The Quiet Men

Seven months ago, Nikita Khrushchev was bounced as boss of the Soviet Union for such character flaws as "phrasemongering." There hasn't been a phrase mongered or a shoe banged within the Kremlin's henna walls since. Where flamboyant Nikita rarely made an unpublicized move, his successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, go about their business so self-effacingly that days go by without the slightest mention of them in the Soviet press.

Typical was the disclosure that last year's harvest of bread grains was a huge 151.5 million tons compared with 1963's mere 107.5 million. The rustic Khrushchev would have ballyhooed news like that from the golden onion domes. The quiet men of the new regime buried it in a handbook of Soviet statistics that simply appeared--six months later--in Moscow book stores. But if the style in Moscow is different, the substance largely is not. With less flair but more efficiency and cautious consistency, the new masters of Moscow have continued Khrushchev's interdependent program of coexistence abroad and goulash Communism at home.

The Dior Look. Russia's largest domestic problem has always been agriculture. Under Brezhnev and Kosygin, the collective farms have been given price increases; collective farmers have been permitted to add to their private plots, have had their income taxes reduced, their prices raised as well. Most important of all--if Moscow follows through--is a new five-year plan doubling the amount of investment in agriculture, which at $9 billion represents a massive shift in resource allocation to what has always been the stepchild of the Soviet economy.

An effort is also being made to satisfy Russia's growing consumer demands both in quantity and quality. Some 400 factories are continuing to experiment with supply and demand and profit guidelines as promulgated by Kharkov Economist Evsei Liberman in an effort to gear the economy away from planning fiat to what buyers want (TIME cover, Feb. 12). Moscow has launched a concerted drive to improve Soviet advertising, even sent the female director of a Moscow store to visit the House of Dior in Paris last month with an eye toward more stylish Russian dress designs. The Kremlin is considering a new plan upping automobile output, plans to manufacture some $8 billion in consumer goods next year, and has increased workers' wages 4.5% this year --v. Khrushchev's average annual boost of some 2.4%.

F. Scott & Updike. Even on the ideological and cultural plane the leadership has made concessions to taste and common sense. Jazz, long considered a degenerate Western art form, was recently given a three-day hearing at a symposium sponsored by officials of the Communist Youth organization and the Soviet Composers' Union. Though no firm conclusion as to its merits for Soviet society was reached, Russian jazz buffs were encouraged. Among other things going for them: Kosygin has one of the largest jazz record collections inside Russia. More important, the duumvirate fired Khrushchev's hated chief ideologue Leonid Ilyichev, replaced him with Party Secretary Petr Demichev. Demichev has informed Soviet artists and writers that the party will no longer interfere in matters of style, though it still retains the threat to clamp down on "nonSocialist content." Today a Socialist abstract painting is not a target of automatic denunciation. Such Western authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike are now being published in Russian.

The Kremlin is making at least a partial effort to put its own history in perspective: Stalin, while not fully rehabilitated, is no longer treated as though he did not exist. In fact, his name was cheered last week when Brezhnev mentioned the late dictator in a Moscow speech. Marshal Zhukov, in oblivion for almost eight years since Khrushchev fired him as Defense Minister, also appeared, and was photographed in full military regalia last week. A Soviet law journal published an astonishing article recently, suggesting that the time had come for Soviet voters to have not one name but a choice of candidates on their ballots.

Primus Inter Pares. Brezhnev and Kosygin have done less well in foreign affairs, in which they are clearly less competent and less interested. Their primary problem, the quarrel with Peking, has hardly been softened, despite a peace-making trip by Kosygin to Red China, and the Kremlin has even less control over Eastern Europe's "satellites" than did Khrushchev in his final years. In a recent speech, Demichev went so far as to explicitly endorse the independence of every Communist state; unlike Khrushchev, the new leaders know how to keep a dignified silence in the face of Peking's catcalls, which has at least kept their family quarrel slightly more private. They are clearly caught in a cruel dilemma as the U.S. escalates the war in Viet Nam, but so far are cautiously trying to continue the detente with the West--and have cut the Soviet men under arms to the lowest level in 20 years, the visible military budget by $555 million.

Widely regarded as a caretaker government, Khrushchev's successors have inevitably been scrutinized with gimlet eyes by Western Kremlinologists for who's on top--or likely to be. Nearly all agree that the burly Brezhnev, as party boss, is primus inter pares in a committee government including Kosygin, Podgorny, the ailing Suslov and Mikoyan--in roughly that order.

One Sovietologist points only half in jest to the recent official photo of the Kremlin talking to the cosmonauts on the last Russian space flight. Whereas Nikita would have appeared all alone, beaming into the telephone, some dozen officials were hovering around. Up front, seated at a desk, were the top men: Brezhnev was actually talking to the spacemen; Kosygin had the other telephone on the desk beside him, and Mikoyan, by stretching hard, just barely made the scene.

Balancing Act. Many of the experts doubt that Kosygin, a somewhat shy and aloof technician on the fringes of the party milieu, has the personality--or perhaps the ambition--to take charge alone. But as one observer puts it, "Russia is a dictatorship without a dictator now," and the feeling persists that the team system cannot work indefinitely. The old conflicts between the metal-eaters and the goulash-givers surely remain, and the military is hardly likely to be ecstatic over the shorter shrift it seems to be getting these days. But such power struggles as may be taking place are invisible, so carefully does the Kremlin balance out podium seats, portrait placements, prestige titles and foreign travel among the top Communists.

Except for Brezhnev's universal No. 1 spot, even the huge May Day tempera portraits of Kremlin leaders on display all over Moscow last week were in a rare random sequence, indicating that local committees either were hideously confused or had been told to post them in any order they saw fit. Well aware of the outside world's careful scrutiny, the Kremlin seems determined to give nothing away in what is no doubt a genuine balancing act, for the time being at least, among the quiet men who have followed the ebullient Nikita.

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