The Kremlin's succession
Bohdan Nahaylo
Slowly the pieces are beginning to fall into place in the Kremlin succession jigsaw puzzle. The recent transferral of the Soviet security chief Yuri Andropov to a new post on the secretariat of the Com- munist Party's Central Committee and his replacement by an obscure career officer, represent the most significant Kremlin leadership shifts for years. After months of Political manoeuvering in the top Soviet leadership that ensued after the death in January of Mykhail Suslov, the Kremlin's chief ideologist, Andropov has apparently been designated to take over part or all of Suslov's responsibilities. Already firmly established as one of the most respected figures in the Politburo — the Party's supreme policy making body — his election to the 10-member inner circle of officials responsible for the day-to-day running of the party's affairs has strengthened his Position as a possible successor to the ailing Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.
At 67 years of age, Andropov's creden- tials as a contender to succeed Brezhnev are impressive. He is reported to be well- educated and is credited with flair and sophistication, which few of his Kremlin colleagues appear to possess. Apart from his 15-year tenure at the KGB, he also has a solid background in both party work and foreign affairs. The son of a Stavropol railway worker, his first party job was as head of the Young Communist League in what was then the Karelo-Finnish Republic. From 1953 to 1957 Andropov was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary and played a ruthless role during the suppression of the 1956 uprising there. On his return from Budapest, he was put in charge of the Cen- tral Committee department overseeing rela- tions with other governing communist par- ties. In 1961 he was appointed a member of the Central Committee secretariat. He serv- ed in this post until 1967 when he was given the chairmanship of the KGB. Six years later Andropov became the first state "security chief since the dreaded Lavrenty Beria to gain full membership of the Poliburo.
A career party official appointed to oversee the country's much feared in- telligence and internal security services and ensure that they remain firmly under party control, Andropov was successful in keep- ing the KGB on a short leash. Although viewed by some Western analysts as a moderate or even closet liberal — a fact that testifies to the effectiveness of KGB misinformation, the 'cultured', 'well- mannered' secret police chief was for a decade and a half the scourge of the USSR's dissidents, nonconformists and religious believers. Significantly, in recent years Andropov encouraged efforts to im- prove the public image of the KGB and to expand its political influence. Frequent public utterances were made by high rank- ing `Chekists', as they like to call themselves, praising the work of the KGB, `the sword and shield' of the revolution. Nevertheless, Andropov's leadership of the KGB was a handicap as far as his political ambitions were concerned, and his depar- ture from this post was a necessary move to enhance his political prospects during the `pre-succession' struggle now being waged in the Kremlin.
Since his transferral to the secretariat in May, Andropov has been seeking to distance himself from his KGB past. His main rival in the Politburo appears to be Konstantin Chemenko, a 70-year old close associate of President Brezhnev, who has also staked a claim to the Suslov in- heritance. The danger for Andropov is that having relinquished his power base in the KGB, he may have left himself high and dry. After all, as in the case of Alexander Shelepin, the last time an ambitious former KGB chief made a play for power, his Kremlin colleagues closed ranks and block-
ed his progress.
Andropov's successor, Vitaly Fedor- chuk, is a 66-year old Ukrainian lifelong KGB officer holding the rank of colonel general. A graduate of the KGB academy, little is known about his career before July 1970 when he was sent by the Kremlin as its troubleshooter to his native Ukraine. This was a time of revived Ukrainian national assertiveness and Fedorchuk, who was ap- pointed the republic's KGB chief, was given the task of 'normalising' the situation there.
By the mid-Seventies Russian human rights campaigners in Moscow were describ- ing Ukraine as a KGB fief. While Fedor- chuk was at the helm, Ukrainian national rights campaigners were imprisoned in greater numbers and for longer periods than dissenters in other parts of the Soviet Union. The republic's religious believers, Crimean Tartars and Jews wishing to emigrate also received short shrift from him. A particularly disturbing feature was the increasing frequency with which the KGB in Ukraine resorted to arresting dissenters on the basis of trumped-up criminal charges and using violence, often in the form of brutal beatings administered by 'unknown assailants', as a means of in- timidating critics of the regime. At the end of April 1981, according to a recent samizdat document, Fedorchuk delivered a speech at the Dzerzhinsky republican KGB club in Kiev in which he boasted:
In the last year a major task was ac- complished — we disposed of 40 Ukrai- . nian nationalists. In order to avoid un- necessary international friction, the ma- jority of them were convicted on criminal charges.
Fedorchuk's appointment as the new chairman of the KGB came as a surprise, for he was chosen over a number of higher ranking officials, including two of An- dropov's deputies. At a time of impending succession struggle, the Soviet leadership appears to have felt more secure giving the post to an official who is both a clear political outsider and a thoroughly reliable veteran. With the Soviet secret police nowadays firmly subordinated to party con- trol, Fedorchuk is the first professional to be entrusted with running the KGB since 1958. In two recent articles in Ukrainian- language ideological journals, he revealed a no-nonsense, hard-line attitude, warning of the dangers of 'ideological sabotage' by the West against the socialist countries, and the subversive activities of 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists', 'international Zionism' and 'clerical anti-communism'.
Given Fedorchuk's track record and views, even a slight tilt in the direction of leadership's agenda. In fact, in the light of the mounting difficulties faced by the Kremlin, ranging from economic stagna- tion, food shortages and social unrest at home, to embroilment in Afghanistan and Poland abroad, the choice of the new KGB chief signifies a general tightening of con- trols within the Soviet Union and an even tougher policy towards dissent.
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