THE REAL ANDROPOV

Press, 26 November 1982, Page 17

THE REAL ANDROPOV

A former secret police chief now wields supreme power in the Soviet Union. What can the world expect? This profile was written by PETER WILSHER, foreign editor of the London “Sunday Times.”

Yuri Vladimirovich Andro-

pov, for 15 years head of Moscow's dreaded Bureau of State Security, the K.G.8., has moved smoothly and without obvious opposition to succeed Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And his very first speech as a superpower leader included these words: “We know full well the imperialists will never meet one’s pleas for peace. It can be upheld only by resting on the invincible might of the Soviet, armed forces.”

Yet, among most official and unofficial Kremlinwatchers around the world, Andropov is far from being seen as a representative of terror and hardline confrontation. Instead his accession to supreme power has been greeted — albeit cautiously — as a victory for moderation and a hopeful augury for international peace. It marks a remarkable triumph of personality, political skill and public relations.

Until May this year, the tall, stooped'Andropov held the job previously occupied by some of the most feared arid monstrous executioners of the twentieth century — Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria, Schelepin, .and half a dozen more. He had reluctantly accepted the post in 1967 with a clear brief from Brezhnev to put a more acceptable face on the operations of this millionstrong secret police force with its $3.5 billion annual budget for the suppression of dissidence and the control of the Soviet people. Remarkably, he emerged with his own reputation not only untarnished but enhanced. Brezhnev himself under- » lined the achievement two years ago when he presented Andropov, just after his 65th birthday, with the October Revolution Medal. “It is fundamentally important,” Brezhnev said, “that the powerful weapon of defence of state and people Against enemy intrigue should be in pure and immaculate hands.” The fact that he could make such a statement with-

out setting off. a gale of ghoulish laughter across the wasteland of labour camps and psychiatric prisons is an extraordinary tribute to Andropov’s subtlety and longterm self-control. Andropov was born on June 15, 1914, in a little Cossack town in the north Caucasus. His father was a lower-grade railwayman, his mother’s family was almost certainly Jewish. Although all the reference books put him down.as Russian, there are rumours that his real origin may have been more Armenian. (C.I.A. researchers suspect that the name may have been quietly changed from Andropian.) These inherited drawbacks, such as they are, have done little to block Andropov’s steady rise. At every stage of his long career, he has worked with immense dedication to cancel out the disadvantages of his distinctly humble start and lack of any formal higher education. He became fluent in foreign languages and a con-. noisseur in art and books, and developed a liking for intellectual jokes and modern jazz. i Of course, it would be quite wrong to suppose that these attributes are just the product of his imagebuilder’s imagination. For instance, his ability to speak and read English (although he is never known to have set foot outside the Communist bloc) is firmly based on regular visits by one of the best teachers at Moscow University, which certainly lasted until 1978. A car would pick her up at 7 a.m. and they would put in a two-hour lesson before breakfast three times a week. There were no English lessons in the little towns along the Volga where he spent his early years, picking up a few roubles as a telegraph operator, trainee cinema projectionist, and boatman. He graduated from the Rybinsk Institute of Water Transportation in 1936, the year Stalin launched the Great Purge, and went to work as “youth organiser” in a local shipyard, and joined the party. In 1938, with the Old Bolshevik faithful dead in

their thousands, he was appointed to organise all youth work in the town of Yaroslavl, the first sign that he was on his way.

When the Winter War with Finland broke out in 1940, he was sent up to help organise things in the turbulent frontier province of Karelia. There he caught the eye of Otto Kuusinen, the man Stalin had picked out to govern Finland, if and when the Soviets took it over. As Kuusinen’s own star ascended, Andropov went with him. By 1951, with Stalin still alive, he was in Moscow as a Central Committee inspector, handling the tricky job of reporting on his seniors’ ideological orthodoxy and personal behaviour.

With Khruschev in control, in 1953, he was promoted to run the Foreign Ministry’s fourth department, responsible for the two Germanies and Austria (hence his good working knowledge of German), as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia. And then he was ready for Hungary, where trouble was starting to bubble up. He became full ambassador in time for the run-up and climax of the 1956 rising. It was there, in Budapest, that the first indications came of his complexity, his ability to dissimulate, and his cool, harsh effectiveness in face of crisis. As resistance to Soviet domination gradually developed during 1954 and 1955, the Ambassador was everywhere, giving little

jazz parties, entertaining groups of Hungarian intellectuals, expressing quite a lot of sympathy with their discontents (he has done the same sort of thing, more recently with dissenters in the U.S.S.R. itself), and giving the impression of liberal flexibility which Hungarians now in exile, like Sandor Kopaksi, former Budapest police chief, still remember. When the crunch came, however, he acted without hesitation. He blandly reassured the Prime Minister, Imre Nagy, that there would be no possible invasion, and by the time the Government woke up, the Soviet tanks were already in the city.

