Eminentoes /The Sickness of Comrade 'Dropoff

...Andropov has been out of public view for nearly a half-year...

...Internally, the USSR's militarism and expansionism are a source of prestige and popular support...

...Finallyr and most enduringly, Soviet rule depends on militarism...

...In the official press the regime launched a campaign against incompetence and shirking...

...And the Jackson wing died...

...In different ways, these books avoid the pitfalls into which many leading U.S...

...Instead, he threw in with the national Democratic party in spite of its dovishness, got labor officials installed on all its panels, and began clearing the way for the AFL-CIO's pre-primary endorsement of Mondale...

...Indeed, it is a most interesting phenomenon--in this day of sociologically grounded political analysis--to witness leading analysts, whose work is wedded to the paradigms of class interests, interest group politics, cultural traditions, historical continuities, and the like, abandoning many of these fundamental factors whenever the USSR faces the possibility of a succession crisis...

...Now, as President Reagan's UN ambassador, she wonders about "the persistence of this peculiar Democratic resistance to the preferences of ordinary Americans [for] a strong defense and a reasonably but prudently assertive foreign policy...

...On January 1, an industrial economic experiment was launched throughout five select Soviet ministries: the USSR Ministry of Heavy and Transport MachineBuilding...

...And as exiled Soviet dissident Boris Shragin reminds us in The Challenge of the Spirit (1978), his excellent study of t h e continuities in Russian nationalism: "For centuries, the government's main function was war: all its strength and resources were spent first in warding off surrounding enemies and later in territorial expansion...

...He promoted an unprecedented number of KGB operatives to important government and Party posts...

...As Zhores Medvedev reminds us in Andropov, ~ his concise, well-written study, before Andropov all Soviet security chiefs with the exception of progenitor Feliks Dzerzhinsky had brief, tumultuous careers which ended in either violent death or political disgrace: "Andropov is the only man who not o~y survived the job but also made himself more influential politically in the process...

...It seems that at such moments all the lessons of Weber or Marx are conveniently forgotten and Freud (personality) comes to the fore...

...And her agent, Sam Cohen, who is responsible for drawing in such luminaries as director Mike Nichols, writer Nora Ephron, and co-star Cher...

...And therein lies the danger of its disruptive role in the world...

...three years locating and interviewing her friends and coworkers...

...Any hope of a scoop, however, was thwarted when the neophyte producers had to spend two years acquiring the rights to Silkwood's story...

...No Soviet leader will challenge this principle...

...With demographic trends leading to a majority non-Russian' population by the end of the century, Soviet leaders have stepped up the pace of linguistic and cultural homogenization...

...The attempts to paint Andropov as a liberal-minded reformer were wrong not only because they failed to correspond to his record in the Party-state apparatus...

...More uneven is the S01ovyov-Klepikova volume which is most useful for illuminating the Russian nationalist dimension of Soviet rule...

...It allows for wider differentials in basic wage scales as an incentive for greater worker productivity...

...While in some matters of fact and interpretation there may be dispute, among Andropov's biographers there is virtual unanimity on one matter-that he is nothing if not a ruthless and capable operative...

...It expanded its support for terrorist activities and, indeed, played a role in creating a "terror network" of Palestinian commandos, Italian "Red Brigades," Japanese "Red Army" operatives, Basque separatists, and the like...

...Unidentified Soviet sources suggest his protracted absence is attributable to nothing more than a cold...

...The kindest thing that might be said of Andropov's first year is Zhores Medvedev's observation that under Andropov "policy is probably better constructed, better implemented, more skillfully presented, but it is still the same conservative policy without any sign o f liberal or democratic trends...

...Apart from its intellectual elite, the Jackson wing has lost its base among labor leaders...

...The unions-steel, building trades, crafts--which promoted Meany's hard-line positions have sagged in clout in the labor movement, and the liberal unions representing government workers and communications employees have gained influence...

...Perhaps it would be useful to be reminded of the sources of that stability, of what might be called the pillars of Soviet rule...

...COMRADE 'DROPOFF ly) from kidney failure, a weak heart, and Parkinson's disease...

...The only mystery is who will succeed him, and on this Beichman and Bernstam leave us with an intriguing parting thought: If the KGB is not enough, then the military will have to step in...

