An Enigmatic Study in Gray

By John Kohan

Yuri Andropov: 1914-1984

A former KGB chief, it was said, would never be allowed to rule the Soviet Union. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov confounded such predictions when he assumed control of the country's Communist Party in November 1982. Within seven months, Andropov had also secured the important title of Chairman of the Defense Council and been elected President of the Soviet Union. It had taken his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, 13 years to accumulate all the same trappings of power. The new Soviet leader, it seemed, was a man in a hurry.

Compared with the exuberant bear-hugging Brezhnev, Andropov appeared stern, almost ascetic in his thick glasses. He impressed Western visitors to the Kremlin with his command of facts, his sharpness of mind and his sardonic sense of humor. But somehow a sense of his true personality always seemed to elude them. The Soviet leader, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson remarked after a trip to Moscow in February 1983, was "extraordinarily devoid of the passion and human warmth" that he had encountered elsewhere in the country.

To the Soviet people, Andropov seemed a study in gray, as enigmatic as the fleeting smile he showed now and again in official photographs. Given Andropov's years at the helm of the Committee for State Security (in Russian, Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or KGB), some of his countrymen feared that he would turn out to be a reconstructed Stalinist, intent on imposing order on a society grown lax and corrupt in Brezhnev's final years. Others wishfully thought that he might emerge as a liberal, eager to improve relations with the West and reform the Soviet Union's cumbersome system of centralized planning. Andropov proved to be neither. Having taken hold of the reins of power late in life, he found his grip too feeble to alter the course of a nation of 271 million.

After Brezhnev's long, debilitating illness, many in the Soviet Union had hoped that his successor would be able to project a reassuring image of vigor and strength. But as early as Andropov's appearance at the state reception following Brezhnev's funeral, many foreign dignitaries were struck by the telltale signs of frailty and age that belied his reputation for mental agility. During the visit of Finnish President Mauno Koivisto in June 1983, Andropov had to be helped to his seat at a Kremlin banquet. When the Soviet leader met with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl the following month, his eyes were clear and alert, but his right hand visibly shook.

Andropov was last seen in public on Aug. 18, when he met for almost two hours with a group of U.S. Senators. He looked pale but seemed attentive and sharp throughout the session. Andropov's health deteriorated following a vacation in the Crimea in September. The leadership took pains to minimize the importance of Andropov's disquieting disappearance from public view. Letters were issued over his signature, and statements were published in his name in the Soviet press. He remained conspicuously absent during the international crisis that erupted when a Soviet pilot shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing the 269 civilians aboard. Any lingering doubts that Andropov was seriously ill were dispelled when he failed to appear at Red Square on Nov. 7 for the military parade honoring the 66th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Even the ailing Brezhnev had managed to turn up for the 1982 ceremony, three days before his death. Andropov also missed the next key events on the Soviet political calendar: meetings of the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet in December. During both sessions, his seat was vacant.

Andropov had encouraged expectations of change when, barely a month after he came to power, he delivered a brutally frank diagnosis of the nation's ailing economy. "You cannot get things moving by slogans alone," he told the party's Central Committee. "Shoddy work, inactivity and irresponsibility," he said, should have an influence on wages and rank. After the lassitude of Brezhnev's final years, Andropov initially projected the image of a cool, pragmatic leader intent on tackling the Soviet Union's major problems.

To match words with deeds, the former KGB chief launched a nation-wide campaign to tighten discipline and encourage efficiency and sobriety in the workplace. Police even raided stores, movie theaters and bathhouses in search of "shirkers" who should have been on the job. Andropov carried his campaign to the shop floor of Moscow's Ordzhonikidze machine-tool factory, assuring workers that he intended to get tough with everyone, "beginning with the ministers." He did. The official press carried stories of key bureaucrats who were summarily sacked and even executed after they were caught taking bribes.

The approach seemed to pay off. During the first three months of 1983, worker productivity climbed 3.9%, compared with 1.5% for the same period the previous year. Once the shock effect of the disciplinary measures had worn off, that performance could not be sustained. In a speech to the Central Committee that Andropov was too ill to deliver in person, the Soviet leader urged his compatriots "not to lose the tempo and the general positive intent to get things going." But Andropov proved unable to deal with the most intractable problem in the Soviet Union's sluggish economy: a cumbersome system of centralized planning that all but smothers creativity and initiative.

Andropov proposed a new reform program designed to give local managers in a limited number of target factories greater freedom to allocate funds and set production goals. But the experiments were too small in scope to loosen the tentacular grip of Moscow's central planners. Under Andropov, the Soviet leadership continued Brezhnev's ineffectual policy of throwing money at agriculture. Despite the introduction of a program that gave small teams of farmers greater incentives to be productive, agriculture remained the Achilles' heel of the Soviet economy.

