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But that would have meant running the risk of having to play the sad music again next year or the year after, and that possibility was finally more than they could bear. If the world is getting somewhat bored with Kremlin funerals, the men who act as pallbearers are surely terrified of them. Not only do the ceremonies serve as a kind of collective memento mori, but they are the outward manifestation of an inner process that must be highly traumatic. The Soviet leaders are among the most conservative on earth. They hate uncertainty, they loathe unpredictability. Leadership transitions are fraught with both. So this time around, they decided to cope with the dilemma by going to Gorbachev. That way, they hoped, the system could at least stave off another transition for a long time. Gorbachev, in short, offered the prospect of institutional longevity.
Columbia University Kremlinologist Seweryn Bialer was in Moscow just before Chernenko's death. "The most overwhelming impression," he says, "was one of gloom. It was the gloom that accompanies the paralysis of leadership. Even before Gorbachev was selected, there was already a cult of personality around him, the hope that he would be able to get the Soviet Union moving again and to keep it moving. In my opinion, that was as important a factor in his quick victory as the votes of loyalty that he got from the Politburo. It was a question of the mood of the elite. They needed somebody like him, not another member of the Old Guard. At the same time, Gorbachev is a very good tactician. It was crucial to his success that a year ago, when Chernenko was selected, Gorbachev became his close ally and never offended the others in the Old Guard."
How much time Gorbachev has to make his mark is, of course, impossible to predict. If he lives as long as Chernenko, and if he stays in the good graces of his colleagues in the Politburo, he could be a leader for decades to come. And because he is young and likely to be around for quite some time, there is a natural tendency to see him as a herald of change. To some extent he is, and the change is already evident. Now that the junior member of the Politburo has become the senior partner, the collective leadership cannot be ridiculed quite so easily as a gerontocracy. No longer will Kremlinology be largely a death watch; no longer will political analysts be consulting quite so closely with medical experts as they try to interpret events in Moscow.
The principal augury out of the Kremlin last week was not one of change, certainly not change in the sense of sweeping internal reform and more accommodating patterns of behavior abroad. Quite the contrary, everything that Gorbachev has said--and everything that can be read between the lines --suggests that his accession heralds not change but continuity in the substance of Soviet policy, particularly foreign policy.