A Kremlin Entrance, and an Exit

By John Kohan

Chernenko, frail and thinner, is back, while a top soldier is out

An awards ceremony at the Kremlin would not normally have attracted so much attention. But when it was leaked that Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko would be presenting medals to three cosmonauts, interest in the ceremony intensified, both in the Soviet bloc and in the West. Would Chernenko, who had been rumored to be seriously ill, really appear? If so, how would he look compared with his last public appearance on July 13? Sure enough, there was the Soviet leader, in a ten-minute film clip of the ceremony that was broadcast over the Soviet evening news last week, going through the usual motions of such occasions. Despite Moscow's attempt to put the rumors to rest, however, Chernenko's reappearance raised about as many questions as it answered.

Chernenko looked tan and thinner, suggesting that he might have really been on a summer vacation, as Soviet officials had claimed. He read a brief address with the same faint and gasping voice as before his absence. But the 72-year-old Soviet leader appeared to have grown more frail. Rather than pinning on the decorations, he simply presented boxed medals to the cosmonauts.

The day after Chernenko walked stiffly back onto center stage, there were more signs and wonders in the Kremlin. The official news agency TASS announced in a tersely worded bulletin that Military Chief of Staff and Deputy Defense Minister Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, 66, had given up his post "in connection with a new appointment." The sudden change caught Western observers and Soviet officials alike completely off guard. Said a Washington military analyst: "It may be really important in terms of the succession struggle, or it may only be turmoil in the armed forces."

The day before the dramatic announcement, Ogarkov had been seen in public at a farewell ceremony for the Finnish Chief of Staff. Exactly a year ago, the marshal had proved to be a confident and tough spokesman for his country when he presented the Soviet explanation for the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in an unusual press conference. Such indications of Ogarkov's growing prominence had led many Kremlin watchers to view him as a possible successor to Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, and there was initial speculation last week that his "reassignment" might be part of sweeping changes in the leadership, possibly involving Chernenko, that the Kremlin wanted to keep hidden.

Judging from the way the Soviet press covered the news, it seemed more likely that Ogarkov had been abruptly sacked and left in limbo. The official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda ran a large photograph and biography of the new Chief of Staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, 61, on the front page and relegated Ogarkov to a few lines of tiny print. Pravda buried the announcement of his departure on the back page.

A pragmatic professional, Ogarkov joined the army the year before World War II began and rose in the ranks to become his country's highest military officer in 1977. The marshal is known to have clashed on several occasions with the conservative Soviet military establishment, and the consensus among the British government's top Soviet specialists was that he had fallen from grace primarily because of a longstanding dispute over weaponry. Ogarkov, they said, had strongly argued the case for concentrating Soviet efforts on the development of advanced weapons that could match the American arsenal, while the majority of Soviet commanders still favored building up a huge numerical predominance in arms.

Some U.S. analysts speculate that the marshal may have got the boot because he was too staunch an advocate of arms-control negotiations with the U.S. Ogarkov served as the Soviet Union's chief military representative to the first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks at a time when the Soviet leadership was convinced of the need to check American advances in weaponry at the negotiating table. Ogarkov is thought to have pushed for the start of talks in Vienna this fall on limiting the arms race in space, but he may have run up against opposition from his boss, Ustinov, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who have all but given up on negotiations for the time being. Ogarkov may have also been singled out as the scapegoat for the Kremlin's failure to halt the deployment of new U.S.-built intermediate-range missiles in Europe, or he may have been blamed for the increasingly costly war in Afghanistan.

The Kremlin passed over more senior-ranking officers and chose Akhromeyev, Ogarkov's longtime deputy and a former tank commander, as his replacement. Like Ogarkov, the new Chief of Staff represents a younger generation of better-educated officers who, in the words of a Washington analyst, are "not frightened by computers and technology." U.S. Congressmen who met Akhromeyev in Moscow last year describe him as "a tough, hard-nosed, thoroughly professional officer, who was clearly the man in charge."

If the world was puzzled by everything that was going on in Moscow, there was no mood of crisis in the Soviet capital. The two younger Politburo members who are most frequently mentioned as possible successors to Chernenko certainly did not seem to be worried. Grigori Romanov, 61, flew off to attend a function in Ethiopia, and Mikhail Gorbachev, 53, left on an official visit to neighboring Bulgaria. They would hardly have left town if a power struggle were under way in the Kremlin.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof