailing Brezhnev retired or died. Now Brezhnev can probably count on eight votes, including his own, on issues that come before the 15 remaining Politburo members. This might enable him to engineer an orderly transfer of power at the 25th Party Congress that is scheduled to begin next February. Current favorite to succeed him, at least on an interim basis: Politburo Member Andrei Kirilenko, who like Brezhnev is 68 and reportedly ailing.

Whether or not Shelepin conspired to grab the U.S.S.R.'s top job, he has long been a formidable and potentially troublesome contender for it. At 56, Shelepin is a mere stripling in the ruling Soviet gerontocracy. He was the youngest member in the Politburo, where the average age is 66, and probably the healthiest. Moreover, as George Washington University Kremlinologist Carl Linden sees it, his impatient approach probably clashed with that of his cautious elders. "While Brezhnev and the other old men wanted to pursue glacial tactics, Shelepin was an activist, always looking for opportunities to shake things up in the world. He has probably favored pressing the Soviet advantage in Indochina, Portugal and the Middle East more actively than Brezhnev."

Shelepin's meteoric rise through the Communist Party apparatus under Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev showed him to be outstandingly adroit in cultivating useful political alliances and cutting through the ossified Soviet bureaucracy. He established a substantial power base as head of the Komsomol organization of young Communists and later as chief of the KGB, the Soviet secret police.

Some experts believe he helped Brezhnev engineer the conspiracy that ousted Khrushchev. At any rate, Shelepin was soon rewarded by a promotion to the Presidium (now the Politburo). Since 1965, however, while he remained a full Politburo member, he has always lurked in the antechambers of total power. His ambition and talent could hardly have pleased the Politburo majority.

The deadly blow to Shelepin's aspirations followed a disastrous trip to Britain earlier this month (TIME, April 14). The guest of the British Trades Union Congress, he was characterized by the press as a secret police assassin, pelted by demonstrators with bricks and umbrellas and snubbed by the Labor Government. Some observers speculated last week that Shelepin's enemies in the Kremlin might have deliberately thrust him into a situation that was bound to discredit him publicly. As one authoritative Western intelligence report has it, the Soviet leadership met in special session the very day Shelepin returned to Moscow. According to the report, his flight was conveniently an hour too late for him to join in the decision that he would "voluntarily" resign.

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