Who's Running the Show?

Andrei Gromyko's trip to the U.S. has given new urgency to a task that preoccupies Western experts on Soviet affairs: interpreting the current murky status of the Kremlin leadership. Says a top U.S. analyst in Washington: "We've got to get a better fix on who is running the show. This ignorance could really screw up our decisions."

The mystery facing the specialists deepened with the brief, repeated appearances on Moscow television last week of a strikingly frail Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko. The General Secretary, who took office in February, had vanished from public view...

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