Andropov and After

...His successor has inherited not only the military, economic, political, and demographic problems associated with maintaining the Soviet empire, but also the West's intense interest in his diseases...

...Nor will Andropov's death result in the sort of radical changes in the USSR that followed the passing of Stalin and Brezhnev...

...It would not be the first time in history (and certainly not in Russian history) that this happened...

...Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Minister of Defense...

...Vorotnikov's meteoric rise in the first year of the Andropov era (he became a candidate member just seven months ago) equals his meteoric fall in Brezhnev's last year...

...On the contrary, he is notorious for slavish loyalty to his patron...

...The only troops stationed in the capital are those of the KGB and the Interior Ministry...

...Conceivably, too, unlike Brezhnev, Andropov has decided it is better not to show up at all in public than to appear in a debilitated physical state that would detract from the empire's powerful image...

...One can easily guess who will be designated before Andropov's instructions are opened and read: Grigory Romanov will become General Secretary of the Party...

...Leonid Brezhnev demonstrated the truth of this saying: He died 10 years after the first rumor about his demise was spread in the world press...

...The process finally ended in a slightly camouflaged police coup, half a year prior to Brezhnev's death...

...The unexpected Chebrikov trip to Warsaw is one more piece of evidence that the Kremlin recluse is dissatisfied with the situation in Poland and distrusts its leader...

...The latest Central Committee meeting also elevated Chebrikov to candidate membership in the Politburo...

...The shift in tactics is attributable to Andropov's personal experience, specifically his own secret mission in Budapest, where he was the Soviet ambassador during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and one of the architects of its brutal suppression...

...One of the j okes making the rounds in Moscow predicts that Romanov is destined to restore the 370-year-old House of Romanov to the Russian throne...

...he has to hurry, and hurry up his protege Gorbachev...

...During his several years of regency under the dying Brezhnev and the one year of his own rule, Andropov has had time to lay the foundations of the new police state, to encircle it with watchtow-ers and guards faithful to him, and to appoint constructors to finish the project...

...In the international arena, Chebrikov has been consolidating connections between the Soviet Union and the vast, complex network of world terrorism—through strawmen and agents like Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, or the Bulgarian branch of the KGB, Derzhavna Sigur-nost...

...Considering that it took Stalin more than 10 years to decimate the ranks of Lenin's old guard, and that Khrushchev never did succeed in removing all the Stalinists from lead-ership(hence his downfall), Andropov's tempo must be regarded as unusually rapid...

...Viktor Chebrikov, the cur-rentKGB Chairman, following in Andropov's footsteps and undoubtedly on his orders, is rapidly returning the country to the Stalinist methods of reprisals against political opponents, instructing his subordinates to use torture at preliminary investigations...

...Yet given his tardy accession to power, he doesn't have the years Stalin had to do the job...

...Aliyev, in Azerbaijan, had launched an anticorruption campaign that made capital punishment a fixture of everyday life...

...He is in charge of personnel shakeups as well, first of all on the level of deputies—the heads of Central Committee departments, ministers, and second and third regional and republican secretaries...

...This is what accounts for the new domestic and foreign policies of the Soviet Union...

...The empire badly wants a ruler who, if he is not able to restore the past, can at least create the semblance of such a restoration...

...The alleged "decentralizer" introduced Draconic laws at plants and factories, centralizing the economy even more from top to bottom...

...While Chebrikov is occupied with dirty work, the "clean" work has been entrusted to Mikhail Gorbachev...

...As for Epishev, it should be clear from his post as political commissar of the Red Army that he was and is the KGB's representative...

...It is a Western model rather than a Russian one, and "Western" not in narrow geographic terms but in the broader political sense of the word...

...In his memoirs, Khrushchev remembered Andropov as the man who single-handedly replaced the Soviet Army in those few days when it pulled out of the Hungarian capital prior to returning for its final assault...

...He could prove to be a long-lived ruler, should his ascension come relatively soon...

...Andropov's era will exist without Andropov: Like Descartes' God, he has given a push to the Soviet universe and forced it to turn, making himself unnecessary or, in any case, not essential...

