Word: chernenko
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...ensuring smooth management succession. Soviet leaders love to award one another ribbons and stars and medals, but never gold watches. Retirement seems a dishonorable estate, a form of internal banishment. So Khrushchev discovered. So Brezhnev no doubt recalled as he grew feeble. Andropov after him. And then Konstantin Chernenko...
...hard to let power pass from their generation to the next. In choosing a younger man, they would be weakening themselves: he would have time to build up his own power base and patronage network, which would gradually impinge on theirs. That is probably why they chose Chernenko 13 months ago. Indeed, they could have exercised the same option last week, turning to Andrei Gromyko, 75, or Viktor Grishin...
Columbia University Kremlinologist Seweryn Bialer was in Moscow just before Chernenko's death. "The most overwhelming impression," he says, "was one of gloom. It was the gloom that accompanies the paralysis of leadership. Even before Gorbachev was selected, there was already a cult of personality around him, the hope that he would be able to get the Soviet Union moving again and to keep it moving. In my opinion, that was as important a factor in his quick victory as the votes of loyalty that he got from the Politburo. It was a question of the mood of the elite...
...much time Gorbachev has to make his mark is, of course, impossible to predict. If he lives as long as Chernenko, and if he stays in the good graces of his colleagues in the Politburo, he could be a leader for decades to come. And because he is young and likely to be around for quite some time, there is a natural tendency to see him as a herald of change. To some extent he is, and the change is already evident. Now that the junior member of the Politburo has become the senior partner, the collective leadership cannot...
These were the main features of Brezhnev's foreign policy, of Andropov's and Chernenko's, and now they are surely of Gorbachev's as well. The real question is not whether he will pursue a course different from that taken by his predecessors, but whether he will pursue it more effectively. The answer is more likely to be yes than no. Since he injects the continuity of Soviet policy with a vitality that it has lacked in recent years, he may also bring to the Soviet-American competition more energy, skill and ingenuity than his recent predecessors, in their...