Tammany Hall, Soviet-Style

If he hopes to step out from Brezhnev's shadow, Yuri Andropov will have to re-make the Communist Party in his own image. A key for the new General Secretary will be to place his own people at the top of the tentacular bureaucracy that carries out the will of the Kremlin leadership. Long excluded from the corridors of power during the Brezhnev era, a generation of party officials in their 40s and 50s will be carefully watching whom Andropov is able to put in important posts in the coming weeks and months. These choices will affect not only Andropov's future but the stability of the cumbersome system of power he has inherited.

The most pressing vacancies are in the Politburo. At the beginning of the year, the ruling body of the Communist Party had 14 voting members, an enshrined gerontocracy whose average age was 70. The death last January of Party Ideologue Mikhail Suslov, 79, lowered the count by one, and last week, as the nation's attention was focused on Brezhnev's funeral, it was rumored that longtime Party Disciplinarian Arvid Pelshe, 83, had also died. If Party Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, 76, is on the way out, as the cold reception he was accorded at the Tammany Hall, Soviet-Style

Brezhnev rites suggests, Andropov could conceivably fill as many as four seats with his own supporters. He may enlist some "younger" recruits among the nine nonvoting members of the Politburo, including Heavy Industry Specialist Vladimir Dolgikh, 57, and Cultural Watchdog Pyotr Demichev, 64.

The highest decision-making body in the Soviet Union, the Politburo functions like a super-Cabinet that charts both foreign and domestic policy behind closed doors. Its membership includes representatives of the government like Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, 74, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, 73, as well as key functionaries in the party bureaucracy such as Konstantin Chernenko, 71, and a handful of republic and urban party leaders like Moscow Boss Viktor Grishin, 68. The new General Secretary will have to appoint known loyalists if he hopes to prevail in Politburo debate.

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.

If he follows the lead of his predecessors, Andropov may also go after a post in the government. Brezhnev assumed the job of President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1977, thus becoming titular head of state. Both Stalin and Khrushchev held the post of Premier or Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

From the Politburo in Moscow down to the 414,000 primary party organizations in factories, schools and collective farms across the Soviet Union, power has always meant the ability to block or grant appointments. For 18 years, Brezhnev proved to be a master of the patronage system, having risen to the top on the coattails of the man he later deposed. How well Andropov can play Tammany Hall politics, Soviet-style, is likely to determine how long he rules.

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