Go back for a moment, as Mikhail Gorbachev assumes his new office in the Kremlin, to the days after Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev in that same leadership position. There were news accounts that breathlessly portrayed Andropov, former chief of the Committee on State Security (KGB), as something of a jazz fan who liked to sip good liquor and play tennis.
What seemed forgotten in the frenzy to find someone lovable in the Kremlin was that Andropov had been responsible for a brutal crackdown that all but cleared Moscow`s streets of dissidents, that he had spearheaded an essentially anti-Semitic government policy that made life miserable for many Russian Jews and that he had long been the principal guardian of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which is what the KGB always has been about.
All of this was abhorrent from the American perspective, but the Soviet Union is not overly concerned about the American perspective. Andropov did his job of defending the ideal of communism so well that he was promoted.
Americans repeatedly try to recast new Soviet leaders into what they want them to be, and what they want them to be bears little, if any, resemblance to what they actually are. People in the U.S. want Kremlin leaders to be just like their American counterparts. In retrospect, they always rediscover how little they really know about the Soviet ruling class.
This mistake probably occurs because in the U.S., Soviet leaders are judged on style and pop assessments made by a collection of authorities who seem ready to produce analysis at a moment`s notice. Often these authorities know little about the substance of the matter, and because style has become the substance of American politics in this age of television, they concentrate on this aspect of the new Soviet leader. Americans, who form impressions of their own politicians based on the way they look, dress or act, make the same hasty assessments of a new face in the Kremlin.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary on the record, an impression was fostered in the case of Andropov that he would prove more healthy, modern and sophisticated than Brezhnev–and therefore more liberal. Expectations of big changes were bandied about. After Andropov`s death following only 15 months in power, his autopsy report made it clear that the man was fatally ill the day he replaced Brezhnev in November, 1982. He was not healthy. He was not liberal. In fact, he was the ultimate conservative on matters of ideology. He never would have reached the hierarchy in the Kremlin if he weren`t.
In Brezhnev`s case, the West watched him inch toward the grave, a long and tedious passing during which the image of him racing fast cars, leering at pretty women and blasting away at wild boar melted into history. What remained was a freeze in Soviet-American relations and the image of this anomalous old shell of a man who could not read speeches well and needed help to stand.
It is ironic that, upon the death of Brezhnev, many pundits thought that Konstantin Chernenko would be the next general secretary. When Andropov got the job, it was immediately portrayed as a surprise that reflected a battle on the part of the military and KGB against other factions in the Politburo.
There apparently was a need to create someone more familiar than Brezhnev. So Andropov, with help from some people who had an image to sell, became a dynamic liberal in tennis whites, sipping Scotch whiskey and listening to jazz. It`s doubtless that Anatoly Scharansky and many other political and religious dissenters who viewed the Andropov ascension from their prison cells he sent them to would point out that a taste for scotch, tennis and jazz–even if true–had had little beneficial impact on their cases.
We want to think of these Soviet leaders as American politicians, forgetting that they live in a world most of us never have seen and that their ascendency in the power structure is a function of conformity, not change. Whatever label we try to pin on them, they are above all true believers in the ideology that made them Soviet nationalists and patriots. Individual styles are irrelevant.
With his selection as general secretary last week, Gorbachev has become the newest Soviet leader subjected to this process. As background, Gorbachev`s patrons in the Soviet hierarchy were Andropov, protector of the faith at the KGB; and Mikhail Suslov, who before his death several years ago had become the Politburo`s head Jesuit, the final interpreter of Marxism-Leninism.
By creation and formation, Gorbachev is of the system. His challenge will be to make it work better, not to do away with any significant aspect of it. It would be foolish to expect him to reject any part of the ideology. Beyond anything else, it would be most safe to bet that Gorbachev is another true believer who wants to achieve an orderly march toward communism, along the way protecting his country in a hostile world.
Nevertheless, the Westernization of Gorbachev already has begun. The seeds were planted in his recent visit to Britain, where many people seemed quite taken by him. Sense of humor, nice suits, pretty wife, big smiles. Peace talk, propaganda with a little populism tossed in. And young, too, at 54. He`s probably the first Soviet leader in decades who can dance.
