Men of the Year: Ronald Reagan & Yuri Andropov

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a troika. They are Andrei Gromyko, 74, who has been Foreign Minister since 1957, and Dmitri Ustinov, 75, the Defense Minister who appears to have backed Andropov in his bid for power after Brezhnev's death. Ustinov's rising prominence suggests that the Soviet Union under Andropov is becoming still more militarized. Brezhnev took his country far in that direction, but Andropov appears to be even closer to the Soviet military than his predecessor.

The military's clout reflects in part the ancient obsession with security of oft-invaded Russia and in part a cold judgment by the Politburo that armed might commands both the fear and respect that give the modern Soviet Union its best chance of extending its ideological and political influence. The practical effect is that the marshals and admirals get whatever weapons they want, never mind the cost.

Andropov's contributions to the breakdown of Soviet-American relations, in one sense, go back further than Reagan's. He became a full member of the Politburo in 1973, when Reagan was still Governor of California with no influence on U.S. foreign policy. Thus Andropov was part of the Kremlin leadership that did much to scuttle détente not long after it was launched.

Détente was an attempt to spin a web of agreements on arms control, trade and scientific and cultural exchanges that would give both sides a tangible stake in maintaining correct, if not exactly friendly, relations. Nixon and Brezhnev formalized the concept in 1972 by signing an agreement pledging each side not to seek a "unilateral advantage at the expense of the other." The Soviets have long accused the U.S. of violating the spirit of détente by encouraging Egypt to switch from Kremlin client to U.S. ally—for which there is no evidence—and by enacting the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, which made a U.S.-Soviet trade agreement contingent on freer emigration of Jews from the U.S.S.R. Moscow regarded that as unwarranted interference in its internal affairs.

Soviet violations of détente, however, were so much more blatant as to appear systematic. In the analysis of Adam Ulam, head of Harvard's Russian Research Center, the Kremlin leaders always took it for granted that the two sides would continue their competition for power and influence in the Third World, and after the Watergate scandal broke they saw little reason to be cautious about doing so. They judged the political authority of Nixon and his successors to be too gravely weakened for them to shape any vigorous response to Soviet probes. Among other things, the Kremlin sent guns and Cuban troops to help Marxist movements seize power in Angola, Ethiopia and South Yemen.

Most destructive of all, Moscow continued its relentless piling up of arms. In 1977 the Kremlin started emplacing mobile, accurate, triple-warhead SS-20 nuclear missiles in the Far East and in the western U.S.S.R.; those in Europe vastly increased the destructive power aimed at U.S. NATO allies. The SS-20s were supposedly intended to counter the threat posed to Moscow by British and French nuclear weapons, but by the end of 1978 they already exceeded the British and French forces in the number of warheads.

In retrospect, it seems incredible that the Politburo thought it could pursue such a course while still proclaiming, as Brezhnev often put it, that