The Soviets: A Top Cop Takes the Helm

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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 feared, 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 "broadminded" 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 chance 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."