...He sought unsuccessfully to convince the reviewing committee that the deletions Romanov was insisting upon were not needed...

...General Vitaly Fedorchuk and General Viktor Chebrikov will remain, respectively, chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and head of the KGB...

...The "furtive Jew" stopped Jewish emigration and whipped anti-Semitic propaganda to a hysterical pitch—up to and including a vindication, for the first time since the Revolution, of anti-Semitic pogroms...

...The Soviet Armed Forces are at present quite incapable of any independent moves...

...Three men faithful to Andropov, who early on were quickly summoned from their provinces to lend a helping hand, are closer: his countryman and protege from Stavropol, Mikhail Gorbachev...

...Ultimately, Chebrikov himself now officially attends to the duties that former KGB chiefs participated in secretly: Heopenly visits EastEuropean countries and blackmails their leaders...

...He had an acute need for proponents of his neo-Stalinist policies, and he drew to Moscow those with a demonstrated capacity for harsh rule...

...All these things were predictable from the outset of Andropov's rule, if one did not yield to wishful thinking and stuck to facts and objective analysis...

...We who were his friends knew even before he died that the organization of the colony was so perfect that his successor, even with a thousand new schemes in his head, would find it impossible to alter anything, at least for many years to come...

...Indeed, every statement issued under Andropov's name bears the hallmark of his personal style—brief, curt, devoid of bombast and ideological cliches...

...Brezhnev's physical feebleness was accompanied by ever-increasing political frailty, and power was gradually shifting from the sclerotic hands of the Politburo's council of elders, led by the President, into the then strong ones of the chief of the KGB, Yuri Andropov...

...Once Andropov managed to gain the upper hand over his dying boss, Vorotnikov was urgently recalled from Havana and rewarded for his loyalty by being placed close to the seat of power...

...The empire itself, on different levels of its consciousness—from a general to the man in the street—feels the necessity for a strongman with Stalinist ideals of governing, with the experience of police work over many years...

...Ogarkov and Kulikov came up in the military ranks in peacetime—that is, thanks to close and long collaboration that began in their early years of service with the " organs" of state security, not through feats of combat...

...As a First Deputy Premier of the Russian Republic, Vorot-nikov supported Andropov when the former KGB chief began undermining Brezhnev and tried to remove one of his closest allies...

...The question now is, just how far is it from the vindication of pogroms to then-revival...

...could not help remarking on his crude Party functionary manner and total ignorance of foreign affairs following a meeting with him and his fel-low-Leningrader, the late Premier Alek-sei Kosygin...

...The scope of those concocted stories was unusually broad and utterly exotic against the background of the Kremlin ikon screen: from his excellent knowledge of the English language to his closet liberalism, from his clandestine Jewishness to his passionate peacemaking, from his plans to decentralize the Soviet economy to his desire to move the USSR's troops out of Afghanistan...

...These two groups share common aims and purposes, the Army's subordinate position on the team notwithstanding...

...they owe their arrival solely to Andropov...

...But many things have changed since Andropov came to the Kremlin in November 1982, including the standing rules for its occupants...

...With the help of the far-flung network of the secret police, totally subordinate to him, Andropov can rule the country from his sickbed, or (to hyperbolize the image) even from his grave...

...Today Andropov has good cause for preferring secret and subversive methods to open military action in fighting against Polish sedition...

...In November 1978, a delegation of American legislators led by former Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-Conn...

...Instead, Dr...

...Thisisallthemoretruebecauseun-like Lenin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Andropov has managed to regulate the process of succession in the Kremlin...

...Where the others failed, Yuri Andropov succeeded...

...Well, it isn't saying too much if I tell you that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work...

...So are the attendant speculations concerning Andropov's political paralysis, the struggle for power in the Kremlin, and the military predominance in the Soviet leadership...

...None of these rumors was confirmed, and no hopes were to come true...

...Here, though, we enter the realm of hypotheses that simply thicken the fog of secrecy hanging over the medieval fortress on Red Square, rather than clear it away...

...Nationality differences notwithstanding, Aliyev and Fedorchuk are united by the fact that both have been professional Chekists since their youth at the height of the Great Terror...