...Others who didn't get posts under Carter but did under Reagan include Richard Perle, Jackson's defense expert who is an assistant defense secretary, and Charles Horner, a former Moynihan aide now at the State Department...

...Soviet actions in Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan likewise required cooperation between KGB intelligence sources and the military...

...For one decade he worked diligently at extending his influence inside the Party's higher reaches...

...Yet what more could be expected of a system that is characterized by continuity, stability, and "conservatism...

...Yet such details of ruthlessness tell us less about Andropov's psychology than about the system in which he functions...

...They make it clear that Andropov officially remains undisputed Soviet leader...

...Or rather, with Streep as directed by Nichols, who has the good sense not to fawn over her the way Alan Pakula did in Sophie's Choice...

...How many contemporary actresses, when called upon to display genuine humor and high spirits, can produce more than a plaque-free smile...

...We might recall some of the nonsense spouted on Andropov's accession...

...Formally proclaimed by Count Sergei Uvarov in 1833, these principles constitute a recurrent theme 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 in the history of Russian power, whether in its Czarist or Soviet variant...

...He is said to be suffering (alternatively or simultaneousAdrian Karatnycky is research director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and associate editor of Workers Under Communism, a quarterly journal...

...The plan also agrees to compensate management for losses incurred while new technology is installed and started up...

...In a major speech on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the USSR in December 1982, AndrolYov revived the concept of the "fusion of nations" as the "final goal" of the Party's nationalities policy...

...For this reason, Beichman and Bernstam's clear understanding of the nature of Soviet totalitarianism makes their book exceedingly valuable...

...And Kirkland's stress is mostly on domestic policy anyway, namely combating Reaganomics...

...And this is precisely the point...

...Jimmy Carter, and a burgeoning antinuclear movement which has all but stopped the industry in its tracks...

...THE TALKIES SILKWOOD VAGUE by Martha Bayles A t the very least, the original producers of Silkwood deserve credit for sheer perseverance...

...Whatever the flaws in 1983's yearend "obituaries" of Andropov, we can be thankful that they did not read like eulogies, which is surely what they would have been had Andropov died at about the same time as Leonid Brezhnev...

...Of course, filmmakers who must spend two years negotiating with the estate of a real person are not apt to come up with boldly imaginative statements about her character--even if such statements were in cinematic fashion, which they aren't...

...However, the system he heads must retain its despotic character, and he must 29 defend the interests of the Party, Army, and security apparatus as well as surmount any challenge to internal Soviet stability...

...I t is, of course, Andropov's fifteenyear tenure in the KGB, the longest in Soviet history, which tells us most about his abilities...

...Zhores Medvedev informs us that Andropov in his KGB post "worked very closely with the army...

...More likely the person will be portrayed in a superficially flattering light, in a script that sticks to the agreed-upon facts while cloaking the disputed ones in silence or ambiguity...

...tacit support...

...It is always worthwhile re-creating the background of a news story, so that we may see what sort of people it's about...

...And several days later he was a no-show at the opening session of the USSR's rubber stamp parliament--the Supreme Soviet...

...But neither does it offer any real insight into her deeper values and motivation, which to me-is a more serious kind of waffling...

...and finally the past six years navigating the ups and downs of Hollywood...

...It all adds up to almost a Martha Bayles is film critic for The American Spectator...

...The year was 1974, when, as Cano and Hirsch put it, "No one had ever done a film about radiation leaks in a factory...

...Finally, an Andropov regime held the most promise for some measure of controlled economic reform and a campaign to increase labor discipline and crack down on corruption...

...The USSR today, in Brzezinski's words, is a "onedimensional" military power...

...The last American to see Andropov was nonagenarian Averell Harriman who asserted that at their June encounter Yuri "seemed well and vigorous...

...Muscovites queueing up for foodstuffs and goods during working hours were checked for truancy from work...

...Indeed, as the Soviet economy has stagnated, it is precisely in the sphere of foreign affairs that the Kremlin has seen possibilities for successful initiatives...

...The Soviet leader's formative experience was integrally linked with the Gulag, which saw Andropov and his Party cronies "living in a prison camp with forced laborers...

