After Brezhnev: Stormy Weather

A new generation of pragmatists faces tough decisions

It is 63 years since the revolution, and the political leadership of the Soviet Union has still not developed a tradition or institution to assure a smooth transfer of authority. The U.S.S.R. is a nation where supreme power changes hands only through death or coup. Vladimir Lenin's demise was hastened by an assassin's bullet. There is a lingering, but unproven, suspicion that Joseph Stalin was murdered. Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev were ignominiously ousted from office. What fate is in store for the collective leadership now ruling the U.S.S.R.? Sovietologists agree that the oldsters clustered around President Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin will merely succumb to the inexorable logic of the actuarial tables. In the 16 years of Brezhnev's rule the average age of the Politburo has crept forward until it stands this year at 70, thus making the U.S.S.R. one of the oldest gerontocracies in the world.

It is also, of course, one of the most experienced. At a time when Jimmy Carter was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy (1943-46), virtually every man in the 14-man Politburo was a member of the power elite. Brezhnev was a major general. Andrei Gromyko was Ambassador to the U.S. Today, however, none of these tough, hard-working old leaders is exceptionally robust. Brezhnev, at 73, suffers from several illnesses, including arteriosclerosis. Alexei Kosygin, 76, has had two heart attacks. Dmitri Ustinov, 71, is currently ailing. "When Brezhnev dies the rest of the Politburo will be gone with the wind," says one Soviet bureaucrat.

Though the present rulers will surely not be swept away quite that precipitously, Kremlinologists believe that in the five years following Brezhnev's death, most of the top leadership will be replaced. Every effort will be made to give the impression of an orderly succession. An interim leadership group composed of some of Brezhnev's surviving associates will presumably come to the fore. The immediate successor in Brezhnev's key post as General Secretary of the Communist Party is expected to be Andrei Kirilenko, who is three months older than Brezhnev, but in better health. Another contender for the job of party chief is Konstantin Chernenko, 68; like Kirilenko, he is a longtime Brezhnev supporter. But Chernenko's present low ranking (seventh in the Politburo hierarchy) and his lack of executive experience may rule him out for the top post in an interim government. The most obvious candidate to replace Premier Kosygin is First Deputy Premier Nikolai Tikhonov, 75, who has already assumed many of his boss's functions.

Three Politburo members are excluded as contenders for supreme power because they are not ethnic Russians--an unacknowledged but key qualification for the job of party boss. They are: Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 62, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, 68, and Arvid Pelshe, 81. Others, like Defense Minister Ustinov and Foreign Minister Gromyko, 70, and Party Ideologist Mikhail Suslov, 77, would appear to be disqualified because of their narrow specializations. The youngest member of the Politburo, Leningrad Party Boss Grigori Romanov, 57, may be a contender for power in a few years. For the time being, however, he has no political base in Moscow; citizens of the Soviet capital jokingly observe that even his surname, the same as the Russian imperial family's, works against him.

The next government will almost certainly pursue the conservative policies of the Brezhnev era. The leaders, though, will probably make overtures to China in an attempt to repair the 18-year-old Sino-Soviet breach. Meanwhile, thousands of middle-level officials who are now in their 40s and 50s will be jockeying for power behind the scenes. By the late 1980s, if not before, they will have completed the second stage of the inevitable transfer of authority to a new generation. Officials now holding 5,000 to 6,000 top jobs will be replaced. These will include not only members of the Politburo, but also Secretaries, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, ministers and deputy ministers, heads of provincial party organizations, leaders of the republics and chiefs of departments.

Not a great deal is known about these bureaucrats whose background, psychology and views are crucial to the world's future. But some Sovietologists--notably Political Scientist Jerry Hough of Duke --have prepared profiles of the upcoming elite on the basis of education and other significant data. These show that the new leaders will be better schooled than the old rulers, some of whom, like Kirilenko, had no real college education. Others, like Brezhnev, attended the vocational colleges that were characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s. Since the younger men began their careers around the time of Stalin's death in 1953, they are likely to be less fearful and more self-assertive than their predecessors, whose lives were under constant threat from the paranoid dictator. Nearly all the newcomers will have had more exposure to the West.

Some experts doubt that these new leaders will be any more favorably disposed to democratic reforms than their predecessors. In fact, as Soviet planners face tough priority decisions about spending on military vs. consumer goods in the economic hard times of the mid-'80s, the leaders may be forced to demand greater discipline and more sacrifices from the population. Such policies will present hazards for any new regime. Soviet elite --members of the party, favored intelligentsia, and so on--could become politically disenchanted with any government that severely restricts their perks. Stiff labor discipline, cutbacks on wage increases and higher prices for consumer staples could lead to popular unrest--as they have in Poland and other East bloc satellites. In sum, the most probable forecast for the Soviet Union's next generation of leaders is stormy weather ahead.

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