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Andropov, who became Soviet leader after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, continued to groom Gorbachev as a key lieutenant. After Andropov was incapacitated by kidney disease in late 1983, it was Gorbachev who reportedly shuttled daily from the Kremlin to the hospital outside Moscow where Andropov lay hooked up to a dialysis machine. "During his last months, Andropov ran the U.S.S.R. through Gorbachev," says one Soviet historian. Gorbachev's time to run the country in his own name had not yet come when Andropov died in February 1984. The Kremlin Old Guard conferred the leadership on the 72-year- old Konstantin Chernenko. But Chernenko was all too obviously an interim leader, and when he also became too ill to function, Gorbachev conducted the weekly Politburo meetings and headed the government in all but name. The final step occurred on March 10, 1985, when Chernenko died and the Secretariat elected Gorbachev General Secretary less than five hours later. Nominating Gorbachev for that post, Gromyko gave what has since become the standard one- line description of the new boss. Said Gromyko: "This man has a nice smile, but he has got iron teeth."
Gorbachev, 5-ft. 9-in., stocky and balding, has amply demonstrated both teeth and smile in a whirlwind half-year. He has taken hammer and sickle to the country's bureaucracy. To date, 22 of 121 regional Communist Party first secretaries and dozens of officials in major cities and republic ministries have been fired. At the top, Gorbachev has named four new voting members of the Politburo, bringing its membership to 13, and nine new government ministers. Grigory Romanov, 62, the Leningrad party boss who was widely considered to be Gorbachev's chief rival, was unceremoniously dumped from the Politburo and Secretariat; officially he resigned for reasons of health. Gromyko, 76, was artfully nudged upstairs to the prestigious but largely % ceremonial post of President and head of state, and replaced as Foreign Minister by Eduard Shevardnadze, 67, a white-haired Georgian with an engaging personality but no experience in foreign policy. The general interpretation placed on that move is that Gorbachev intends to have a major say in foreign policy details.