TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82cop

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 10.1 KB | 196 lines

                                                                                November 22, 1982 

SOVIET UNION

A Top Cop Takes the Helm

Yuri Andropov becomes the first KGB boss to run the country


Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, 68, is said to be a witty
conversationalist, a bibliophile, a connoisseur of modern art--a
kind of "closet liberal."  He also happens to be the former boss
of the world's most powerful, and possibly most fear, police
organization.

Andropov's elevation to General Secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union marks the first time that a former head of
the KGB has occupied the highest post in the land. His rise sent
a chill of apprehension sweeping over the Soviet Union's
intellectual and religious dissidents. It also reinforced the
view held by Reagan Administration advocates of a hard line
toward Moscow that the Soviet Union is an unregenerate police
state.

Paradoxically, the new Soviet leader has been widely described
in the U.S. and European press as a liberal and an intellectual
with pro- Western leanings. Since Andropov (pronounced
an-dro-pof) left the KGB last May, this impression has been
fostered assiduously by the Soviets in an effort to soften his
image. A number of Soviet intellectuals in Moscow, Soviet
tourists abroad and emigres in the West have been making a point
of portraying him as a cultivated man, not at all what one would
imagine a top policeman to be like.

On a visit to West Germany, for example, Literary Gazette
Editor Alexander Chakovsky characterized Andropov as a "good
man" with "broad-minded" views. Soviet emigres have described
Andropov to U.S. journalists as "savvy," "open-minded" and
"Westernized."  Though the KGB crushed the Soviet Union's
dissident movement, its chief was said to have sought friendly
discussions with protesters. (Thus far, however, no dissidents
have identified themselves as having had such talks.)

Some Western specialists believe that Andropov will be more
flexible than Brezhnev. Writing in the Washington Post,
Sovietologist Jerry Hough hailed Andropov's election last May
to the Central Committee Secretariat, which put him in line for
the job of party chief, as "one of the most favorable
developments to have occurred in the Soviet Union in recent
years."  Britain's weekly Economist declared that though
Andropov is "no woolly liberal," he is an "enlightened
conservative."  Soviet experts in the British Foreign Office
have characterized the new party chief as an "urbane" and
liberal" figure who offers the best change for an improvement
in East-West relations.

Who is Yuri Andropov--unreconstructed Stalinist despot or
pro-Western reformer?  Little is known about him, and even less
can be surmised from the bare facts of his career. Says
Historian James Billington, director of Washington's Woodrow
Wilson International Center:  "The successor had to rise through
the system,and the garb he put on for the ascent is not
necessarily the garb he will wear when he is in power."

What can be said with certitude about Andropov is that he is a
master politician, adept at the behind-the-scenes maneuverings
and patient coalition building that made his rise to power
possible. Few of the contenders for the succession labored under
more formidable handicaps. Leonid Brezhnev, wary of Andropov,
opposed his police chief's ambitions. But Brezhnev's first
choice. Andrei Kirilenko, fell ill or was disgraced last year.
Then Andropov gradually undercut the heir apparent. Konstantin
Chernenko, a longtime Brezhnev crony who was vulnerable because
he lacked both experience and political pull.

Andropov also had to contend with the shadow case on his
political career by his 15-year tenure as KGB chief. Though he
resigned his police post in May, it was argued both in the West
and in the Soviet Union that his image was too tarnished for him
to represent his country at home or abroad. A more important
impediment Andropov had to surmount was the widespread fear of
the KGB among Soviet officials who vividly remember the purges
of party and government bureaucrats by Stalin's secret-police
chiefs. Working for Andropov, however, was his record of
efficiently crushing religious, intellectual and national
dissent; he once dismissed the dissident movement as "a skillful
propaganda invention."  Yet at the same time, he managed to make
the country's leaders feel secure from Stalin-like coercion by
the KGB.