...the Byelorussian Ministry of Light Industry...

...For Lenin, imperialism represented the highest stage of capitalism...

...Larry Cano and Buzz Hirsch were film students at UCLA when they first read about Karen Silkwood, a worker in an Oklahoma plutonium recycling plant who became a union activist concerned with safety issues...

...To a certain extent, they are right...

...Just as it was a Polish general, Jaruzelski, who saved the Communist Party in his country, so could it be a Soviet marshal with a baton in his knapsack who could represent the "Bonapartist" solution to the Soviet crisis...

...There is evidence, however, that Andropov has at last embarked on some limited economic experimentation aimed at reversing poor Soviet economic performance...

...At home, Andropov's tenure saw the lengthening of prison terms for political offenses...

...Even before Jackson's death, Kirkland signaled the decline of the hard-line wing of the Democratic party...

...Such a renewed campaign of internal control is hardly the cure for sluggish economic growth...

...I n view of these constants, the three recent studies of Andropov should therefore be judged as much for their insights into the nature of the Soviet system as for their insights into Andropov...

...He had earned the support of the armed forces and his own KGB...

...In 1956, as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov exhibited some of the traits that served him so well in his long march through Party and state institutions...

...a decade-long campaign of intimidation and repression aimed at the dissident movement which Andropov, more explicitly than any other Party leader, sought to link to the "special services of imperialism...

...Second is the policy of Russification...

...Under Andropov the KGB extended its scope of operations into new areas...

...Participants were urged to fill in the blanks of newspaper coupons with names of individuals guilty of violating labor discipline...

...The announced reform is aimed at decentralizing economic decisionmaking by leaving a greater share of profits ~it the disposal of local management...

...According to Bela Kiraly, military commander of Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution, even at the moment Soviet troops began their attack on the city, Andropov was to be found in Prime Minister Imre Nagy's office in the Hungarian parliament, assuring the popular leader that a Soviet attack was out of the question...

...Yet before the movie has gotten very far, we realize that this nuanced performance (and that of Kurt Russell as Silkwc " - ~yfriend) is not going to lead a e. The highly textured acting arouses r curiosity, but does not satisfy it ~ t any sort of revelation about Silkwood's reasons for making the choices she did...

...Those few leaders _9 who have strayed from the pillars of Party primacy, Russification, or militarism have been demoted or purged...

...This picture of the KGB is hardly reassuring...

...As Beichman and Bernstam report, "Andropov lived side-by-side with the Gulag system and saw it in operation each day...

...So who wants to hear about Karen Silkwood now...

...Little was spent for administration, which was always a weak point of the Russian system...

...Abrams has become a Republican, giving up on the Democratic party in 1976 after anyone associated with CDM was blackballed in the Carter Administrati~m...

...By the end of the film I began almost to resent Streep's intriguing performance, seeing it as a will,o'-the-wisp intended to lure the audience onward in the absence of any other real suspense...

...the USSR Ministry of Electrical Equipment Industries...

...The KGB is responsible for guarding all important military objects and missile launching . . . . The army cannot fire nuclear missiles without the KGB, as their officers form part of the launching teams...

...This might be all right if the plot held some surprises, but after all, we already know what is going to happen...

...Sovietologists have fallen in recent years...

...The film shows Silkwood's milieu to be vaguely countercultural, with alienated and unattached young working people drifting in and out of jobs, commitments, relationships...

...The Washington Post's Charles Fenyvesi and Sovietologist Jerry Hough staked a claim for Andropov as a closet liberal and active proponent of d~tente, Hough characterizing Andropov's climb to the top as "one of the most favorable developments to have occurred in the Soviet Union in recent years...

...Harrison Salisbury claimed for Comrade Yuri a knowledge of English and a keen familiarity with American culture...

...Young Communist League activists in the Ukraine conducted a campaign known as "Operation Chronometer...

...In other words, the wall hanging may come from India, but the planks underneath are 19ure Oklahoma...

...Since the Khrushchev years there had been continuity and consensus within ~ Soviet ruling circles...

...But otherwise the characters' sixties-style alienation seems quite believable, if only as a thin cover for their native cussedness, orneriness, and anarchic individualism...