...In addition, apart from the aged Minister of Defense, Dmitri Ustinov, who is not a professional soldier despite his honorary rank of Marshal, Andropov's "people" include his three military advisors: Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the General Staff and an advocate of a first atomic strike...

...Consider how broad the scope of the guesswork has been: from a kidney ailment to a heart attack...

...Now he can allow himself to do what Brezhnev and his comrade-partocrats barely managed to keep him from doing...

...Fedorchuk, in the Ukraine, had ordered the most ferocious reprisals against dissidents, including murder...

...He tried depriving the turbulent country of its spiritual leader, but the inaccuracy of the Turkish terrorist and the skill of Italian surgeons saved the life of the Polish Pope...

...According to Tacitus, the Emperor Gal-ba in naming his successor said: "The best and easiest way to find out what is good in a man, and what is bad, is to look closely into what he strove for under another ruler...

...That is why an ailing Andropov evokes a sick Brezhnev, despite an essential difference between the condition of the two men, and not merely in a medical sense...

...Hishenchmen from the "protective organs" (theKGB and the regular police) can be counted on to assure a smooth transition of power to the new leaders...

...Those terrorists who refuse to carry out Moscow's orders are soon unloaded...

...Police coups, on the other hand, have been tried: by Lavrenti Beria, who was executed...

...Under Andropov the country has returned to dictatorship of a Stalinist stripe, and the dictator bears responsibility for all of its actions...

...It is noteworthy that all three came from outside Moscow and had no roots or connections there (as did the Ukrainians, Chebrikov and Fedorchuk...

...The supreme power he holds has not made him a bigger man, has not enlarged his personality, but definitely has emancipated it...

...Some of the changes may occur while Andropov is still alive, for he could very well outlive Brezhnev's antiquated team of septuagenarians...

...After usurping the three top posts in the USSR—General Secretary of the Party, Commander-in-Chief and President—Yuri Andropov continues to be the country's top cop in his methods, his working habits, his political goals, and in terms of his psychology...

...His absences from the business meetings and holiday parades may not even be due as much to his illness as to his next chess move, his pretense, a jesuitic trick—whether to take his global adversary unawares before a decisive lunge, or to provide himself with an alibi in case of another barbaric action like the downing of the unarmed civilian airliner...

...Thus Gorbachev, Romanov, Aliyev, Chebrikov, and Fedorchuk are already performing functions that exceed the posts they officially hold...

...A second "not guilty" argument, claiming that Andropov was vacationing at a resort for the Party elite in the northern Caucasus during the act of air piracy, was simply absurd...

...His designees (most of whom are either professional secret service men or specialists who have worked for the KGB) will replace Brezhnev's ministers and Party bosses as they leave political life for reasons of age...

...He alone will choose his heirs, and probably has by now doneso...

...The doubts about his legacy that have been expressed more than once in the light of his physical frailty are rather naive...

...The examples cited to support the view range from Napoleon's "18th Brumaire" to contemporary coups in Greece, Chile, Pakistan, Argentina, Turkey, and Poland where the military assumed political power...

...Franz Kafka "In the Penal Colony" A Russian proverb tells us that a man who is prematurely buried will live longer...

...Yet Romanov will not necessarily remain modest and obedient if he gets into power...

...Where Andropov achieved power unassisted through a continuous and complicated series of intrigues, Romanov has moved up by promotion...

...His nonappearance at public ceremonies doesn't necessarily indicate diminishing activity, especially given the fact that his previous job as head of the secret police accustomed him to working from the deep underground, under cover of pitch darkness...

...Although now it is Andropov's hands that are trembling, this by no means signifies that he is losing his grip...

...Attempts last September to relieve Andropov of guilt for shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by pointing a finger at the military were in flagrant contradiction with the Secretary's aggressive statement on the incident, not to mention with the police-like centralization of control he has instituted...

...In any case, Andropov was present at the recent celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Party gatherings...

...In Andropov's case the task was very easy indeed—it was enough to recall the agency he headed under Brezhnev for 15 years running and its sinister reputation...

...One meeting took place when Romanov called in the editors of the literary magazine Aurora, where Elena Klepi-kova worked, to deliver a stern reprimand for the ideological blunder they committed by publishing an article that inadvertently described dissident academician Andrei Sakharov as a " moral model...

...One might think he went off without leaving his address or telephone number with his Kremlin comrades...

...Romanov had turned Leningrad into a reactionary bastion, a stronghold of Russian jingoists and neo-Stalinists, creating an atmosphere that had disappeared in Moscow from the time of Stalin's death until it was revived under Andropov...

...If so, the error is highly beneficial to Moscow, and for that reason alone a dangerous one...

...Before the War (according to Isaak Solovyov, father of one of the authors, who in the 1930s was assigned to Stalin's personal guard), when the leader was sick or afraid of an attempt on his life, he usually sent a double to official ceremonies...

...Vorotnikov's punishment was "honorary exile" as ambassador to Cuba...

...and by Aleksandr Shelepin, who along with his conspirators suffered political disgrace...

...not by Marshal Tukhachevsky, who was executed as a plotter during the Great Terror on the basis of a false charge...

...With a complaisance that is taken for loyalty and a dullness that is taken for modesty, he suits Andropov, his former colleagues in the KGB, the Moscow Party establishment, and the influential elite of marshals and generals...

...And the absent Andropov further fortified his position by having two other supporters, Mikhail Solomentsev and Vitaly Vorot-nikov, named full members of the ruling body...

...The notion that the Army is the real threat to Andropov and is already acting without his knowledge to counter him—fairly widespread in the CIA, the State Department, the White House, and among university Sovietologists— is a pure figment of imagination...

...they are permeated from top to bottom with KGB agents...

...his ideological confederate from Leningrad, Grigory Romanov...

...When we lived in Leningrad (before escaping to Moscow in the hopes of thereby avoiding the temptation to emigrate), each of us had occasion to meet with Romanov on separate matters that may seem trifling to a Western reader...

...and his KGB colleague from Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev...

...Jekyll turned once and for all into Mr...

...In the end they did not satisfy the Party boss anyway, and the work was eventually banned...

...That is why the death of Andropov will change nothing: Whoever replaces him will do exactly what he is doing—but inevitably being a less sophisticated personality, he will do it more harshly and crudely...

...It should be added that well before Andropov the Soviet leaders prudently removed every Army contingent from Moscow...

...It is not only Yuri Andropov who matters here, however...

...The rumors about illnesses and death could be self-serving, fabricated by the tyrant himself...

...Hyde...

...Finally, the "peacemaker" resumed the Cold War with the United States, began blackmailing and intimidating Western Europe, and plunged his country into military ventures and confrontations in the Middle East and Indochina (using Syria and Vietnam as his proxies...

...During Brezhnev's prolonged death agony and the concurrent maneuvering for his political mantle, Romanov's name surfaced once—when Catherine the Great's dinner service, borrowed from the Hermitage Museum, was smashed at his daughter's wedding party...

...Whatever the number of Yuri Andropov's remaining years, he is destined to live them to the accompaniment of rumors about his own death...

...and General Aleksei Epishev, Chief of the Armed Forces political administration and the main designer of the blitzkrieg in Afghanistan...

...in his speeches he often mentions Andropov only by his first name and patronymic, "Yuri Vladimirovich" —a sign of special flattery in official usage...

...Geidar Ali-yev, who like Andropov was first with the secret police and later became a Party chief, albeit within the limits of his Caucasian oil-rich satrapy, acts as de facto Premier in the presence of nominal Premier Nikolai Tikhonov...

...While still serving as potent regent of the steadily declining Brezhnev, he altered the very structure of power in the USSR...

...The KGB droppedits obedience to the Party, whose "sword and shield" it was supposed to be, and took complete control of the political apparatus...

...At the same time, a sizable volume of his articles and speeches— twice as large as Andropov's—was published...

...not even by Leon Trotsky—the founder of the Red Army and its favorite—when Stalin began to squeeze him from the Soviet leadership right after the death of Lenin...

...This probably explains his swift career leaps over the past year...

...In our age of instant electronic communication the tendency anyway is to forget history and reach for immediate analogies...

...The shortest of all the Politburo members, Romanov cuts an amusing figure alongside the tall, slightly stooped Andropov...

...The same personal brand marks current Soviet policy at home and abroad, providing eloquent testimony that it is Andropov who stands at the helm of state...

...And at the Supreme Soviet sessions in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, at the very center of the rostrum where the men of the Politburo were sitting, stood, significantly and ominously, Yuri Andropov's empty chair, a symbol of his invisible yet redoubtable presence...

...But besides their physical condition, rendering the older men incapable of a struggle for power, most of them are loyal to Andropov out of sheer fright...

...Andropov has already dismissed many people, being unwilling to wait for their retirement...

...Furthermore, in 66 years of Soviet history not a single military coup has been attempted: not by Marshal Zhu-kov, although Khrushchev dismissed him for "Bonapartism...

...Incidentally, Andropov's absence seems so prolonged only in comparison with the regular public appearances of Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev...

...Vladimir Solovyov's encounter came at a discussion of a new play, when he was a theater critic...

...Stalin, for example, rarely attended public ceremonies after World War II, deliberately revealing his image urbi et orbi in small doses to great effect...

...Brought into the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat as a specialist in agriculture, he scarcely devotes any time to this disastrous section of the Soviet economy...

...Grigory Romanov, the Number Two man in the Party apparatus, is similarly engaged in doing the chiefs bidding...

...There may well be other reasons for Andropov's protracted seclusion relating to his health...

...prominent in his huge portrait mounted on floats and framed with blinking lights, in billboards carrying his quotes, in the flattering references to him in official speeches, in his words read by radio and television announcers, in his letters to Western leaders, and in his written replies to their actions and speeches...

...Previously, others did the traveling throughout Eastern Europe on such delicate assignments—Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, Warsaw PactCommander-in-Chief Marshal Viktor Kulikov, somebody from the Central Committee—not the KGB Chairman...

...It is hard to imagine anyone duller than Stalin was, particularly in contrast to such stars of the first magnitude as Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin...

...He was quite visible and Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepi-kova, new contributors to this magazine, are the authors of Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage Into the Kremlin...

...That is the main reason Yasir Arafat lost Soviet support...

...After he achieved power the situation changed...

...For that matter, no one will dare to defy it, because Andropov has installed "his men"—Vitaly Fedorchuk and Viktor Chebrikov, respectively—at the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB...

...The system he has created—or, more accurately, restored from its partial destruction by anti-Stalinist Khrushchev —now works by itself and doesn't allow any challenge from either parto-crats or the military...

...More important is the age of the troika: Gorbachev is 52, both Romanov and Aliyev are 60...

...One need merely remember how many rumors Andropov had spread about himself when he took over, and on what a fertile soil of credulous Western public opinion they fell...

...In some instances, such as the recent case of Yuri Sokolov, former director of Moscow's best food store and a friend of the Brezhnev family, the death penalty has been urged...

...Perhaps because our sense of reality is inevitably colored by our circumstances, we mistake the uncertainty of our knowledge about what is going on in the Kremlin for political uncertainty in the Kremlin itself...

...Actually, the military has no grudge against Andropov and his police entourage...

...To be sure, Andropov's prolonged absences from public view seem suspicious—particularly his failure to take his place atop Lenin's Tomb at the annual Revolution Day parade, or to be present at last month's Central Committee and Supreme Soviet meetings...

...Andropov and Chebrikov must be credited with high KGB professionalism...

...It is suspected that Andropov pinned the compromising story on Romanov to make him appear the enfant terrible of the Politburo...

...This of course doesn't mean that thanks to the proverb Andropov is assured of a long life, yet it is obvious that those rumors are, in the well-known words of Mark Twain, slightly exaggerated...

...Situations do arise where symbols become live human beings, andstandard-bearersbecomegenerals...

...The "advocate of a peaceful solution to the Afghan crisis" also moved additional troops into Afghanistan and resorted to a scorched earth policy, obliterating the civilian population by having Soviet soldiers gun down the men and bayonet the women and children...