Though Andropov's name is inextricably associated with the KGB
in the minds of Westerners and Soviet citizens, he is in fact
not a professional policeman. Until his political appointment
to the KGB in 1967. Andropov's career had been in government or
party service. The son of a railway worker, he was born in 1914
in the village of Nagutskoye in the northern Caucasus. At times
a telegraph operator and boatman on the Volga River, Andropov
began his political career at 22, when he became an organizer
for the Young Communist League. After serving as a political
commissar on the Finnish front during World War II, he worked
in a series of party jobs, gradually gaining a reputation as an
expert on Eastern Europe. As Moscow's Ambassador to Hungary, he
played a key role in orchestrating the brutal Soviet suppression
of the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

Later, Andropov is said to have supported Hungarian Party Chief
Janos Kadar's liberalizing economic reforms. But according to
Columbia University's Seweryn Bialer, he is scarcely likely to
model the gigantic, centrally planned Soviet economy on the
Hungarian system, which has abolished most planning and is
heavily dependent on imports and exports. As a secretary of the
Central Committee from 1962 to 1967, he was in charge of
relations with the Communist bloc, traveling to Eastern Europe,
Albania, Yugoslavia and Viet Nam. Says the University of
California's George Breslauer:  "He has tended to take a more
tolerant view of Eastern Europe because he is more familiar than
most with the complexities of those countries."  But those are
about the only countries he is familiar with; he has never
visited a non-Communist nation.

Partly because he has not been exposed to the West, Andropov's
personality and private life are even more shadowy than those
of other Politburo members. Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev says
Andropov has only one hobby--politics. "He's a politician who
loves politics."  A widower, Andropov has a son, Igor, 37, who
has worked under Soviet Americanologist Georgi Arbatov at
Moscow's Institute of U.S.A. and Canada Studies. According to
Hough, Arbatov has had a long personal and professional
relationship with Andropov and may now become the equivalent of
national security adviser to the new General Secretary.

Andropov's daughter Irina is married to Actor Alexander Filipov,
who has performed in a number of avant-garde productions at
Moscow's Taganka Theater. It is though Filipov that Russian
artists and theater people have sometimes caught a glimpse of
the unofficial Andropov. At theater parties, the former Volga
boatman likes to join in hearty renditions of Russian songs.
Andropov also has a dry sense of humor. One Moscow actor who
chanced to be seated across a dinner table from Andropov related
how the then secret-police chief reached across the table to
offer him a glass of cognac. When the actor demurred, Andropov
jokes:  "You'd better accept. The KGB has a very long arm."

According to former KGB Agent Vladimir Sakharov, who defected
to the U.S. in 1972, Andropov has a 5 1/2-room apartment in
Moscow that is comfortable but not elegant. When Sakharov was
invited to visit by Andropov's son in the mid-1960s, the
apartment's outstanding features were a stereo system, a sofa
and a cabinet of highly polished wood, gifts to Andropov from
the late Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito. Sakharov was amazed
at Andropov's collection of books and records, which showed "a
strange attraction for Western culture," and not necessarily for
the best it has to offer. In literature, his taste ran to
Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, and in music, to Chubby
Checker, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Bob Eberly.

Still, a penchant for American pop fiction and golden oldies
does not make a liberal intellectual. "They don't raise doves
in the Kremlin," says Medvedev. "But where Mikhail Suslov [the
late party ideologue] was a dogmatist, Andropov is a pragmatist.
The major problems of Soviet foreign policy today--Poland and
Afghanistan-- cannot be solved by applying more power, but
through skill and flexibility."

In domestic affairs, Andropov may well use the strong-arm
methods he developed in the KGB to discipline the Soviet Union's
unruly and underproductive labor force. Says Breslauer:  "There
is a felling in the Soviet Establishment that the system is
grinding down and that the Soviet Union now needs a strong man
to take charge."  Though Breslauer, like most Sovietologists,
does not anticipate a wave of neo-Stalinism, he believes that
Andropov could easily exploit the prevailing mood. "He has 15
years of experience in the KGB, and his role in helping crush
the Hungarian uprising is seen as an accomplishment. Andropov
seems to have the capacity for the kind of decisive leadership
the Soviet Union is looking for."

But given his age, he may not have a great deal of time to
bring about an Andropov era. All but one of the Politburo
members who supported him for the leadership are in their 70s.*
 Andropov has suffered at least one heart attack. The actuarial
tables suggest that he will be a transitional figure who will
prepare the ground for a new generation of leaders. But Andropov
has confounded Soviet watchers before, and this enigmatic figure
may do so again as he takes up the portentous burden of ruling
the Soviet Union.


*The "Andropov group" in the Politburo is believed to be
composed of Defense Minister Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, 74, Foreign
Minister Andrei Gromyko, 73, Kazakh Party Chief Dinmukhammed
Kunayev, 70, and Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 64.

--By Patricia Blake. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow and
Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles