Andropov's absence hints at a leadership crisis
Monolithic, centralized, impregnable and, above all, unshakably secure in its sense of direction and control. That is the image that the Soviet leadership has long tried to project to friends and foes alike. But suddenly last week, on the most grandiose of Soviet annual public occasions, there was a gaping hole at the center of Moscow's bureaucratic façade. The image that lingered in Red Square was that of a superpower afflicted by a leader ship crisis of unknown dimensions, and of new prospects of uncertainty in international relations.
The event that prompted such a vision was one of the holiest in the Soviet liturgical calendar: the Nov. 7 military parade commemorating the triumph of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Before the march-past began, virtually all eyes in Red Square's diplomatic enclosure were turned to the dark red, 35-ft.-high Lenin Mausoleum. There, the aging leadership of the Kremlin, dressed in look-alike dark gray overcoats and fedoras, shuffled slowly into line to review the parade. The face that every spectator sought was that of President and Communist Party General Secretary Yuri Andropov, 69, whose absence at a celebration two days earlier had been officially explained by the report that he was suffering from a "severe cold."
At first, there was some confusion. "There he is," a voice rang out at the sight of a tall, stooping figure on the reviewing stand. Then came the correction: the man was Konstantin Chernenko, 72, a former rival for the leadership in the eleven-member ruling Soviet Politburo. Long after the ranks of T-80 tanks and SA3 missiles began rumbling through the square, the first sign of Andropov's continuing presence in the Soviet hierarchy was a huge airbrushed portrait of him that sat on a red-draped float during the ensuing civilian procession.
No foreigner could recall a previous occasion when a Soviet Communist Party leader had failed to appear for the parade. Only a year earlier, the late Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, visibly ill, had endured three hours of icy temperatures on the reviewing stand. Three days later, he died. Said a prominent Western envoy in Moscow: "Brezhnev stood there on his dying feet, because not being there meant you had lost power and authority."
In Andropov's case, the Soviet authorities went to extraordinary lengths to blunt such a conclusion. Days earlier, Leonid Zamyatin, head of the Soviet Central Committee's international information department, had hinted broadly that Andropov might not appear at the parade because of his "cold." Soviet newspapers gave prominent display to photos of the larger-than-life Andropov portraits that appeared during the parade. Even though Chernenko took Andropov's place on the reviewing stand, the official party newspaper Pravda never once mentioned Chernenko's name in reporting the event.
Speculation about Andropov's health began to increase last March, after he briefly disappeared from public view. When Andropov reappeared, he seemed weak and shaky. His last public appearance was a meeting with a group of U.S.