Men of the Year: Ronald Reagan & Yuri Andropov

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having attained equal status as a superpower. Because of their weakening economy, uncertain leadership and failure to stop the U.S. missile deployment in Europe, says Bialer, "there is no doubt the Soviets are in a hole. But anyone who thinks that will make them easier to deal with does not understand them."

For hundreds of millions of people in every part of the globe—including the U.S. and the Soviet Union—it is not enough just to make the superpower conflict less menacing. They long for a breakthrough toward cooperation, rather than controlled animosity, and toward a level of disarmament that would leave the superpowers incapable of ending civilization. Alas, those can be only the most remote of long-range goals. The values of U.S. and Soviet society are too starkly contrasting to permit for the foreseeable future anything friendlier than a more cautious competition. It is in the U.S. interest to be strong militarily, but Washington should explore every possibility of negotiating agreements that would reduce the risk of war. The Soviets, for their part, will be more secure when they begin to understand how their own actions can, and do, provoke the kind of U.S. response that they later deplore.

There is a chance of moving away from confrontation, even under the leaders who brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union so close to it during 1983. Reagan has time and again proved to friends and political opponents alike that they have underestimated his ability to calculate how far his intense ideological convictions can realistically be pushed. Andropov, in the judgment of Richard Nixon, could be "the most formidable and dangerous adversary" of any recent Soviet leader, but also "the best one with whom the U.S. could develop a live-and-let-live relationship." Says Nixon: "He is not, like Khrushchev, controlled by his emotions. He is more imaginative than Brezhnev. He is highly intelligent. He is coldly pragmatic. He will not do something rash."

Both leaders must realize the overriding truth of superpower relations: since they cannot make war without destroying themselves and most of the rest of the world, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are, in Henry Kissinger's phrase, "doomed to coexist." To TIME'S Men of the Year, the point can be put more personally: whatever else they do, Reagan and Andropov will be judged by history primarily on how each deals with the other's country—and with the other as a man.

—By George J. Church. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow, Laurence I. Barrett and Strobe Talbott/ Washington, with other bureaus

* Marshal Ogarkov confirmed that the show had been screened privately for some Soviet officials. His view of it: "The danger which is shown in the film really exists."