Andropov also failed to achieve his top foreign policy goal: preventing the deployment of new U.S. Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Pursuing what at first seemed to be a shrewd propaganda offensive, the Soviet leader tried to exploit the burgeoning West European peace movement. In a flagrant attempt to influence the outcome of West Germany's national elections in March 1983, he dispatched Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to Bonn to encourage West Germans, in effect, to cast their ballots for the Social Democratic Party, which was far more skeptical of the NATO missile plan than was the Christian Democratic government of Chancellor Kohl. But the effort backfired, and Kohl and his coalition won with a large majority. His government stood by its commitment to accept the new nuclear weapons if there was no breakthrough in U.S.-Soviet negotiations in Geneva on limiting intermediate-range nuclear forces. With no progress in sight, the first missiles were deployed in Britain and West Germany. The Soviets walked out of the Geneva talks on intermediate-range missiles and indefinitely postponed the resumption of strategic-arms negotiations and talks aimed at reducing conventional forces in Europe.

Andropov had no more success in other areas. He singled out former Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua and Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq for special attention following Brezhnev's funeral, prompting speculation that he would move to improve relations with Peking and try to bring the war in Afghanistan to an end. But Sino-Soviet negotiators ended their third round of talks last October without any major breakthrough. Despite hints that Andropov was looking for a way to withdraw his country's 105,000 troops from Afghanistan, the war continues with nothing but Soviet military might to hold the Marxist regime in Kabul in power.

The Middle East was perhaps the only region of the world in which the potential for Soviet troublemaking increased during Andropov's short tenure, complicating U.S. efforts to bring peace to war-torn Lebanon. Syria had suffered the humiliating loss of 96 aircraft and more than 390 tanks during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In response, the Soviets sent an estimated $2 billion worth of weapons and more than 5,000 advisers and technicians to Syria. The arsenal included SA-5 long-range (150-to 180-mile) antiaircraft missiles capable of striking aircraft over much of Israel.

Meanwhile, relations with the U.S. rapidly deteriorated. Andropov may have had success in persuading Samantha Smith, the fifth-grader from Manchester, Me., who wrote to him, that the Soviet Union was interested in improving relations "with such a great country as the U.S." But the Reagan Administration was quick to voice skepticism about the sincerity of those sentiments. Following the Korean-airliner disaster, President Reagan accused the Soviet Union of committing "a crime against humanity." Moscow responded by taking the offensive. After Reagan unveiled new arms-control proposals last September, Andropov issued a statement with the most comprehensive denunciation of a U.S. Administration since the chilliest days of the cold war. Said the Soviet leader: "Even if someone had any illusions about the possible evolution for the better of the policy of the present Administration, the latest developments have finally dispelled them."

Reagan sought to bring about a thaw in the superpower chill when he acknowledged in a speech last month that "our working relationship with the Soviet Union is not what it must be." By that time, all hope for a summit between Reagan and Andropov had passed. A final interview published under Andropov's name in Pravda offered no new counterproposal for breaking the deadlock. Instead, it repeated earlier calls for the U.S. and its NATO allies to "display readiness" to return to the situation that had existed before missiles were deployed in Western Europe.

Andropov's time in power may have been marked by failures at home and abroad, but important, if measured, steps were taken to overhaul and rejuvenate the gerontocratic party machine. Brezhnev holdovers who hoped to retain cherished sinecures at the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy found their jobs going to younger men. At least 34 of an estimated 150 provincial party posts changed hands during Andropov's 15 months in power. It was the largest turnover of party officials around the country in two decades.

Even if Andropov was too physically frail to attend last December's party plenum, he appeared to come out of the meeting politically stronger. The balance of power in the Politburo seemed to tilt in his favor by the appointment of two new men whose careers had been stalled under Brezhnev. Politburo Newcomer Vitali Vorotnikov, 58, joined a number of younger leaders who appeared to owe their growing prominence to the ailing leader. They included former Azerbaijan Party Chief Geidar Aliyev, 60, who was the first Andropov appointee to the party's inner circle, and two technocrats, Nikolai Ryzhkov, 54, and Yegor Ligachev, 64, who were assigned to key posts in the Central Committee.

Whether these changes can be counted as personal triumphs for Andropov is another question. The push to pump younger blood into the aging body politic during Andropov's time in power would certainly have promoted the interests of his supporters throughout the security services and the military. Indeed, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov was believed to have been instrumental in helping Andropov secure the top party post. But if the late Soviet leader made some moves to shake up the party, he did nothing to challenge a defense establishment grown so large under Brezhnev that no one man could control it.

The final months of ill health provided the denouement in a career marked by consummate political skill and shrewd calculation. The son of a railway worker, Andropov was born on June 15, 1914, at Nagutskaya Station in the northern Caucasus. He studied at a school for water transportation and worked briefly as a telegraph operator and a Volga boatman, but soon demonstrated his talent for political work. He became active as an organizer in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). After the Stalinist purge cleared vacancies in the organization's HIerarchy, Andropov was catapulted in 1940 into the post of First Secretary in the newly formed Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic.

