The Secret Files of Mr. X

The dark blue suits that Brezhnev and Chernenko prefer are cut by the same Moscow tailor from a stock of top-quality English cloth available only to the party elite. The style is conservative, but was never the fashion -- anywhere.

Chernenko has gray eyes, high cheekbones and a full head of gray hair. He is the same height as Brezhnev, about 5 foot 8, and just as stocky. Like Brezhnev, Chernenko is poorly educated and is a graduate of a low-quality high school.

Though his name is Ukrainian, he is believed to be an ethnic Russian whose parents migrated to Siberia. His Russian is coarse, uneducated. He is not very articulate in private conversations and is a poor speaker who keeps stumbling over words even in front of a small audience. He lacks Brezhnev's warmth and boisterous self-confidence. Unlike Brezhnev, he is a moderate in his smoking and drinking.

Chernenko is the classic party bureaucrat who spent his life in the cloistered world of the party hierarchy where obedience is the cardinal rule. He has always worked in someone else's shadow and has never had the responsibility to run a factory or an army unit.

His apartment is right underneath Brezhnev's, on a well-guarded section of a Moscow street named after General Suvorov, the Russian hero who dodged and ultimately defeated Napoleon.

Brezhnev's kitchen is where Chernenko regularly makes his appearance, and matters of state are often decided there. The kitchen is accessible only to the men closest to Brezhnev. Moreover, Brezhnev and Chernenko have been taking their vacations together for years, usually in a Black Sea resort reserved for Communist dignitaries. Their wives are friends.

A Soviet joke, reported by U.S. diplomats, sums up their partnership: Brezhnev is dead. Actually, he has been dead for quite some time, but Chernenko hasn't told him yet.

Thoughtful Kremlinologists believe that Chernenko may turn out to be more of a consensus-builder than Brezhnev. Chernenko has been taking the unorthodox position that the Party must listen to the non-Party masses, and he has been able to translate that abstract principle into practice. For instance, he upgraded the position of the bureaucrat who deals with letters sent to the Party or to Brezhnev and suggested that letters from ordinary people be answered, rather than thrown in the wastebasket. In effect he revived the practice of giving a hearing to the person who in his desperation petitioned the czar.

Chernenko has gone as far as criticizing the practice of each party meeting's having a set agenda and speeches. He has called for candid discussions -- or in one overused yet explosive word: democratization. He seems to be a reformer troubled by class and minority tensions, rather than a hard-liner calling for a crackdown on malcontents.

But all this is Kremlinology, a dowser's search for the precious metal of personal convictions among ash heaps of cliches. The problem is that Soviet noncomformists and Westerner liberals alike look for any hint of a variation from the dull standard; to detect a divergence is not just a coup for the observer but a sign of hope for the future.

An alternative analysis -- in Kremlinology there is always an alternative analysis that is equally convincing -- regards Chernenko as a disciplinarian, a hard-line apparatchik. Elizabeth Teague, a researcher for Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, argues that Chernenko "proposes firmer discipline as a universal panacea for all the U.S.S.R.'s social and economic worries."

A Soviet leader meticulously edits his text to disguise any private sentiment. There is no hint in speeches Khrushchev made while Stalin was still alive that Khrushchev was anything but an ardent Stalinist. Similarly, Brezhnev was Khrushchev's most faithful follower until Brezhnev staged his coup.

Soviet leaders are free to express their personalities only if they reach the top. Khrushchev turned out to be insecure, impatient, impulsive. Brezhnev has been an ebullient, skillful promoter of a military-industrial alliance. He has carefully placed in positions of authority men beholden to him.

The West knew moreabout Khrushchev and Brezhnev at the time they took over than it now knows about the people likeliest to succeed Brezhnev, says Paul Smith, editor of the scholarly bimonthly Problems of Communism, published by the U.S. government's International Communications Agency. "We have more information now," Smith says, "because over the past 10 years, Western bankers and senators, foreign policy experts and celebrities of the artistic world have had far more access to the Soviets than in previous decades. Yes, we have more information, but the conclusions are less reliable because many of the skilled professionals who parsed every sentence in Pravda and puzzled over changes in the official biographies have been replaced by the social scientists studying structure and process. The computer printout with quantifiable analyses has taken the place of the in-depth study mixing hard and soft data, speculation and intuition based on files maintained over many years. No wonder we are short on good studies of Soviet personalities."

Toon believes that we could reduce our ignorance by ending "the Soviet practice of having their Washington embassy preside over the bulk of U.S.- Soviet contacts." The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has one of the best qualified staffs of any U.S. mission, Toon says, yet each administration in Washington fails "to provide them with pegs to contact Soviet officials."

There are limits, though, to the values of personal contact. Toon recalls President Carter's first--and only--summit meeting with Brezhnev, in Vienna in 1979. After sitting through the boredom of the the formal dinner the Soviets held for the two delegations, Carter thought he had a better idea. He decided that he would break through the Soviets' reserve and conquer by personal diplomacy.

The dinner tendered by the Americans was to be a small and intimate party; each leader would be accompanied by only three aides. Such a setting ought to encourage good feelings and confidences, Carter thought.

But dinner for eight was not the Soviets' idea of business or pleasure.

Perhaps Brezhnev had been on medication, Toon says, or he might have had too many drinks at the dinner table, but in 15 minutes he was incoherent. The meal was completed within one hour, then the participants fled, both sides conceding defeat.