...Indeed, after an initial flurry of round-ups, complete with daytime raids of public steambaths, the outward signs of a labor discipline effort appear to have subsided...

...Andropov may die before this reaches you, yet the continuities in Soviet rule and the imperatives of Soviet power will remain unchanged...

...decade--during which there have been endless court cases, books and plays, The China Syndrome starring Jane Fonda, Three Mile Island starring...

...This authenticity has a lot to do with Streep...

...With the exception of a brief, limited relaxation in the 1920s, the Soviet government has pursued a policy of,subjugating non-Russian nationalities and assimilating them into a variant of Russian culture...

...The obituary-like tone of such discourse is of course not without basis...

...the expansion of the use of psychiatric incarceration for political opponents...

...In the course of her efforts to gather evidence against KerrMcGee Corporation, Silkwood was badly contaminated, then killed in an auto accident while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times...

...EMINENTOES THE SICKNESS OF Recent assessments of Yuri Andropov's first year in power have read remarkably like obituaries...

...Yuri Andropov was therefore selected as Party general secretary precisely because as KGB chairman he had demonstrated a capacity to manage internal discontent and to deal with eruptions of protest in the Soviet Empire's unruly colonies...

...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 League, and supervised the recruitment of women and children for forced labor in rock quarries and in the timber industry...

...The most scrupulously documented of the recent Andropov biographies is Arnold Beichman and Mikhail Bernstam's Ant~ropov: New Challenge to the West, ' a wellspring of insight particularly on the early Andropov...

...During his first year as general secretary, Andropov's major domestic actions were fully consonant with his background in the security service...

...But leave out the operational side of the KGB--the naughty things they allegedly do...

...Such mass-circulation journals as Molodaya Gvardiya and Komsomolskaya Pravda (the Young Communist League newspaper) printed articles glorifying the Czarist past and engaged in anti-Semitic vilification...

...In early 1983 an unprecedented round-up of people "infringing on labor discipline" was initiated under the code name "Operation Trawl...

...they were wrong because in a state such as the USSR there is no possibility for a reformer to emerge, barring some major, palpable crisis...

...The AFL-CIO no longer plays a major foreign policy role...

...Norton, $14.95...

...In December his ashen, trembling visage was absent from a key meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee...

...Evidently all these people, and a great many critics, not to mention moviegoers, feel that the story is worth retelling...

...The film doesn't commit itself to either explanation...

...Even Vice President Bush joined in the fun, telling the Christian Science Monitor: "My view of Andropov is that some people make this KGB thing sound horrendous...

...Yet, Harriman's assurance to the contrary, rumors about Andropov's health have been circulating since the summer...

...Meryl Streep, for one...

...Similar campaigns did not work in the past and were quickly jettisoned...

...After helping to oversee "normalization" in Budapest, Andropov was transferred to a post on the Central Committee...

...It's a safe course, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 31...

...In other words, Russia and its successor state, the USSR, have been engaged in a "centuries-long arms race...

...During World War II he moved up in rank to assume the post of first secretary of the Karelo-Finnish Young Communist Stein & Day, $16.95...

...In keeping with the genre, they have sought to locate Andropov's place in Soviet history, have traversed his life's course through the Soviet institutional labyrinth, and above all have exhibited a solemn tendency to overvalue the role of their subject in shaping the present...

...Even the samizdat Russophile journal Vyeche was allowed to circulate freely for years, while the KGB conducted a harsh campaign of repression against the Russian democratic opposition...

...The principles of Party primacy, militarism, and Russification have clear antecedents in Czar Nicholas I's doctrine of "Official Nationality," whose three parallel cornerstones were Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality...

...In 1967, when Vladimir Semichastny was purged from the KGB chairmanship, Andropov was Brezhnev's surprise choice to head the Soviet security apparatus...

...Kirkland started a trend, Jackson's death accelerated it, Moynihan's actions did nothing to impede it, and CDM, all but irrelevant, merely followed suit...

...That demonstrated to all of us that the Democratic party was a McGovernite party," he said...

...Though .he was a founder of CDM, Kirkland largely abandoned his involvement in the group after the 1980 election...

...He moved aggressively to shake up domestic policies...

...Today's triad of Soviet political imperatives has echoes that extend far into Russian history...

