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The exact circumstances under which Gorbachev gained the Kremlin's highest prize remained unknown last week, but there were some reasonable assumptions about how this latest transition had come about. Not many lights in Moscow's Central Committee building were burning late into the night after Chernenko's death, indicating that the decision to appoint Gorbachev had been made well before Chernenko passed away. Indeed, shortly after Chernenko came to power in February 1984, Soviet officials had let it be quietly known that Gorbachev, the man whom many initially considered to be Andropov's handpicked heir, had come out of the succession race with a secure hold on the No. 2 slot. He was given the prestigious post of Party Secretary for Ideology, and increasingly served as a stand-in for Chernenko as the older man's strength ebbed.
The decisive moment for Gorbachev may have come last summer, when Chernenko was out of public view for 54 days. Gorbachev apparently moved into a position of shadow leader during that period, presiding in Chernenko's stead over meetings of the Politburo. "He succeeded Chernenko because he already held the gavel," said a Washington Kremlinologist. The Soviets' chief disarmament negotiator, Viktor Karpov, told newsmen in Geneva that it was Gorbachev who had led the Politburo session a week earlier. At that meeting the leadership endorsed the Soviet Union's opening position at the arms- control talks.
Gorbachev's rise to the top would not have been possible without backers in the three main sources of Soviet power: the military, the security services and the party bureaucracy. Unlike some of his predecessors, Gorbachev could make no pretense of having defended the motherland under fire: he was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. As his Central Committee speech indicated, he will pay close attention to the military, but he will be dealing with a defense establishment that was politically weakened by the death last December of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov and the dramatic demotion three months earlier of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the onetime Chief of the General Staff. Moreover, rumors circulated in Moscow last week that the current Defense Minister, Marshal Sergei Sokolov, 73, a longtime Ustinov deputy, was ill.
Sokolov did not appear during Chernenko's lying-in-state in House of Trade Unions, and no military officers stood with the party leadership atop the Lenin Mausoleum during the funeral in Red Square--perhaps to make the marshal's absence less obvious. Noted Columbia University Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer: "It was very fortunate for Gorbachev that the military was put in its place before he took power."
As the protege of Andropov, the KGB chief from 1967 to 1982, Gorbachev presumably will be able to count on the support of the security apparatus. He could help to cement those ties by promoting to full membership in the Politburo the pres-ent KGB boss, General Viktor Chebrikov, 61, who was named to the post in 1982.