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The safe choice would be for the old guard to pick from its own ranks. But that would mean going through the same trauma again, sooner rather than later. A younger successor would postpone that embarrassment, but he would carry a higher degree of uncertainty, of unpredictability.
The Soviet leaders hate uncertainty, they hate unpredictability. Yet they find themselves repeatedly unprepared in the face of the ultimate certainty: death. Even when we know "after Andropov, who," it will be months, perhaps years, before we know "after Andropov, what." —By Strobe Talbott