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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.