Once again the sad music, followed by the ritual, seen before, only speeded up and muted this time. The surviving leaders seemed so impatient to bury the departed one that they were almost rude to his memory. They were even more impatient to name his successor. In particular, this successor. Here, finally, was a General Secretary who could go on vacation to his native Northern Caucasus without the world wondering whether he was on a dialysis machine or a respirator. There would be no more jokes about George Bush having a season ticket to Kremlin funerals, and the programmers at Radio Moscow could broadcast Tchaikovsky's Pathetique without fearing that it would touch off rumors of an imminent solemn announcement.
Quite appropriately, much of the commentary last week dwelled on Gorbachev's relative youth. After all, his age was one of the few things that outsiders knew for sure about him. Even the CIA's biographical file was, according to one agency official, "pathetically thin and unhelpful--a monument to how little we still know about that damn place and the people who run it."
One thing the West does know about the Soviet Union is that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution, it is incapable of providing for the timely transfer of power as leaders grow old and sick.
The Politburo has often been compared with the board of directors of a stodgy American corporation. But one important difference is that Marxism-Leninism Inc. has yet to meet that rudimentary requirement of good business, a procedure for ensuring smooth management succession. Soviet leaders love to award one another ribbons and stars and medals, but never gold watches. Retirement seems a dishonorable estate, a form of internal banishment. So Khrushchev discovered. So Brezhnev no doubt recalled as he grew feeble. Andropov after him. And then Konstantin Chernenko.
That is one of the reasons why the aged leaders of the Soviet Union's Old Guard have, until now, found it so hard to let power pass from their generation to the next. In choosing a younger man, they would be weakening themselves: he would have time to build up his own power base and patronage network, which would gradually impinge on theirs. That is probably why they chose Chernenko 13 months ago. Indeed, they could have exercised the same option last week, turning to Andrei Gromyko, 75, or Viktor Grishin, 70.