At the height of this folly, someone actually compared Gorbachev and his wife to JFK and Jackie. Maybe Mrs. Chairman Raisa will have a televised tour of the Kremlin, a la Jackie? (”This is the Red Room and this is the Blue Room, and Lenin sat here.”) Maybe a glittering Moscow nightlife will be born. Vodka and caviar for everyone. Waltz for peace and friendship!
All this is why thinking and educated Soviets often think that people in the West are hopelessly stupid. Even ordinary Soviets know how Gorbachev got where he is. Maybe not the intimate details, but the theme.
When it came time for assignments, he took on one of the most challenging of all: Soviet agriculture. And during Andropov`s brief tenure, he assumed overall responsibility for the economy. The suits he wore, whether he could chuckle in public, his television presence, the fact that his wife is attractive–all of those things that are so important to people in the West, were no doubt irrelevant.
In the assessment of some critics, the West has come to this state of affairs in which a brief appearance becomes so significant, because the Western media haven`t the slightest idea of how to tell the story of the Soviet Union to the rest of the world. The media simply grab hold of whatever they can find.
Stephen Cohen, a professor of Soviet politics at Princeton University, talked about this problem at a conference last fall for journalists at Harvard University`s Russian Research Center. The text of his address was published in Harper`s magazine recently.
”In recent years,” Cohen said, ”American newspaper and television coverage of the Soviet Union has been as bad as I can remember. Too much of it is one-dimensional, distorted, silly and factually wrong. Consider the image of the Soviet Union that now prevails in the American media: a crisis-ridden nation with a stagnant, inefficient economy; a corrupt bureaucratic elite; a cynical and restive populace; and an aged, inept political leadership.
”There are, of course, elements of truth in this picture. But for the most part it is a crude caricature, lacking context, complexity and balance. It is reminiscent of all those depictions of American life in the Soviet press, which consist largely of accounts of unemployment, drug addiction, street crime and political corruption.”
In Cohen`s analysis, the problem becomes most apparent when the media try to cope with what may be behind the selection of new leadership. There are two glaring difficulties: the attention paid to style and personality, and the assumption that the country rests in the hands of one man.
”Virtually all commentary on the possibility of change in Soviet policy is based on speculation about the personality of this or that Soviet leader,” Cohen said. ”You will recall the media`s brief fixation on Andropov`s closet Westernism and liberalism. . . . Chernenko is portrayed as a dullard incapable of new ideas, and the state of Soviet-American relations is attributed largely to (Foreign Minister Andrei) Gromyko`s personal resentments and generally sour disposition.”
The blame for the way the Soviet Union is depicted in the U.S. should not be placed exclusively on the media. Somebody, perhaps a government official or an academic ”expert,” first tells reporters about these matters, which then are passed to the public with authority and conclusiveness that sometimes defy reality.
A recent example: the White House, during one of President Reagan`s California vacations, presented during a series of dinners and interviews with reporters the assessment that U.S. intelligence had concluded that Chernenko had six months to live. It was an object lesson in what can happen when an isolated assessment, which itself probably was based on informed speculation, is leaked.
Some reporters wrote that Chernenko had only six more months to live and speculated, quoting administration sources, on what that meant for weapons-control negotiations. One reporter took the same set of ”facts” and reached a different conclusion: Chernenko is not going to die tomorrow and has at least six months to live, and that`s good for arms control. A few weeks later, of course, Chernenko was dead.
This incident carried with it echoes of the declining days of Brezhnev, which in retrospect lasted for about five years. During that strange period, there were varying news accounts that Brezhnev had died, that he was so feeble that he was seen trying to use a fork to eat his soup at a state dinner, that his jowls were pumped up with cortisone.
After one long vacation, the Kremlin was so interested in defusing these rumors that it invited 15 photographers from various nations into Brezhnev`s office while the Soviet leader marched up and down past them for a Western-style ”photo opportunity,” an event that later led to a spectrum of diagnoses about the state of his health.
Cohen argued that it is time to change this process. Admittedly, the Soviet Union remains one of the most secret places on Earth, but not as secret as it used to be. And Cohen refers to a gap in journalism that most certainly exists across American society, one that must be filled not by speculation, but by knowledge and education.
