Brezhnev: Intimations of Mortality

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The Soviet leaders are obsessed with projecting to their own subjects and to the world an image of stability and legitimacy. Their stability is already well established, indeed oppressively so. The same key men — Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Ideologue Mikhail Suslov and a handful of others — have been at the pinnacle of power for nearly 15 years. They have out lasted three American Administrations. They have also nipped in the bud the ambitions of potential usurpers like Shelepin and Voronov. Jerry Brown would not get far in Soviet politics. It is a system firmly under the control of a conservative gerontocracy. The average age of the 13-member Politburo is 68. That of the inner circle is over 70. Despite its hostility to capitalism, the ruling Soviet elite is like nothing so much as the cautious, aging, but very powerful board of directors of a large blue-chip corporation. The board may be reluctant to retire its chairman (though most U.S. companies now enforce retirement at 65), and it is not about to hire a young, hot-shot candidate from the Young Presidents Organization to be the chief executive officer. The Soviet leaders want to resolve the problem of management succession in a way that appears orderly and dignified. Yet there is no constitutional mechanism for such transfer of power. In the past, transfers have been accompanied by upheaval and very often by bloodshed. Therefore the collective leadership is doing what comes naturally to any committee, particularly a committee made up of old men: it is procrastinating. It is hoping, from one day to the next, that Brezhnev slept well the night before, that his food agrees with him, that his medicine works — and that his stamina holds up for a summit meeting with the President of the U.S.