Word: andropov
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...this regard, Andropov's brief tenure may have provided a hint of what the West can expect from Gorbachev. Andropov's ascendance, too, occasioned high hopes in the West. The code words of wishful thinking were the same: moderate, pragmatist, technocrat, sophisticate. Within a day of his selection, there was talk of an Andropov era, a phrase that suggested a clean and welcome break with the past. His style seemed fresh and that, it was assumed, connoted a change in the content of Soviet policy. Here was a Soviet leader who would be comfortable and stimulating on the Georgetown cocktail...
...Andropov never had much of a chance. But even before he was purged by Comrade Death, he demonstrated that the change he represented was very much one of style and not of substance. The preoccupying issue of Soviet-American relations in those days of late 1982 and early to mid-1983 was the prospective deployment of new U.S. ballistic and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Under Brezhnev, Soviet policy had been absolutely uncompromising, and absolutely unacceptable: the U.S., said the Soviets, had no right to deploy even a single Euromissile...
Immediately upon taking over from Brezhnev, Andropov seized that policy and made it his own. He issued a series of proposals that were almost Reaganesque in the alluring way in which they combined simplicity and ingenuity. He played numbers games with the European nuclear balance, promising subtractions from the Soviet side if the U.S. would cancel the addition of its own missiles; he offered an equation that was supposed to yield equality, but in fact would have left the Soviet Union with a significant advantage in key categories of weaponry and would have succeeded in keeping the U.S. from deploying...
...short, Andropov applied his considerable skills to the task of repackaging the hard line, not to softening it. His cleverness failed about the same time as his kidneys. The Euromissile deployment went ahead on schedule at the end of 1983, just as Andropov was becoming a disembodied voice communicating to the world and to his own people through ghostwritten Pravda "interviews...
...Just as Andropov assumed Brezhnev's stonewalling position on the Euromissiles, Gorbachev has inherited Chernenko's adamancy on the central arms-control issue of today: space weapons and strategic defenses. The Soviets are just as determined to block the U.S.'s Star Wars program as the Reagan Administration is determined to see that it goes forward. There is no reason to expect that Gorbachev will be more yielding than Chernenko. In his inaugural speech last week, Gorbachev stressed his opposition to "the development of ever new weapons systems, be it in space or on earth...