Brezhnev: Intimations of Mortality

By Strobe Talbott

In the weeks since the American and Soviet governments announced that Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev would meet in Vienna, June 15-18, there has been little doubt that the SALT II treaty --the centerpiece of the encounter--would be ready for their signatures. Yet there has been considerable suspense about whether the summit would ever take place. Would Brezhnev's health hold up long enough for him to attend?

For the past few months, the Kremlinologists of the Carter Administration have been doing double duty as actuaries and diagnosticians, trying by remote means to calculate the risks of travel and take the pulse of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Both titles are held by a man of 72 who has eaten too much starchy food, smoked too many cigarettes and drunk too much vodka in a life full of stress, and who is now suffering from a variety of chronic neurological, respiratory and circulatory ailments. Brezhnev's physical condition has already severely drained his energy, slurred his speech and slowed his movements. It could kill or incapacitate him at any time.

Even the site of this weekend's summit is dictated by the fragility of Brezhnev's health. In 1974 Richard Nixon had traveled to Moscow and Gerald Ford to Vladivostok, so protocol required that this time the U.S. play host to the Soviet leader. But Brezhnev's doctors did not want to subject him to the rigors of a transatlantic flight. The agenda for the Vienna summit has been kept as flexible as possible to allow Brezhnev maximum time for naps and ministrations by the physicians in his entourage.

Brezhnev has good days and bad days. In April he was barely able to conduct his side of the conversation with visiting French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, while last month he seemed to have bounced back somewhat to receive Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, who is 14 years older than Brezhnev but markedly more vigorous. Two weeks ago, when Brezhnev journeyed to Budapest for a perfunctory meeting with Hungarian Boss Jaanos Kadar, the local press and diplomatic corps were not so much interested in what Brezhnev said as the difficulty with which he said it. Ambassadors in a receiving line compared notes afterward on the Soviet leader's flaccid handshake and his shuffle as he mounted the steps to a speaker's platform. Brezhnev's public appearances are becoming primarily chances to examine the patient.

If, as both the Soviet and American summiteers hope, Brezhnev has a series of good days this weekend, he and Carter might conduct negotiations that would be--in fact as well as in the parlance of the communiques--frank, businesslike and useful. But if, as both sides fear, Brezhnev has a relapse, the meeting could be little more than an anticlimactic signing ceremony, tediously stretched out over four days. It would also be a lost, probably last opportunity for these two men, who are meeting for the first time, to thresh out some of their differences in a period of deep mistrust and misunderstanding between the superpowers.

The sicknesses of leaders have always been troublesome variables in world affairs, giving rise to some of the more tantalizing hypothetical questions of history. What if Alexander the Great had not gone on a three-day binge of eating and drinking in Persia in 323 B.C.? That overindulgence may have hastened his death at the age of 33. Would he have completed his conquest of Asia Minor and founded a more durable empire? There are historians who theorize that if Napoleon had not been suffering from hemorrhoids and insomnia at Waterloo, he would have had the presence of mind to prevent Field Marshal Bluecher's retreating Prussians from joining forces with the Duke of Wellington's English army. Napoleon might then have won the battle and changed the course of the 19th century.

As longevity has increased, the leadership of nations has fallen more and more to old men, whose experience tends to be inversely proportional to their physical vigor and sometimes their mental acuity as well. Decrepitude is particularly an occupational hazard of autocrats and leaders of authoritarian regimes. For many, their first choice is immortality. Failing that, they aspire to dying with their jackboots on and being interred in marble mausoleums.

There certainly is nothing new about the almost pathetic spectacle of an infirm Soviet leader clinging to power rather than wielding it. In Vladimir Lenin's last years a series of strokes partially paralyzed both his body and his ability to act decisively. Lenin's incapacity contributed to the rise of his successor Joseph Stalin. At the end of his life Lenin, who had been so ruthlessly effective in his prime, was reduced to whining about Stalin's "rudeness" and "suggesting" that his comrades on the Politburo remove Stalin from the post of Party General Secretary.

Stalin's own dotage and death in 1953 were marked by a macabre irony. His last purge was to have been a mammoth pogrom. The pretext was the spurious charge that the Kremlin doctors, most of them Jews, were poisoning political luminaries in their care. In his terminal paranoia, Stalin came to believe in the plot and suspected that his personal physician was a British agent. As blood vessels began to burst inside his own brain, plunging him into a prolonged agony, the dictator would not let any doctor near him on his deathbed.

Nor is there anything exclusively Soviet about the phenomenon of a leader who tries to govern--and negotiate--despite the encroachments of a fatal illness. During the Paris Peace Conference in April 1919, Woodrow Wilson succumbed to severe fever and gastrointestinal illness. He tried to conduct diplomatic business from bed, but issued irrational and contradictory orders and thought the French servants waiting on him were spies. The episode may well have presaged the massive stroke six months later that left him physically and, to a large extent, politically disabled. For the rest of his presidency--and indeed his life--Wilson's wife literally guided his hand as he signed documents. Franklin Roosevelt, who had been in poor health for years, took a turn for the worse during his wartime meeting at Yalta with Stalin and Winston Churchill in February 1945. After a particularly contentious session on the future of Poland, F.D.R. developed gray splotches on his skin, a paroxysmal cough and irregular blood pressure. Two months later he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga.

Eight American Presidents have died in office, including four who were assassinated. Most of the other 31 have eventually retired to their plantations or farms, their golf and their memoirs, their home towns in the heartland, there to play the comfortable roles of folk heroes and elder statesmen. The Soviet Union has no such tradition. The top leaders there either die on the job like Lenin and Stalin, or are ousted and relegated, like Georgi Malenkov, to diplomatic exile, or, like Nikita Khrushchev, to virtual house arrest and the ignominy of being an unperson. Since Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, only two higher-echelon Soviet leaders have retired because of age: Anastas Mikoyan and Nikolai Shvernik. Numerous others--including the dynamic opportunist Alexander Shelepin, the Ukrainian strongman Pyotr Shelest and the moderate reformer Gennady Voronov--have been expelled from the Politburo and denounced for political sins. If there were more precedent for honorable retirement, Leonid Brezhnev might have decided, on one of his bad days, to step down long before now.

Brezhnev's comrades on the Politburo probably want him to hang on as long as possible. Theirs is a truly collective leadership. All important decisions are made by consensus. That certainly includes any decision about which of them should be first among equals. While a retouched newspaper photograph here or a discordant note in a speech there may hint at squabbles and realignments, and while Brezhnev's possible heir, Andrei Kirilenko, may seem to be up one week and down the next, there is little doubt that whoever eventually succeeds Brezhnev will be a Brezhnevite, drawn from the ranks of the present inner circle. Meanwhile, it is easier and safer for his colleagues to keep renewing Brezhnev's own contract than to replace him.

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.

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