And Then There Was One

Kosygin resigns in favor of a Brezhnev yes man

Once there were three. After Nikita Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, the mantle of Soviet leadership fell to a power-sharing troika: Leonid Brezhnev as Communist Party chief, Nikolai Podgorny as President, and Alexei Kosygin as Prime Minister. Slowly and then surely, Brezhnev emerged as the dominant figure. In 1977, Podgorny was shunted aside and Brezhnev added the presidency to his other powerful post, relegating Kosygin to a much diminished role. Last week the troika became one.

The announcement came, fittingly enough, from Brezhnev himself, who after 16 years at the helm has proved to be the most durable Soviet leader since Joseph Stalin. Addressing 1,500 delegates to the biannual session of the Supreme Soviet in the Kremlin, Brezhnev announced that Kosygin, 76, was stepping down "on the grounds of his health, which has recently worsened." To replace him as Prime Minister, Brezhnev formally nominated Kosygin's longtime deputy, Nikolai Tikhonov, 75. The parliament's approval, with a unanimous show of hands, came automatically. Kosygin and former President Anastas Mikoyan are the only top Kremlin leaders who are known to have left office voluntarily.

Kosygin also asked to resign from the Politburo; that request will probably be taken up at the next party congress in February. The retiring Premier is believed to have suffered two heart attacks in the past four years, and has long been afflicted by painful circulatory ailments. Kosygin's absences from public view have become more frequent and prolonged. "He has been trying to resign for some time," a family friend explained last week. "He just wanted to rest and fish."

Kosygin's replacement by a man only a year younger once again dramatized the aging fragility of the Soviet leadership. Although he has appeared robust and vigorous in his recent public appearances, Brezhnev is 73 and suffers from a host of ailments, reportedly including cancer of the jaw and heart disease. The average age of the inner circle of the ruling 15-man Politburo is 69. Most Kremlinologists agreed that the Kosygin move did not presage any major shake-up or policy shift. If anything, it was expected to enhance Brezhnev's own already dominant power. A master of political survival, who was said by Dissident Leader Andrei Sakharov to be "the most intelligent and toughest man in the Politburo," Kosygin periodically differed with Brezhnev both on economic and foreign policy. In 1968, for instance, he was thought to have opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In Tikhonov, Brezhnev has acquired the nearest thing to a tried and tested yes man. Tall, square-faced and self-effacing, the veteran technocrat has little foreign and defense policy experience; he has been known as a Brezhnev protege ever since the two studied metallurgical engineering at neighboring technical institutes in the Ukraine in the 1930s. He became deputy chairman of GOSPLAN, the state planning committee, in 1963, a Deputy Premier in 1965 and a full member of the Politburo last November. By then, as First Deputy Premier, he had already become Kosygin's virtually full-time standin. sb

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