Ending an Era of Drift

By John Kohan

It was 8 a.m. in Moscow last Monday and Yelena, a student in a technical school, had just turned on her television set expecting to watch her favorite exercise program. Instead, a news show on world events was on the air. Any place else, the change in programming would not have been all that unusual, but in the Soviet Union of the past three years it was more than enough to prompt the concern that it had happened again--a Soviet leader had died. The suspicion was all but confirmed when regularly scheduled broadcasts during the following six hours were replaced by nature films and classical music. Having mastered the macabre code used to signal the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 and that of his successor Yuri Andropov only 15 months later, millions of Soviet citizens were fully prepared for the announcement, which was finally broadcast simultaneously on radio and television at 2 p.m.: "Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet, died at 7:20 p.m. on March 10, 1985, after a grave illness."

The news about Chernenko's death was hardly unexpected, given his age, 73, and his increasingly poor health. The medical report, signed by Dr. Yevgeni Chazov, the chief Kremlin physician, revealed that Chernenko had died of heart failure brought on by chronic emphysema. The report noted that the late General Secretary had also suffered from "chronic hepatitis, which worsened into cirrhosis," a deterioration of the liver.

The real surprise came the next day when Soviet citizens lined up at newspaper kiosks to buy Pravda. The front page of the Communist Party daily was not dominated by a black-bordered picture of the late Soviet President, as had been the case when Brezhnev and Andropov died; readers had to turn to the second page for a glimpse of Chernenko. Instead, the front-page space was devoted to the official portrait of the new leader, a balding, round-faced man, and the announcement that Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, had been chosen by the Central Committee as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The decision to give over the front page of Pravda to Gorbachev was more a matter of protocol than an intended slight of Chernenko. But it did reflect the unprecedented speed of the latest succession in the Kremlin. News of Gorbachev's promotion to the highest post in the land came only five hours after Chernenko's death was announced. In Geneva, Soviet negotiators signaled the U.S. delegation, which had arrived there early last week to resume arms- control talks, that business would go on as usual, despite the death of Chernenko. Said a Moscow housewife: "It looks as if they are getting Chernenko out of the way in a hurry--as if they have a lot to do and they want to get on with it."

It did indeed appear that the Soviet Union wanted to put the world on notice that the era of drift, of weak and enfeebled leadership that began in Brezhnev's declining years, had come to an abrupt end. A small circle of aging leaders, men whose careers spanned most of their nation's history, had handed over power to someone from the younger generation, an event as monumental in its way as the death of Stalin in 1953. The Kremlin no longer could be viewed as the domain of ailing and absent rulers; its boss was now a man of vigor who might well lead the Soviet Union into the 21st century.

Before moving into the future, Gorbachev had to take leave of the past. His first days in power were filled with the pomp and panoply of a funeral that brought heads of state and other dignitaries from 49 nations to the Soviet capital. Television coverage gave Soviet citizens a closer look at their new leader, who is better known in the West than in his own country thanks to extensive Western press coverage of his visit to Britain last December. Evening news programs showed Gorbachev and the Politburo delegation as they paused inside the House of Trade Unions to contemplate the alabaster profile of Chernenko; the open coffin was set high amid a bank of purple, red and white flowers. At one point, Gorbachev bent over to express his condolences to Chernenko's widow Anna. Gorbachev's wife Raisa was seated at her side. During the 42 hours that Chernenko's body lay in state, convoys of buses brought groups of party faithful, many of them workers and farmers from outlying regions, to swell the crowds that waited patiently to walk past the bier.

In most details, the Chernenko funeral differed little from the final rites for Brezhnev and Andropov. The crack gray-uniformed honor guards, goose- stepping beside the red and black-bedecked gun carriage, each balancing his rifle on one hand, seemed as coldly perfect as a precision gear wheel put through one more rotation. Portraits of Chernenko bobbed above the crowds in a regular pattern as the cortege made its way into Red Square.