...The next echelon of proxies includes hired assassins like the Iranian kamikazes or the Turkish terrorist who shot Pope John Paul II, Mehmet Ali Agca...

...The gang, all told, is no less dangerous than its reclusive ringleader...

...Last summer Romanov, the longtime Party boss in Leningrad, was transferred to Moscow as a national Party secretary...

...Geidar Aliyev or Vitaly Vorotnikov will become Premier...

...There is no one around who can restrain Andropov: both the legislative and executive powers are today combined in one man, and absolute dictatorship has replaced the previous collegiate Party leadership...

...In the Soviet Union, that power was taken from the military by the secret police...

...For the layered system they have developed successfully pushes into the shadows the primary initiator and manipulator of the terrorist action...

...Then he was a keynote speaker at the gala Revolution Day ceremonies in the Palace of Congresses...

...At present, these men form Andropov's "kitchen cabinet...

...After all, if the ghost of Hamlet's father roamed Elsi-nore, why couldn't theghost of its enigmatic master roam the Kremlin...

...Marshal Viktor Kulikov, Warsaw Pact Commander and principal overseer of the unruly herd of East European countries...

...The last is of no small importance in drawing the Kremlin horoscope: The initial portent of Andropov's victory over his rivals was his delivering the main speech at the celebration of Lenin's birthday in April 1982, half a year before Leonid Brezhnev died...

...He stands a better chance of succeeding Andropovthantheothers, though, and therefore deserves a more detailed look...

...The "closet liberal" threw dissenters of every kind into prisons and special psychiatric hospitals, and eradicated any manifestations of sedition in the country...

...from a sensational attempt upon the Party Secretary's life by Brezhnev's revengeful son Yuri to Andropov's progressive blindness caused by exhaustion, diabetes and nervous stress —which doesn't prevent him from functioning as a leader but makes him look pathetic and helpless...

...Romanov is making no claim to higher office at the moment...

...This is another reason why the Army can't play a major role in the Kremlin's power struggle: A challenge on its part would mean the beginning of a civil war, something that it is doubtful any of the current generals would want...

...To mention just one example: Sergei Chodorovich, director of the Sol-zhenitsyn fund for political prisoners, recently was brutally beaten and placed in a prison hospital with a fractured skull...

...Andropovites tend to view Romanov as a proxy in whose name they hope to rule should their leader depart from the political arena...

...This in itself makes the three, actively supported by the Party Secretary, dominant over the Politburo's elders: 78-year-old Premier Nikolai Tikhonov, 75-year-old Minister of Defense Dmitri Ustinov, 74-year-old Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, and Brezhnev's 72-year-old protege, Konstantin Chernen-ko...

...He fits that role least of all...

...More likely, Gri-gory Romanov will continue the restoration of Stalinism that Andropov is successfully carrying out...

...Under the Levantine protocol of the USSR, participation in these events has been mandatory for every Soviet leader...

...Realistically, there is no other way to advance in the modern Soviet Armed Forces...

...The then top cop dealt resolutely with his competitors, regardless of their political opinions...

...Instead, he visits Western countries and meets with their envoys in the Kremlin, handing over Andropov's personal messages or passing them on orally...

...Alas, with today's photo and cinematographic equipment, such a masquerade would be easily unmasked...

...Not only is there no one around to wage it, but it would be mortally perilous in Andropov's Kremlin...

...Dullness is not an obstacle to this...

...Mikhail Gorbachev, Minister of Foreign Affairs...

...In short, the struggle for power that the world press would have us believe is going onin connection with Andropov's absence from official ceremonies is not in fact taking place...

...Along with Vitaly Fedorchuk, Aliyev has launched a harsh police campaign against economic crimes, from corruption at the top to absenteeism, sloth and hard drinking at the bottom...

...A meeting of this kind was held last November 25 with General Wojciech Jaru-zelski, immediately after the Polish dictator was declared Supreme Commander-in-Chief and took control of the new Military Council...

...Fear became a stable feature of Leningrad's political climate, enveloping its inhabitants, and did not vanish even in the relatively liberal periods of Khrushchev's thaw and Brezhnev's detente...