Soviets may reshape leadership

Press, 21 October 1980, Page 8

Soviets may reshape leadership

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The Soviet Union’s Communist "elite will gather for la meeting this week that ■ could reshape the party and i Government leadership or at least provide hints .of changes to come early next year. ■. ' Probably today, the 280 full members of the party’s policy-setting central committee and nearly 140 nonvoting candidates will hold a plenary session at which the country’s economic performance will be the main topic. But interest in the session, in party parlance known as a plenum whose private proceedings are never publicly divulged in detail, will be focussed on possible personnel shifts and especially the position of the ailing Primel Minister, Alexei Kosygin. Minor uncertainty has also | been added by the officially! reported death in a car crash - earlier • this - month of i

Pyotr Masherov. party chief in Byelorussia who was also one of the youngest figures in the senior hierarchy. The 76-year-old Mr Kosygin, since 1964, the country’s economic overlord, has been absent from the Kremlin stage since early August after suffering a relapse following a short recovery from a serious heart attack last October.

Apart from protocol appearances during his short-lived re-emergence on the scene in the spring, the Prime Minister’s job has been performed by his First Deputy, the 75-year-old Nikolai Tikhonov. Both are members of the party’s Politburo, the 12-man body headed by the general secretary and Head of State [(President Leonid Brezhnev) [ that is effectively that (Kremlin’s Cabinet and top [decision-making unit. I Mr Tikhonov, closely assd-j i ciated through -> much of his ■

career "with •Mr Brezhnev, moved into the Politburo last November, a year after his younger fellow First! Deputy, Kirill Mazurov, had ( stepped ■ down officially, (because of: ill-health but in 'some apparent disfavour,

Soviet officials have made little secret in private conversation of Mr Kosygin’s serious condition, but have declined to say if he will resign as Prime Minister and from the Politburo. i

For the formal record, he was slated by the last plenum in June to address next February’s twenty-sixth Party Congress on the 198185 five-year economic plan — a decision seen at the time as indicating that his health was on the mend. His name has continued to appear on Kremlin messages to newly elected foreign leaders and on official obituaries.

The general feeling among foreign analysts in Moscow is that no move will . be taken next week to alter the Prime Minister’s official position, for which there seems little; pressing administrative or, political need. There is virtually no precedent in the Soviet-Union’s

63-year history for a leader to retire honourably from such a senior post in the party or Government apparatus, and it seemed possible Mr Kosygin could retain his title for his lifetime.

Even were he not to recover again to speak at the Party Congress — in which case his report, would certainly be delivered by Mr Tikhonov — there appeared little certainty, that his'formal status would be changed then either. But if these predictions prove unfounded, the plenum could make the first move next week by approving his retirement from the Polit-

buro. Subsequently the country’s Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, . which holds its winter sitting from tomorrow to. Friday, would rubber-stamp his departure as Prime Minister and-vote in- Mr Tikho-I nov,