Again, the World Holds Its Breath

By Strobe Talbott

After only 15 months of power, Andropov leaves unfinished business and a country in need of leadership

He was a long time dying; the world was a long time waiting. Indeed, since last fall, Kremlinology had become largely a death watch. In capitals round the world the same questions persisted: After Andropov, who? After Andropov, what?

Yet there was no sense of anticlimax when it actually happened. The news still stunned a Washington already benumbed by the latest upheaval in Lebanon. U.S. policymakers and experts were awakened early Friday morning, and their reaction was, in the main, anything but a yawn. A major event had occurred, and there was no way to be fully prepared.

For one thing, Soviet officials had insisted that Andropov was recovering. For another, no amount of warning and contingency planning renders the actual event routine when the deceased is the leader of the Soviet Union. So it was with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev--all of whom were, like Yuri Andropov, a long time dying, and all of whose deaths occasioned not just obituaries but portentous talk of epochs and turning points. If Andropov's passing occasioned anxiety as well, it was because questions the experts have been asking for so long could still not be answered.

In the Soviet Union, leadership transitions are, by definition, leadership crises. The most oppressively managed of societies and political systems has never been able to manage successions in a way that avoids conveying a sense of crisis both to the Soviet people and to the world. Top leaders never retire with honor.

They either die on the job (as Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev did), or they are thrown out and end up as pensioners in ignominy (as Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev were).

The paralysis of the Soviet gerontocracy could hardly have been more vividly demonstrated than by the macabre spectacle of Andropov's long eclipse. For months, he was nowhere to be seen as his colleagues insisted he was suffering from "a severe cold." In his place, a disembodied, ventriloquial voice spoke for the Soviet leadership in carefully drafted, presumably ghost-written statements issued in Andropov's name and in "interviews" in Pravda.

The Soviet leaders are unable to cope with the political implications of their own aging, infirmity and mortality for a reason that is simple and damning enough: theirs is a system based on the seizure, accumulation and consolidation of power. It has no built-in mechanisms for the sharing or transferring of authority beyond the inner circle. Every time a Soviet leader dies or is incapacitated, the world ought to be reminded of that essential fact.

The conservative old men who run the Soviet Union operate by two sets of rules--those that they make by and for themselves, and those that are established and enforced by the actuarial tables. Andropov's heirs found themselves in a dilemma that underscores the irony of the Soviet Union's youthfulness as a state (a mere 61--six years younger than the average age of the Politburo members) and the falsity of its claims to represent the wave of the future.

The safe choice would be for the old guard to pick from its own ranks. But that would mean going through the same trauma again, sooner rather than later. A younger successor would postpone that embarrassment, but he would carry a higher degree of uncertainty, of unpredictability.

The Soviet leaders hate uncertainty, they hate unpredictability. Yet they find themselves repeatedly unprepared in the face of the ultimate certainty: death. Even when we know "after Andropov, who," it will be months, perhaps years, before we know "after Andropov, what." --By Strobe Talbott