Soviet Union Winds of Kremlin Change

By George Russell

Once again, surprise was in the air in Moscow. For the second time in two months, the increasingly confident new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, last week shook the Kremlin with a dramatic burst of changes at the top. Grigory Romanov, the man who some Western analysts believe had been Gorbachev's rival for the Communist Party leadership before the General Secretary's March 11 accession, was unceremoniously dropped from the ruling Politburo. One of the oldest and most familiar Kremlin figures of all, Andrei Gromyko, who has been his country's Foreign Minister for the past 28 years, was raised to the prestigious but largely ceremonial post of President, a position that had been vacant since the death of Konstantin Chernenko on March 10. Immediately thereafter, the Foreign Ministry passed into the untried hands of Eduard Shevardnadze, party boss of the southern Soviet republic of Georgia.

Amid this spate of unexpected appointments, another decision was announced in relatively muted fashion by both Moscow and Washington. President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev will hold the first U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in six years, in Geneva on Nov. 19 and 20. Both sides were careful to limit the potential significance of the scheduled encounter.

What did all the moving and shaking mean? One thing for certain: less than four months after he took office as General Secretary of the Communist Party following Chernenko's death, Gorbachev, 54, was consolidating his power, as one U.S. Kremlinologist put it, "faster than any previous leader in Soviet history." In April the urbane, affable Soviet leader had gained three new places for his supporters on a newly expanded, 13-member Politburo. The latest shake-up was apparently aimed at giving Gorbachev the same kind of free hand, and perhaps a wider range of policy choices, in his dealings abroad. Said Peter Reddaway, a Soviet expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science: "This makes it more conceivable that changes could happen in the field of foreign policy." Above all, Gorbachev's new round of shuffles displayed a combination of determination and political virtuosity that promises to make him a formidable summiteer come November (see box). The first of his moves was made public in a one-sentence announcement following a closed-door meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Romanov, 62, onetime Leningrad party chief and overseer of the Soviet Union's military- industrial complex, had been "relieved of his duties" on the Politburo "in connection with retirement on health grounds." The change was not unexpected. There had been rumors that Romanov is being treated for alcoholism in a sanatorium. It was the first direct demotion from the Central Committee's policymaking body since Andrei Kirilenko, then 76, retired in 1982, also for health reasons.

The major event on the party leader's schedule for the following day was a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union's nominal parliament. Gorbachev had been widely expected to use that session to assume the presidency, formally known as the Chairmanship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. That would have followed the example of his three predecessors, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Chernenko. Instead, Gorbachev rose in Moscow's columned Great Kremlin Palace to declare that his duties demanded such "intensity" that he should concentrate on the party leadership. He then nominated Gromyko, 75, who he described as an "eminent political figure" and also, significantly, as "one of the oldest party members." Then came the second part of Gorbachev's surprise. Gromyko's replacement as Soviet Foreign Minister would be Shevardnadze, 57, the vigorous, innovative Georgian who had been named to full Politburo membership only the previous day, filling the Romanov vacancy.

Kremlinologists quickly noted that after a highly successful 13-year career as party leader in one of the Soviet Union's most fiercely traditional republics, Shevardnadze has unquestioned political skills. It is also clear that he has close relations with Gorbachev. His foreign policy experience, however, is negligible. The most obvious implication drawn by most analysts was that Gorbachev intends to be his own Foreign Minister.

Whatever else the moves implied, it appeared that Gorbachev had found a novel and relatively graceful way to ring down the curtain on an era while continuing his rejuvenation of the Politburo. Since the end of Chernenko's painfully indecisive 13-month reign, Gromyko has been widely viewed as the foremost member of the Kremlin's Old Guard. His personal power reached an apogee last March when, it is believed, he played a principal role in winning the party leadership for Gorbachev. Gromyko nominated Gorbachev in an impassioned speech to the Politburo (subsequently published) that was seemingly designed to overcome resistance to the choice among some other members of the Kremlin gerontocracy. Last week it appeared that Gorbachev had repaid his debt to Gromyko. But at the same time Gorbachev removed a potential source of opposition to any future changes he may have in store for Soviet foreign policy.

How Gromyko felt about the change remained, as usual, something of a mystery. After the 1,500-member Supreme Soviet gave unanimous approval to his nomination, the dour, stoop-shouldered diplomat, variously known as Grim Grom and Dr. Nyet, accepted Gorbachev's praise and his new title in typically expressionless style. "It is not for me to judge whether I deserve such words or not," he said. "I shall make every effort to discharge with honor my duty to the party, to the country, to the people."