What seemed to be the only moment of genuine emotion came from Chernenko's widow. While cameras discreetly looked on in long focus, Anna Chernenko kissed her husband's cheek and repeatedly bowed her head against his shoulder until she had to be drawn away from the casket. Fog horns and sirens keened as the coffin was lowered into a plot on the Kremlin Wall terrace, opposite to where Brezhnev and Andropov are buried. As the national anthem sounded, the red and gold hammer-and-sickle flag above the Kremlin was hoisted back to full staff and troops marched briskly past the Lenin Mausoleum to the sounds of a military march. The old era had ended.

After the funeral, Vice President George Bush, French President Francois Mitterrand, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and a long line of other distinguished visitors quietly filed past Chernenko's grave. Then they passed through the Kremlin gates to meet the new man in charge.

Dressed in a dark blue suit and blue-striped tie, Gorbachev stood at the head of a receiving line in the white-and-gilt Hall of St. George. Premier Nikolai Tikhonov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and First Vice President Vasili Kuznetsov were by his side as he greeted the foreign dignitaries. Gorbachev looked his guests in the eye, occasionally giving a visitor a two-handed grip or flashing a reserved smile of recognition.

Later Gorbachev met privately with many of the leaders. Mitterrand described the new General Secretary as "a calm, relaxed man who appears willing to tackle problems firmly." Said Kohl: "You do not have the impression that you are listening to a Tibetan prayer wheel." Thatcher, who had proclaimed Gorbachev "a man with whom we can do business" after meeting him in Britain last December, said she was not changing her opinion after conversing with him for 55 minutes in Moscow. Said Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney: "He's clearly in command and I think it augurs well for the future. I was very impressed."

Bush came away from his 85-minute private session with Gorbachev in a cautiously optimistic mood. His feelings, Bush said, were "high, high on hope, high that we can make progress in Geneva, high for an overall reduction of tensions." Bush, who had flown to the Soviet Union on the heels of a 13,000-mile tour of Africa with a stop-over in Geneva to address a United Nations conference on that continent's famine, hand-delivered a special message to Gorbachev from President Reagan. The President had attended neither Brezhnev's nor Andropov's funeral, but, given the significance of the latest change in the Soviet leadership, there was some thought in the White House that a quick Reagan visit to Moscow for the Chernenko burial would constitute symbolic assurance of U.S. concern for better relations. At 9:30 a.m. Washington time, 3 1/2 hours after the announcement of Chernenko's death, Reagan and a small group of aides that included Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane gathered in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a Moscow trip. Shultz set forth the pros and cons of an impromptu summit, but Reagan had already made up his mind during earlier meetings with White House Chief of Staff Don Regan and Close Friend Michael Deaver. The decision was not to go, mainly because there was insufficient time to prepare for a meeting with Gorbachev and little prospect of fulfilling the high expectations such a trip would inevitably create.

Instead, the President decided to send Bush with a letter inviting Gorbachev to come to the U.S. for a meeting at a mutually convenient time. (The last two U.S.-Soviet summits were held outside the U.S.) The general nature of the invitation made it clear that the U.S. no longer insisted, as it had during the Andropov and Chernenko regimes, that there be a specific agenda for a superpower summit. Gorbachev accepted invitations to visit both France and West Germany during his more than 15 hours of meetings with world leaders last week, but according to Shultz, who returned from Moscow last Friday to brief the President, the Kremlin was still pondering the Reagan offer. Administration officials characterized Gorbachev's response as "We are interested and we will get back to you."

Shultz told the press that the Reagan message was "constructive." "We believe that this is a potentially important moment for U.S.-Soviet relations," he said. The Secretary explained that his discussions with Gorbachev had touched on the President's desire for deep cuts in nuclear arsenals and for a "long-term dialogue" on the contribution that Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars plan, could make to foster more stable superpower relations. Shultz described Gorbachev as "energetic and businesslike," someone who could go "right at the issues in a conversational way." But Shultz also cautioned, "It is one thing to be businesslike, but whether it turns out you can do business is another matter."

The swiftness of the transition raised expectations in some West European publications that a positive new era was unfolding in the Soviet Union. The German weekly Stern headlined the story of Gorbachev's ascendance with the question A RED KENNEDY? A more ponderous query followed: "Does he have the spirit of Peter the Great, who opened Russia to the West in the 18th century in order to strengthen it?" But not everyone--certainly not government officials and analysts who specialize in Soviet affairs--echoed any such attitude. Said West Germany's Heinz Brahm, a director at the Federal Institute for Eastern and International Studies: "We can expect a new charm offensive toward Western Europe. We may find ourselves longing for the days of the old men who didn't talk very much."

The general caution reflected fears that Gorbachev, like Andropov, was being oversold in parts of the West as a man of "liberal" views who would take radical measures to revamp the Soviet system and open doors to the outside world. In fact, very little was known in the West about Gorbachev until recently, except that he was a Moscow State University-trained lawyer and an agronomist, and a man of remarkable political staying power. Then, last December in Britain, Gorbachev and his wife created a stir with their unproletarian style--the London penny press called them the Gucci Comrades. Within days a Soviet media star was born who sported dark, conservatively cut suits, smiled and joked, and was fast on his feet in a way that led one British journalist to compare him to "a successful lawyer or banker from the Midwest." It seemed a repeat of what one U.S. official called the "Andropov syndrome--that the man drank Scotch and wore cuffs on his pants."

There is one major difference between the elusive Andropov and Gorbachev. While KGB disinformers spread tantalizing tales about Andropov's taste for Scotch, Benny Goodman and Western pulp fiction, the former chief of the Soviet intelligence services remained the shadowy figure he had always been. Andropov, throughout his life, never traveled to the West and was seen only from afar at Kremlin ceremonies. Gorbachev, in contrast, is responsible for creating his own image abroad. He has what one Washington Kremlinologist calls "a real sense of public relations."

Quite aside from the cut of his clothes or his jib, Gorbachev indisputably differs from the Old Guard in his ability to talk to Westerners without giving shrill lectures on the advantages of the Soviet way. He has made eleven trips abroad, six of them to Western countries, and demonstrated to farmers in Canada, politicians in Britain, and NATO diplomats that he is a good listener and that he can discuss issues briskly and without putting them into an ideological context. In talks with British officials in London last year, for example, he argued against the development of Star Wars weaponry, saying that it would divert funds badly needed to modernize the Soviet economy. Also in Britain he told a group of business executives, "If we can get the economics right, I believe politics and peace will look after themselves." Whether new ways of speaking necessarily mean new ways of thinking is, of course, another matter. Argued a State Department official last week: "I think we will see a lot of old wine in new bottles."

Gorbachev provided the clearest outline of his agenda in his 30-minute acceptance speech to the Central Committee the day he took office. He offered no strikingly new programs or proposals. His emphasis was on continuity. Said Gorbachev: "The strategic line, worked out at the 26th Party Congress (and) at the subsequent plenary meetings of the Central Committee with the vigorous participation of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov and Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, has been and remains unchanged."

In evoking the name of Andropov, who is widely believed to have been responsible for Gorbachev's rapid rise through the hierarchy, the General Secretary signaled his intention to pursue the cautious program of bureaucratic and economic reform that has been desultorily followed for the past two years. The Soviet Union, Gorbachev said, had to make a "decisive turn" and switch the economy to the "tracks of intensive development." Hinting at the widening technological gap between the West and the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev asked his countrymen to push for scientific and technical excellence by applying socialist economic principles "in a creative way." Even within a planned economy, he said, there was room for "enhancing the independence of enterprises (and) raising their interest in the end product of their work." But Gorbachev also cautioned against letting the drive for greater material benefits disrupt "social justice," a signal that the Soviet Union, for all its economic difficulties, was not about to adopt the sort of incentive systems being introduced and practiced these days in Deng Xiaoping's China.

Turning to foreign affairs, Gorbachev declared that the Kremlin's first priority was to "strengthen in every way the fraternal friendship with our closest friends." What that might mean for Moscow's East European allies appeared to have been left intentionally vague. Since the word reform continues to be anathema in Czechoslovakia, the regime of Party Leader Gustav Husak hoped that Gorbachev would not bring about change too quickly. The pragmatic-minded Hungarians, on the other hand, welcomed Gorbachev as a potential reformer, sympathetic to the economic experiments that have given Hungary the highest standard of living in the East bloc. There was nothing in Gorbachev's speech, however, to indicate that he would be more tolerant than his predecessors of any East European moves toward greater independence from Moscow.

Gorbachev was unambiguous about his desire to patch up differences with China. "We would like a serious improvement of relations with the Chinese People's Republic," he said, "and believe that, given reciprocity, this is quite possible." Relations between the two Communist neighbors have grown noticeably better since First Deputy Premier Ivan Arkhipov visited China last December, the most senior Soviet official to do so in 15 years. China was represented at the funeral by Vice Premier Li Peng, 56, a technocrat typical of Peking's younger generation of leaders. A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Peking said that the Chinese government had "taken note" of Gorbachev's offer.

The General Secretary also underlined the Kremlin's ongoing commitment to Third World revolutionary groups. "The Soviet Union has always supported the struggle of peoples for liberation from colonial oppression," he said. Gorbachev joined later with one Third World friend, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, to "vigorously condemn U.S. interference" in Latin America. Moscow's closest ally in that region was absent from the funeral. Cuban President Fidel Castro sent his brother Raul in his place, fueling speculation of a possible squabble between Havana and Moscow over Soviet economic assistance.

In the global view, the most interesting passage of the speech dealt with Gorbachev's views on East-West relations and arms control. Said he: "To good will the Soviet Union will always respond with goodwill, as it will respond with trust to trust." Moscow, he declared, "valued" the successes of detente and was prepared to continue the process. He repeated Soviet offers to freeze nuclear arsenals, but went on to say that "we want a real and major reduction of the arms stockpiles and not the development of ever new weapons systems, be it in space or on earth," and called on the Kremlin's negotiating "partners" to respond in kind.

Then came the tough talk. The Soviet Union, warned Gorbachev, was prepared to meet any attack with a "crushing retaliatory strike." Tipping his hat to the military, he said that "our glorious armed forces will have, in (the) future as well, everything necessary for that."

The exact circumstances under which Gorbachev gained the Kremlin's highest prize remained unknown last week, but there were some reasonable assumptions about how this latest transition had come about. Not many lights in Moscow's Central Committee building were burning late into the night after Chernenko's death, indicating that the decision to appoint Gorbachev had been made well before Chernenko passed away. Indeed, shortly after Chernenko came to power in February 1984, Soviet officials had let it be quietly known that Gorbachev, the man whom many initially considered to be Andropov's handpicked heir, had come out of the succession race with a secure hold on the No. 2 slot. He was given the prestigious post of Party Secretary for Ideology, and increasingly served as a stand-in for Chernenko as the older man's strength ebbed.

The decisive moment for Gorbachev may have come last summer, when Chernenko was out of public view for 54 days. Gorbachev apparently moved into a position of shadow leader during that period, presiding in Chernenko's stead over meetings of the Politburo. "He succeeded Chernenko because he already held the gavel," said a Washington Kremlinologist. The Soviets' chief disarmament negotiator, Viktor Karpov, told newsmen in Geneva that it was Gorbachev who had led the Politburo session a week earlier. At that meeting the leadership endorsed the Soviet Union's opening position at the arms- control talks.

Gorbachev's rise to the top would not have been possible without backers in the three main sources of Soviet power: the military, the security services and the party bureaucracy. Unlike some of his predecessors, Gorbachev could make no pretense of having defended the motherland under fire: he was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. As his Central Committee speech indicated, he will pay close attention to the military, but he will be dealing with a defense establishment that was politically weakened by the death last December of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov and the dramatic demotion three months earlier of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the onetime Chief of the General Staff. Moreover, rumors circulated in Moscow last week that the current Defense Minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, 73, a longtime Ustinov deputy, was ill.

Sokolov did not appear during Chernenko's lying-in-state in House of Trade Unions, and no military officers stood with the party leadership atop the Lenin Mausoleum during the funeral in Red Square--perhaps to make the marshal's absence less obvious. Noted Columbia University Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer: "It was very fortunate for Gorbachev that the military was put in its place before he took power."

