Half a World Lies Open

By Roger Rosenblatt

Leonid Brezhnev leaves a vacuum greater than the man who filled it

Suddenly the Soviet Union demands our scrutiny again: the deep chasm peered at impolitely by a world that, in every age, has found it impenetrable, benumbing. When Joseph Conrad wrote about the place, he called his novel Under Western Eyes because he wanted his readers to understand that his story was being told by an outsider, meaning that no non-Russian could ever hope to see into that particular heart of darkness with any clarity or certainty. It is the same now. With Leonid Brezhnev gone, where are Western eyes to look, at the man or at the space he left, for an understanding of this moment?

Brezhnev was his country--genial, brutal, boring. He had the face of both plodder and plotter, being something of each; a scholar's face and a doorman's, the kind one does not notice until it is in charge of things. In the West one saw him mostly in photographs: clapping solemnly at parades, his chest tiered with medals, his body like a metalwork; or embracing a world leader.

How he must have relished pawing Nixon, who hated to be touched. For all Brezhnev's bulk, there was something oddly "dainty" about him, as Willy Brandt put it. Here was huge, shapeless Mother Russia dressed as a man, the androgynous nation full of bear hugs and danger.

As for the quality of his mind, it is suggested by Kissinger in his latest memoir. Kissinger recalls a day when Brezhnev took him hunting and an enormous wild boar approached: "One could see easily why it had attained such a size. It was not greedy; it set about to investigate the bait. It examined the ground before every step. It looked carefully behind every tree. It advanced in a measured pace. It had clearly survived and thrived by taking no unnecessary chances. All its precautions attracted Brezhnev's attention, however, and he felled it with a single shot." Brezhnev probably understood the quarry because the quarry was so like himself. The difference was that Brezhnev had no Brezhnev in the Soviet hierarchy to shoot him down; he saw to that. Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Khrushchev, he had nothing sudden, nothing revolutionary, about him. Yet all three of his predecessors were contained in him. He gave stolidity to his country's history.

After his long reign, the Soviet Union was no longer a public desperado banging shoes to gain attention.

But what exactly was it? What lies in the chasm, which, after all, should be a lot easier to comprehend than when Conrad was searching it? In 1517, the German Ambassador brought the West its first description of a Russian ruler: "He surpasses all the monarchs of the whole world. He uses his authority as much over ecclesiastics as laymen, and holds unlimited control over the lives and property of all his subjects: not one of his counselors has sufficient authority to dare to oppose him." Was he describing a Tsar or a Stalin? The power alone is not unfathomable. The country itself seems both to seek subjugation and to struggle against it. It takes a special kind of oppressor to succeed in such a place. Like Brezhnev, he must appear to have sprung from the soil and descended from the sky simultaneously. He must be both the struggle and the oppression.

With Brezhnev gone, his successor, Yuri Andropov, will initially be not only a mystery to the West but a cloud to his people as well. So begins the fascinating exercise of watching another Soviet leader fill the abyss. Andropov could prove to be someone who is barely there, a transitional figure. Or it may turn out that in a year or two he, like those before him, will be the Soviet Union itself--a massive burden to impose on any man, but one that is necessary in a nation where power is either total or usurped.

For the moment little is clear, except the departure of a methodical leader, equally frank and canny, whose principal virtues were stamina, patience and the common sense to realize that if power is what you want, you build up the military. Thus the Soviet Union is both strong and fragile now: long on guns, short on butter. It is precisely as the poet Nekrasov described it a hundred years ago: "Wretched and abundant." Yet these abstractions give no sense of the essential character of the country, or of the direction it now will take. Half a world lies open, but not visible, either to the other half, or to the Soviet people themselves, who must wait to be told their fate. Thus operates the future that does not work, which determines so much of our own.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

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