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This collegial leadership is dominated by a troika made up of Premier Kosygin, Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, 60, and President Nikolai Podgorny, 64, the chief of state. A fourth man also regularly joins the decision-making executive committee of the eleven-man Politburo: Party Ideologist Mikhail Suslov, 65, whose position seems to have stayed almost the same through several changes in leadership. Of the top four, none was old enough to have had a major role in the revolution, and all but Suslov were trained as technocrats: Kosygin was a textile engineer and factory manager, Brezhnev a surveyor and metallurgical engineer.
The top men are well balanced against one another, and have divided up the job of ruling Russia. As party boss, Brezhnev controls vast patronage and for this reason is undoubtedly the most powerful member of the group. He also concentrates on the reform of Soviet agriculture and has overall responsibility for the increasingly delicate task of maintaining relations with the other Communist countries. Premier Kosygin is a sort of executive vice president who runs the regime's industrial liberalization, takes care of the Russian consumer—whose needs this year for the first time are given precedence over heavy industry—and handles the Kremlin's relations with the U.S. and other Western countries. Podgorny deals with the Arab countries and the underdeveloped nations.
The present regime overthrew Khrushchev not only because it found many of his actions boorish and his policies impetuous, but also because he had a way of forcing his will on the Politburo and the Central Committee.
Nowadays, the balance in the troika is such that no one man is likely to impose his will against the others. A majority vote in the Politburo decides policy on many issues. Even Brezhnev was dealt a setback recently when the Politburo cut back by 13% his fiveyear, $45 billion crash investment program in agriculture. Kosygin was reported to have opposed bringing Sinyavsky and Daniel to trial but to have been outvoted by his colleagues. The move toward high-level democratization has in no way been institutionalized, however, and it is still possible that one man could again gather all the power into his own hands.
Brezhnev and Kosygin are in agreement about liberalization in Russia, but Brezhnev takes ideology more into consideration and generally prefers a relatively tougher line. Kosygin is more practical and realistic and, though no liberal in the Western sense (both he and Brezhnev served time in Stalin's ca dres), is more or less looked to by the new intelligentsia as their best hope for further relaxation of party control. Suslov is more of a hardliner, while Podgorny has the strongest liberal tendencies of all. All four distrust the ambitious younger leaders, at whom they recently struck a blow by removing Aleksandr Shelepin, 49, an ex-head of the secret police, from his job as Deputy Premier and Party Secretary and demoting him to an obscure and less powerful post as head of the Russian trade unions. Shelepin had surrounded himself with a group of former Komsomol (youth league) officials who are hawkish in foreign policy, favor strict control of the intellectuals and are known as "metal eaters" because they stress heavy industry rather than consumer goods.