What has most impressed Western analysts has been the speed at which Gorbachev's changes have occurred. Indeed, that may prove to be a hallmark of the Gorbachev era. The party boss showed the same kind of decisiveness in April, when he suddenly increased his control over the Politburo. At the % time, he served notice that "revolutionary changes" would be the order of the day.

Romanov's ouster seems to be a case in point. Before Gorbachev's selection as General Secretary, Romanov was regarded by many Kremlinologists as a serious contender for the leadership. According to some reports, Romanov led the opposition to Gorbachev inside the Politburo by nominating another Old Guardsman, Moscow Party Chief Viktor Grishin, 70, as a candidate for General Secretary.

Romanov has been the subject of a growing rumor campaign in Moscow. Stories were told with increasing openness about his supposed arrogance, ostentation and hard drinking. Such traits are sharply at variance with the image that Gorbachev is trying to develop as a reformer with a popular, man-in-the- factory style and as a campaigner against alcoholism. Says a Soviet academic: "Romanov had himself driven around Leningrad in an eight-car motorcade, disrupting traffic and annoying people."

By contrast, new Foreign Minister Shevardnadze is being cast by Kremlin image makers in the Gorbachev mold: honest, unconventional and with a flair for public relations. Described by one U.S. official in Washington as a "tough and capable man," Shevardnadze has visited only nine countries and has never served as a Soviet diplomat. Skeptics in Moscow have declared that the Foreign Minister's only qualification for his new job is that "he speaks a foreign language -- Georgian." (He is, however, said to speak some German.) Says Marshall Goldman of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "Of all the things that Gorbachev has done, this is the most bizarre."

The silver-haired, well-tailored Shevardnadze (pronounced Shevard-nad-zeh) got most of his early party training in the 1950s when he moved through the ranks of Komsomol, the Young Communist League. He almost certainly forged close personal ties with Gorbachev, who also served as a Komsomol leader in Stavropol, a district adjoining Georgia. Shevardnadze studied history, but his true specialty has long been law-and-order. In 1965 he was named Georgian minister for maintenance of public order, a euphemism for head of the local police. That has always been a challenging job in Georgia, the transcaucasian republic where residents cling stubbornly to their local language and customs and where corruption and black-marketeering have been endemic. Shevardnadze quickly established a reputation as a crime buster, both as the republic's top cop and from 1972 as Georgian party secretary.

Soviet officials are letting it be known that Shevardnadze has long cultivated an unpretentious life-style of the kind that Gorbachev seems to favor. At a time when the families of other Georgian officials lived in splendid villas and drove around in limousines, Shevardnadze's wife Nanuli, a journalist, was said to take the bus to work. Although he is both admired and disliked in Georgia for his crackdown on corruption, early this year he felt confident enough of his position to authorize a newspaper poll of public reaction to his policies, a rare and unorthodox action for a Soviet party official.

Some diplomats guess that Gorbachev arranged Shevardnadze's rapid elevation in order to give less emphasis to Soviet relations with the U.S. and Western Europe, the mainstay of policy under Gromyko, and grant more attention to Third World issues. Says an Asian envoy in Moscow: "Gorbachev sees that the Russians are having trouble in the Third World . . . He remembers what happened to them because of Afghanistan."

However, superpower relations remain far too important to be downgraded. William Hyland, editor of the quarterly Foreign Affairs and a former Deputy National Security Adviser, notes that "it would be a major mistake to look for major foreign policy changes." Gorbachev, he says, has been having "an impact" on Soviet diplomacy for possibly as long as the past two years, going back to the time when he was Andropov's protege on the Politburo. Moreover, as a U.S. State Department analyst puts it, Gromyko "hasn't exactly been given a gold watch," and is still likely to remain a respected voice on the Politburo, where foreign policy is set. Even in his new ceremonial duties, Gromyko may have an active role to play. As President, for example, there is a chance that he will meet with Reagan in New York City at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

In short, Gorbachev's changes may indicate that the new leader is keeping his policymaking options as open as possible. At the same time, his shuffling of Soviet officialdom is likely to continue. In that regard, another important move was last week's confirmation of Politburo Member Yegor Ligachev, 64, as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Soviet of the Union, one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet. The title confirms that Ligachev, who was installed in the Politburo only in April, is the de facto No. 2 in the Kremlin hierarchy.

As Gorbachev's new broom continues to sweep through the bureaucracy, & Gromyko's characterization of the General Secretary last March seems especially apt. As he told his fellow Politburo members, "Comrades, this man has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth."

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow, with other bureaus