It is typical of Andropov’s sideways approach that this was far from the end of the story. After the revolution had been crushed, he stayed on to select and install a new prime minister, Janos Kadar, who is still there, presiding over Hungary’s notably successful programme of economic reform. He then returned to Moscow as Central Committee secretary in charge of Eastern Europe, holding the satellites in check during the years between 1957 and the Prague Spring with a careful mixture of limited concessions to the people and graded sanctions against the rebels. Only at the end did the. Dubcek emergency set his policy in question, and by then he had gone to higher

responsibilities. In 1967, three years after the ousting of Khrushchev, the K.G.B. was in something of a shambles. Its current boss, Viktor Semitchestny, had lost more than 100 agents in a series of arrests around the world; referred in public to the Nobel prizewinning novelist Boris Pasternak as “worse than a pig”; and failed to stop both the publication of the damaging autobiography of Svetlana Alulyeva, Stalin’s daughter — and the escape of the lady to the West.

Andropov, recognising all the risks to his own burgeoning career of becoming associated with this dangerous institution, finally accepted Brezhnev’s invitation to clean it up. His performance, during these past 15 years, has been an almost miraculous balancing act. He has polished up the K.G.B.’s gulagdominated image both inside and outside the Soviet Union. He has powerfully advanced the K.G.B.’s representation and status within the Kremlin hierarchy. He has found ail sorts of ways (quite apart from his access to the key secret files on all his colleagues) to keep fresh his own political standing and influence. And yet, in his own unflamboyant way, he has held down the lid on trouble with unparalleled success. Under his imaginative tutelage, the secret police have been depicted almost as folk heroes. Detective stories and thrillers about them are officially encouraged (in 1976 a special commission of . the Union of Writers was set up to promote the genre). Films were commissioned to show the patriotic work done tracking down foreign spies. Awards to members of the security forces have come thick and fast, with Brezhnev himself often enrolled to make the presentations. More signficantly, Andropov and several key lieutenants received significant promotions, alongside their K.G.B. jobs. Andropov was elected to the central Politburo group in 1973 — the first K.G.B. chief there since Stalin’s day.

There, when k Brezhnev died, he had only one real rival. Mikhail Suslov was

K.G.B. representation on the 220-strong Central Committee has now significantly increased. while that of the military has gone down — a great contrast to the time when Khrushchev was purging the agents from all levels of the party.

The K.G.B. has also had its status as an institution enhanced: under the 1977 constitution it became a State Committee of the U.S.S.R. whose leader automatically commands a place on the Council of Ministers. Before that, the leader had to be invited. None of this reduced the K.G.B.’s effectiveness as a crusher of dissidence. Andropov’s schoolmasterly approach has achieved almost total success in eliminating critical individuals and groups: those who monitor the Helsinki agreements, well-known figures such as Andrei Sakharov, the wouldbe free trade unionists, the protesters at the use of mental hospitals to take care of troublemakers — all have been firmly suppressed and silenced.

However, Andropov, by a striking sleight-of-hand, has distanced himself from all this, giving the impression — quite falsely — that all he is interested in is the higher reaches of foreign policy and ideological rectitude. ■ To a large extent Andropov’s trick has worked. He hardly rates a mention .in Amnesty International’s rollcall of human rights villains. Instead, he has diverted attention to his public utterances — he has three times been asked to deliver the prestigious annual Lenin Memorial Address, most recently in the spring of this year — and ■ to his gradual advance towards the real centres of Soviet power. The most important of these, by a long chalk, is his longstanding membership of the shadowy, but quite crucial Supreme Defence Committee, which is restricted to a tight inner core within the already' small Politburo.

dead, Andrei Kirilenko was more or less out of political life (he had been formally dropped from the Politburo), and Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and Defence Minister Dmitri Ustinov were not really putting themselves forward. The succession therefore could fall only between the last two, Andropov and Kostantin Chernenko. Everyone else was, literally, an outsider. Andropov won, apparently without a struggle, in the least stormy transfer of power that the Kremlin has so far recorded. The first

question now is how long will he last? He has a history of heart trouble and there are reports of at least one quite serious attack. The second question is: how long will he take to establish himself as fully in control? The cliche of “collective leadership” is subject to some question, but it does require time for new men, especially without many proteges established in the party and government hierarchies, to impose their more innovative ideas. The third question is: just how innovative does Andropov want to be, and in which directions? There is some

evidence that in 1980 he was very dubious about invading Afghanistan. Will he try to pull out or scale down that operation? He has retained close links with the Hungarian economic experiment. Will he try to introduce something similar within the U.S.S.R.? He has built strong relationships with the Soviet military establishment, and went out of his way last week to emphasise the central importance of their efforts. Will he try, however, to temper their aggression and slow the pace of the Soviet arms- build-up? During the Brezhnev years

Andropov stood up quite publicly for detente, even at the risk of attracting unpopularity among his Politburo colleagues and army leaders. Will he, and could he, carry ~ some of that through to the new realities of the Reagan era? After such a short time in office, there are few answers and an infinitude of further questions.. But one thing, at

any rate, is clear from his 67-year career so far: there is a lot more to this stooping, bespectacled Volga boatman than leaps immediately to the eye. What no-one yet knows is whether that is good or bad for the rest of mankind.