Pursuing His Three Strategic Principles

Others Who Stood In The Spotlight

He is living proof that those tough old men in the Kremlin often thrive on adversity. A year ago, Moscow was rife with rumors that he was on the brink of retirement if not death, that a faith healer from the Caucasus was treating him for mysterious, possibly terminal ailments, that his colleagues on the Politburo were bypassing or overruling him on key decisions.

Yet Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, who turned 74 on Dec. 19, almost seemed to draw strength from a very bad year. It began with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and ended with the threat of an invasion of Poland. In between came a plague of humiliations: outpourings of international protest over Afghanistan; a partial boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games; reports of brief but ominous incidents of labor unrest in Soviet factories; the second disastrous harvest in a row; new tensions with China; the collapse (at least temporarily) of arms control negotiations with the West; the election of a new American President whose rhetoric is explicitly anti-Soviet; and finally the Polish crisis, which posed the most serious challenge to the Soviet empire since World War II.

Brezhnev came through those difficulties physically more vigorous and politically more powerful than before. On his state visit to India earlier this month, he had to be helped up and down stairs, but otherwise looked alert and vital. In February he is expected to preside over the 26th Communist Party Congress, which will sing his praises as it sets the tone and direction of Soviet policy for the next five years.

In recent years Brezhnev has gained enough authority and prestige to put his portrait and quotations on propaganda posters all across the U.S.S.R. Yet so far he has avoided responsibility for chronic failures of the economy and agriculture. That onus he thrust upon other comrades, particularly his longtime partner Alexei Kosygin, who died in late December, less than two months after his resignation as Premier. Now more than ever, the gerontocratic leadership of the U.S.S.R. is dominated by Brezhnev appointees and proteges, with neither an obvious heir nor a challenger in their midst.

Despite the embarrassments and rebukes that followed the Afghanistan invasion, Brezhnev and his colleagues have hewed unswervingly to a foreign policy based on three principles. First, they seek detente with the West in the form of trade, arms control agreements and cordial political atmosphere--as long as these goals can be achieved without compromising what the Soviets see as their security interests. Second, they are always looking for--and frequently finding--ways to weaken and distract Moscow's main adversaries, the U.S. and China. And third, once they have decided that the Soviet Union's vital interests are threatened, they exert force massively, without compromise or vacillation.

In 1980 all three principles were in evidence--and sometimes in conflict. The 85,000 Soviet troops "invited" into Afghanistan a year ago are hunkered down for a long occupation despite the profound damage that the invasion did to relations with the West and the Third World. In conciliatory meetings with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany last summer and with Senator Charles Percy near year's end, Brezhnev said that he was willing to call a truce in the new cold war and make a fresh start in 1981.

Events in Poland will largely determine if that is possible. The Western Europeans are eager to preserve "Eurodetente" regardless of the tensions between Moscow and Washington; yet they clearly could not maintain a business-as-usual approach in the face of another Soviet invasion, this one chillingly near by. Brezhnev and his Kremlin comrades would love to seduce the Europeans from Washington's orbit, and to maintain Communist rule in Poland merely by the posturings of force. But no one doubts that if necessary they will resort to its use, just as they did in Afghanistan last December and in Czechoslovakia twelve years ago.

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