...and the Lithuanian Ministry of Local Industry...

...A Carter aide boasted of blocking her nomination...

...Abroad, the security service increased its efforts in the arena of scientific, industrial, and technological espionage...

...The first is the pre-eminence of the Party...

...Silkwood's car goes off the road, and we wonder about the circumstances: Was she f o r c ~ off, or did she simply pass out from all the drugs she had been taking...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 manifestations of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, and Jewish national sentiment...

...The underpinning of that primacy is the nomenklatura system, through which the Party rewards its loyalists with key posts and thus exerts total control over all spheres of social, political, and economic life...

...One of those barred from a Carter job was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been recommended as ambassador to Israel...

...More recently, several book-length studies have demolished what remains of the early version of Andropov as a liberal, reform-minded Soviet leader...

...several months litigating with Kerr-McGee (who in 1977 subpoenaed the filmmakers' accumulated materials...

...Here she is encouraged to be scuzzy, skinny, bitchy, and sly--all of which she does extremely well...

...He had demonstrated shrewdness in manipulating Great Russian nationalism in the service of Soviet stability while suppressing national sentiment among the non-Russians who will soon constitute an absolute m~tjority within the Soviet Union...

...Maybe I speak defensively as a former head of the CIA...

...AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland is an anti-Communist, but not in the fashion of George Meany...

...We can perhaps paraphrase Lenin and say that military governance may one day be the highest stage of Communism--and its last...

...In the USSR of the post-Stalin era, the general secretary cannot be an absolute despot...

...Finally, Andropov's policies revealed him to be a strong supporter of Russian national chauvinism, while brutally suppressing 2 W.W...

...And inasmuch as Soviet foreign policy is based on the projection of military power, we have been witness to the growth of the military's influence in government...

...And at the other end of the scale, she has moments of great beauty, sweetness, and something rarely seen on the screen nowadays: merriment...

...Such a crisis erupted in the aftermath of Stalin's death, when Party functionaries acted to avert another dark age of terror...

...As explained in the league's newspaper, the avowed purpose of the campaign was: to explain the reasons for loss of work time, and in the process to identify the culprits of, and analyze the causes of, the tardiness and idleness common at enterprises, and the delays in the provision of raw materials, specified components, and equipment for Komsomol shock construction projects...

...And Zhores Medvedev's study, despite its leftish, unilateralist stance, provides an expert account of personal rivalries in Soviet ruling circles while emphasizing the sources of the changing #quipe's fundagaental Conservatism...

...In Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage Into the Kremlin, 3 Vladimir Solovyov and Eiena Klepikova describe chauvinistic Rodina (Motherland) societies, which experienced astronomical growth in the 1960s and 70s with Andropov's Macmillan, $15.95...

...A mythology arose around Andropov's putative tastes in fiction (Jacqueline Susann) and music (Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee...

...Since then, for example, a purge of Party cultural figures has been initiated in the Ukrainian SSR-the second largest nationality after the Russian in the USSR, and historically the most,restive and independence-" minded of the non-Russian nations...

...Kirkland, for instance, can't unabashedly back Reagan's policy in El Salvador because the Administration has failed to get the government there to bring to justice the murderers of two AFL-CIO officials...

...Despite the degeneration of Soviet prestige worldwide, "By the 1980s," Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote recently in Encounter, "Soviet power had acquired, for the first time, genuine global reach, compensating thus for lack of systemic appeal...

...In November, he became the first leader in Soviet history to miss the annual military parade celebrating the Bolshevik revolution...

...On becoming first secretary of a local Young Communist League, he "assisted in the administration of a province, half of which could be regarded as a Russian Auschwitz, minus the gas chambers...

...the Ukrainian Ministry of Food Industry...

...I have a little trouble with Cher's lesbian lover, a wisecracking blonde who works as a beautician in a funeral home--such sitcom cuteness reminds me too vividly that the producer is ABC...

...Yet there's no reason to expect much to come of this plan, if only because it is highly restricted and results will not be in for years...

...He can't be...

...In time, Edward Jay Epstein, among others, demonstrated the implausibility of by Adrian Karatnycky these claims in his justly famous New Republic essay which put to rest much of the wishful thinking and outright disinformafion...