The Gorbachev Succession

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985

Summary:  Two trendlines suddenly intersected in March 1985. The arms control negotiations between the two superpowers resumed, after a long break that had threatened to become a permanent breakdown. As the delegations were arriving in Geneva, Konstantin Chernenko died in Moscow, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev was quickly named the new general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The succession to Leonid Brezhnev had at last been completed.

William G. Hyland is Editor of Foreign Affairs.

Two trendlines suddenly intersected in March 1985. The arms control negotiations between the two superpowers resumed, after a long break that had threatened to become a permanent breakdown. As the delegations were arriving in Geneva, Konstantin Chernenko died in Moscow, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev was quickly named the new general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The succession to Leonid Brezhnev had at last been completed.

The new talks in Geneva are indeed new: they begin against the backdrop of a threat of a revolutionary upheaval in the superpowers? strategic competition. For the first time in the nuclear age, the possibility of strategic defense is being taken seriously: at issue is whether this prospect will prove to be the cause of a truly dangerous confrontation between Moscow and Washington, or the source of new common ground and even a political breakthrough.

In Moscow, for the first time, the leadership of the Soviet party has passed to a man born after the Bolshevik revolution. Change is in the air. A new generation is taking power. In his initial public remarks, however, the new general secretary elaborated on old and familiar themes: prosperity and reform at home, and peace and security abroad. He promised both, of course. But it was not a bad platform.

It is fashionable in the West to dismiss, with some contempt, the idea of any major changes in Soviet foreign policy simply because of new personalities. Nevertheless, the reelected President of the United States finally had a partner to deal with; a man who could easily survive well beyond the end of President Reagan?s second term. So the President extended an invitation for an early summit meeting. And the atmosphere of Soviet-American relations began to clear.

Much will depend on Geneva, and whether an acceptable resolution can be found to what looked like an immediate stalemate over American plans to proceed with a Star Wars defense and Soviet determination to block it. The resolution of this confrontation, in turn, will depend in some measure on whether Mikhail Gorbachev is a man who would be willing and able to challenge the Soviet system and change it.

II

The Soviet state and party form a massive bulwark against change. It is largely the same system as that created by Josef Stalin, though without his personal insanities. It is a heavy bureaucracy, bound by a stultifying ideology and administered by careerists, whose vested interests are in maintaining the status quo, perhaps occasionally permitting just enough change to mollify the forces of discontent. Only strong leaders have affected this mass inertia: Stalin by terror, Khrushchev by surprise attack. Stalin, of course, succeeded all too well; Nikita Khrushchev eventually faltered and suffered the fate of innovators?in October 1964 he was the victim of a coup staged by his loyal lieutenants, Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Mikhail Suslov. (Mikhail Gorbachev at the time was a minor functionary in the town of Stavropol in the Caucasus.)

There were flickers of change in the wake of the anti-Khrushchev coup. A reform program was sponsored by Kosygin in 1965. But the Brezhnev era was not to be a time of change. Rather, it was a time for the system to settle down after the tumult of Khrushchev. For a decade the Soviet leadership was virtually unchanged. Reform was quietly dropped, as was de-Stalinization. Party morale was repaired, the split with China became definitive, and Russia massively rearmed.

Leonid Brezhnev made the Soviet Union a true superpower. But there was a price. Stability became stagnation: the economy ran down; the leadership began to atrophy. And superpower status, once earned, could not be maintained without aggressive foreign and defense policies that eventually clashed with the main line of Brezhnev?s détente policies. By the early 1980s, the necessary flexibility and dexterity required to deal with growing problems abroad were beyond the capacity of the ailing and aging Brezhnev. It seemed to outsiders that it was time for a change.

But Soviet politics does not change much. There are rules of engagement. One of them is that seniority counts; that was Brezhnev?s contribution. Thus the succession progressed first to the reliable Yuri Andropov and then to the tried and true Konstantin Chernenko. It remains one of the Kremlin?s many mysteries why Chernenko, whom Brezhnev had anointed as the crown prince, was denied the succession in the first round after Brezhnev died in November 1982. It is also something of a mystery why, given his health, he was granted a second chance when Andropov died in February 1984.