Word: mikhail
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...most pressing vacancies are in the Politburo. At the beginning of the year, the ruling body of the Communist Party had 14 voting members, an enshrined gerontocracy whose average age was 70. The death last January of Party Ideologue Mikhail Suslov, 79, lowered the count by one, and last week, as the nation's attention was focused on Brezhnev's funeral, it was rumored that longtime Party Disciplinarian Arvid Pelshe, 83, had also died. If Party Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, 76, is on the way out, as the cold reception he was accorded at the Tammany Hall, Soviet-Style
Andropov will also need to consolidate his hold on the Central Committee Secretariat, the Moscow bureaucracy that manages the day-to-day affairs of the party. Officials who hold jobs in both the Secretariat and the Politburo, like Agriculture Specialist Mikhail Gorbachev, 51, wield the most clout. Andropov and his colleagues are answerable in theory to the Central Committee, a body made up of 308 voting and 147 nonvoting members who represent a cross section of the nation. In practice, the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat exercise limitless power in running the Soviet Union...
...stewardship, Brezhnev was unwilling to dilute his power by infusing new blood into a Politburo that was packed mostly with his longtime comrades and cronies. When Brezhnev died, only two of the voting members of the Politburo represented the younger generation of leaders: Grigori Romanov, 59, and Mikhail Gorbachev...
...They don't raise doves in the Kremlin," says Medvedev. "But where Mikhail Suslov [the late party ideologue] was a dogmatist, Andropov is a pragmatist. The major problems of Soviet foreign policy today?Poland and Afghanistan?cannot be solved by applying more power, but through skill and flexibility...
...Minister Andrei Gromyko, 73, a career diplomat who may have to be content with the largely symbolic post of Soviet President. Or Boris Ponomarev, 77, a onetime historian, who seemed the ideal candidate to fill the role of party "theologian" before Andropov took the job held by the late Mikhail Suslov. Not elder statesmen like Brezhnev's Premier, Nikolai Tikhonov, 77, a man with more experience in government than in the party apparatus, or the widely traveled and urbane Central Committee Secretary Konstantin Rusakov, 72, who lacks a vital prerequisite: Politburo membership. One contender seems...