Word: secretariat
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...this week when the Central Committee meets in Moscow. To build his strength, Andropov will probably seek to place his supporters in the key positions that are now vacant on the Politburo (see box). Still, whether Andropov succeeds in getting his allies into the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat will not be evident for some time, simply because no one outside a small circle of top party leaders knows precisely who Andropov's supporters...
Andropov will also need to consolidate his hold on the Central Committee Secretariat, the Moscow bureaucracy that manages the day-to-day affairs of the party. Officials who hold jobs in both the Secretariat and the Politburo, like Agriculture Specialist Mikhail Gorbachev, 51, wield the most clout. Andropov and his colleagues are answerable in theory to the Central Committee, a body made up of 308 voting and 147 nonvoting members who represent a cross section of the nation. In practice, the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat exercise limitless power in running the Soviet Union...
...With the exception of a few who personally ran afoul of Brezhnev, most Soviet top officials did not resign; they died in office. Now Andropov will have to start replacing as many as 6,000 top officials in every important governing institution in the country, including the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
Some Western specialists believe that Andropov will be more flexible than Brezhnev. Writing in the Washington Post, Sovietologist Jerry Hough hailed Andropov's election last May to the Central Committee Secretariat, which put him in line for the job of party chief, as "one of the most favorable developments to have occurred in the Soviet Union in recent years." Britain's weekly Economist declared that though Andropov is "no woolly liberal," he is an "enlightened conservative." Soviet experts in the British Foreign Office have characterized the new party chief as an "urbane" and "liberal" figure who offers the best chance...
...newcomer to Moscow politics, he has yet to attract a following in the party bureaucracy. Says a Western analyst: "He's only served in one part of the country, dealing with one issue. His party and functional bases are very narrow." But as a member of the Party Secretariat as well as a full member of the Politburo, an overlapping of posts matched only by Kirilenko, Chernenko and Andropov, seasoning could favor Gorbachev next time around...