Word: andropov
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...three weeks since Konstantin Chernenko succeeded Yuri Andropov as leader of the Soviet Union, U.S. policymakers and Kremlinologists have peered closely East and West for portents of hope. Last week they thought they detected several encouraging signs of Soviet movement on arms control...
...reason Westerners have had such difficulty analyzing and describing Konstantin Chernenko is that the Kremlin's penchant for secrecy as well as the lack of a real electoral process tends to cloak the private lives of Soviet rulers in multiple shadows. Yuri Andropov was dead before the world knew he had a living wife; she suddenly appeared at his funeral. Another reason for the difficulty is that by the time a new man achieves leadership, the Soviet mythmakers have been long at work. Last week, for instance, there were reports in Moscow that Chernenko was often seen walking and even...
...acting as a friend, confidant and aide-de-camp. It was Chernenko who turned up Brezhnev's hearing aid and, on occasion, ordered the translators to speak louder so the old man could hear. The best of good soldiers, he was Brezhnev's choice for the succession. But when Andropov was chosen, everybody assumed that Chernenko's career was finished. Instead, Chernenko apparently transferred his loyalty to his former opponent...
...Unlike Andropov, who never traveled to a country that was not under Communist control, Chernenko is not unknown in the West. Still, a number of Westerners who have met him are unimpressed. "He is a dullard," says Malcolm Toon, the tart-tongued former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, who met Chernenko at the SALT II talks in Vienna in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration's National Security Adviser, remembers Chernenko as "a very cautious bureaucrat, very deferential to Brezhnev, not forceful, not dynamic." The fact that Chernenko was "the least competent, the least likely to innovate [of the contenders]," Brzezinski...
...roll with happy abandon, but they do not demand the climate of freedom that spawned the Western youth culture in the first place. Their lack of interest in politics was evident last week in the absence of young faces in the procession to bid farewell to Yuri Andropov. "What goes on in the leadership is remote from our lives," said Volodya, 26, an engineer. "Besides, nobody asks our opinion...