As the protege of Andropov, the KGB chief from 1967 to 1982, Gorbachev presumably will be able to count on the support of the security apparatus. He could help to cement those ties by promoting to full membership in the Politburo the pres-ent KGB boss, General Viktor Chebrikov, 61, who was named to the post in 1982.

In the murky world of Kremlin power sharing, all distinctions ultimately blur in the Politburo, where military and security issues become tightly intertwined with party politics. A major question is the degree to which Gorbachev alone can make much of an imprint on Soviet foreign and domestic policy. Said President Reagan at a White House lunch for a group of editors and broadcasters: "While an individual, once chosen by them, can undoubtedly influence or persuade them to certain things that might be particular theories or policies of his, the government basically remains the same group of individuals."

Foreign Minister Gromyko emerged from the succession as the most prominent member of the Old Guard. Given Gorbachev's relative inexperience in foreign affairs, it seems likely that Gromyko will continue to guide Kremlin policy toward the outside world. If Gorbachev quickly secures the two other major posts, Chairman of the Defense Council and the largely ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet--in effect, President--he will have all the outer accoutrements of power. A sharing of these responsibilities would indicate that he still has some way to go to establish himself firmly and fend off all possible Politburo rivals.

Ultimately, Gorbachev will probably set about remaking the ruling elite in his own image. Time and numbers will work to his advantage. Death has shrunk the number of full Politburo members. Gorbachev could make his move at the next party plenum, set for this spring, to advance younger technocrats like Vladimir Dolgikh, 60, the party secretary in charge of heavy industry, and Eduard Shevardnadze, 57, the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party and an advocate of economic reform; both are nonvoting members of the Politburo. Other possible candidates for promotion include Nikolai Ryzhkov, 55, a former engineer in charge of the Central Committee section for economic planning, and Yegor Ligachev, 64, who holds the key job of supervising personnel changes in the party.

Gorbachev's most pressing task will be to oversee the selection of new members for the 300-plus Central Committee, to be chosen at the 27th Party Congress, which is expected to take place later this year. "He is going to concentrate on getting his people in," says a Western diplomat in Moscow. "This is the Central Committee that will be ratifying Politburo seats for the next five years." If Gorbachev hopes, as he signaled last week, to invigorate the sluggish Soviet economy, he will have to unveil his program as part of the 1986-90 Five-Year Plan, which will be adopted by the Party Congress.

In Washington, there was a discernible sense of skepticism about whether a new age was dawning in East-West relations. Many analysts felt that Gorbachev, however young and personable, could ultimately prove to be a supremely talented apparatchik, but one without the breadth of vision to carry out far- reaching internal reforms or a reassessment of the Soviet Union's relations abroad. Calendar age does not necessarily equate with political outlook, nor is new necessarily better. Said one State Department official: "Gorbachev's energy will vitalize his office, so the possibility of progress is greater. But at the same time his ability to exploit our vulnerabilities is greater." President Reagan offered his own assessment of the Soviet leader who might eventually face him at the summit table: "I do not think that there is any evidence that he is less dominated by their system and their philosophy than any of the others, but it is not true that I do not trust anyone under 70."

Reagan's quip touched on a blind spot in outside perceptions of the Soviet Union. The world has dealt for so long with a gerontocracy in Moscow that it knows next to nothing about the men of Gorbachev's generation who will move forward now that he has breached the generational dividing wall. Will better education and greater exposure make them more flexible in their thinking and more accommodating in their dealings with foreigners? Or will they master the ways of the West, but only to pursue better the Soviet Union's long-standing interests?

Clearly it was much too early to take more than a quick measure of Gorbachev. First impressions, whether of new U.S. Presidents or new Soviet General Secretaries, have proved too often to be false impressions. Given the many promises made and broken, the aborted starts and wrong turnings in the tortuous history of U.S.-Soviet relations, there seemed little reason to hope that Moscow and Washington would be any more likely to take advantage of the present period of change to put their relationship on a new footing.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof and Nancy Traver/Moscow