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The cloistered nature of the top Kremlin leadership singularly handicaps its members in judging how their actions look to non-Soviet eyes. To them, Reagan's plans appear to envisage a restoration of the nuclear superiority the U.S. enjoyed during the 1950s and '60s. His arms-control proposals seem to be designed only to placate European public opinion while codifying that supremacy. Georgi Arbatov, one of Moscow's chief experts on U.S. affairs, charges that "the Reagan Administration returned to Geneva not to find an agreement but to relieve the pressure [from the peace movement] and, frankly, to fool the people." As to Reagan's rhetoric, Anatoli Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., says: "Words are deeds."
Andropov has put much less of a personal stamp on foreign policy, and on the minds of his adversaries, than Reagan. Not only was he a somewhat unknown figure to those outside the Kremlin even before illness removed him from public view, but some of what the West thought it knew about him was wrong. The picture of Andropov as a Westernized intellectual, fond of American music and books, that circulated widely in the months before he assumed power following the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 was mostly the product of wishful thinking, possibly aided by deliberate Kremlin disinformation. He does, however, have a reputation as the best-informed and most sophisticated Soviet leader since Lenin. Western diplomats who visited him in Moscow early in his tenure were impressed by his command of facts and sardonic humor. But French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson, who met Andropov last February, found him "extraordinarily devoid of the passion and human warmth" that Russians often display.
Andropov amassed the trappings of power more rapidly than any previous Soviet leader; he assumed the twin posts of General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the U.S.S.R. within seven months. By that time, he had also become chairman of the powerful Defense Council. It took Brezhnev 13 years to accumulate those three titles. Once again, though, appearances may have been deceiving. It is still not clear how much real authority Andropov exercised before he fell ill, nor how much he will regain if he recovers full health. The task of determining that is complicated by the nature of Moscow's decision-making system.
At the top, in theory at least, sits the Politburo, which meets every Friday morning in the Kremlin. It is one of the most elderly ruling bodies in the world; the average age of its eleven full members is 67. Most started moving into influential positions during the 1940s and, like Reagan, formed their views then. They have traveled in the West only fleetingly if at all. Some Soviets acknowledge the problem that their leaders' age and narrowness of experience creates. Confides one young journalist: "The old leaders at the top who cling to their old ideas and to their power, that is our tragedy."
On the matters that most affect the outside world, Andropov is widely believed to make decisions only after consulting the two other members of what is in effect