Andropov played an important role in consolidating Moscow's power in this northwestern region, which had been partly under the control of Finland before the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-40. When the Nazis invaded, Andropov apparently served as a political commissar with the Soviet partisans; he may have been involved in the Allied shipments of materiel through the port of Murmansk. Andropov remained in Karelia after the war as a deputy to the regional party leader, veteran Finnish Communist Otto Kuusinen, who is thought to have been influential in securing for the ambitious Andropov a post in the party's Central Committee in Moscow.

The party bureaucrat proved to be an able diplomat and steadily rose in the ranks. In 1953 Andropov was assigned to the Soviet embassy in Budapest. The next year he became ambassador. Hungarians acquainted with Andropov during that turbulent period described him as a cultivated man who could give formal dinner parties and still enjoy a raucous evening with the Budapest police gypsy band. During the 1956 uprising, Andropov visited Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy, apparently to assure him that Moscow had no aggressive intention against Hungary. Yet at that very moment Soviet tanks were rolling toward Budapest. Andropov's association with Janos Kadar. the Hungarian Communist leader who introduced economic reforms, helped give rise to the rumors that Andropov was interested in adopting some of the liberal ideas that have given Hungary the most innovative economy in the Soviet bloc. He never did so.

After the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising, Andropov was named to an important post in the Central Committee's foreign affairs section. As a liaison with other Soviet-bloc Communist Party organizations, Andropov traveled to Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Albania and North Viet Nam. But neither then nor later in his career did he even set foot in a country that was not under Communist control. Andropov was elected to the Central Committee in 1961; three years later, Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev chose him to deliver the keynote address on the anniversary of Lenin's birthday, a singular honor that marked Andropov as a public figure to be watched.

In 1967, when Brezhnev wanted to strengthen party control of the KGB, Andropov was the consensus choice to lead the organization. He became a candidate member of the Politburo at the same time and a full voting member in 1973. During his 15 years at the head of the Soviet security and intelligence empire, Andropov transformed a demoralized organization into a thoroughly professional force capable not only of keeping order at home but of advancing Soviet interests abroad with growing sophistication. In contrast to predecessors who used mass terror to suppress dissent, Andropov employed a broad range of punishments selectively tailored for each nonconformist and effectively crushed the dissident movement, which he once dismissed as a "skillful propaganda invention."

Andropov altered the stereotype of the ham-fisted Soviet spy in the ill-fitting suit by encouraging KGB recruiters to go after the best that the Soviet academic world had to offer. KGB foreign agents grew more adept at pilfering high technology and stepped up efforts to spread Moscow's influence around the globe through propaganda and disinformation. But Turkish Gunman Men met Ali Agca's bungled attempt to kill Pope John Paul II in May 1981 tarnished the KGB's new image. Suspicions of a KGB link in the papal plot through Bulgarian surrogates gave rise to speculation that the Soviet agency still relied heavily on such dark arts as political assassination and clouded Andropov's time in power.

As Brezhnev's health began to falter, Andropov's influence with the Kremlin's inner circle grew. In May 1982, Andropov was relieved of his position as head of the KGB and promoted to the spot on the party's powerful Central Committee Secretariat that had been left vacant by the death of Ideologist Mikhail Suslov. It was seen as a move to "launder" Andropov for the top party post. When Brezhnev died six months later, Andropov had lined up enough support to beat back the challenge of Konstantin Chernenko, who was widely believed to be Brezhnev's personal choice for the post of party General Secretary.

Not only had Andropov gained influence during his years at KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, but he appeared to be relatively untainted by the job. Some foreign observers even considered him to be a closet reformer. Word was spread around Moscow and Western capitals that he was really a secret liberal who read trashy American novels and listened to Chubby Checker albums. A rare Andropov interview published in the West German magazine Der Spiegel brought the rumor mill grinding to a halt. Andropov acknowledged that he had traditional tastes. He said that he did not play tennis but did enjoy Beethoven's "Pathetique" Sonata. But even these sparse revelations about his personal hie were not shared with the Soviet people.

Little was known about Andropov's family. It had been widely assumed that he was a widower, until his wife, Tatyana, appeared by his flower-decked coffin in Moscow's House of Trade Unions. His daughter Irina, married to an actor from Moscow's Taganka Theater, remained discreetly out of the public eye. Andropov's son Igor was a ranking member of the Soviet delegation to the Stockholm disarmament conference but also avoided the spotlight.

For all his ambition to rule, Andropov cherished anonymity. More technocrat than autocrat by instinct, he shunned the accolades and personality cult that had tickled the vanity of his predecessor. But if Andropov assessed the politically possible with computer-like precision, he remained a man of his generation. Other Soviet leaders have left their distinctive mark on Soviet history, but future chroniclers will have difficulty in discerning an Andropov "era," and not only because of its brevity. Though the late Soviet leader may have aspired to be more than a transitional leader, he was ultimately unable--or unwilling--to do more than tinker with the system that he inherited. --By John Kohan. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof