Shadows and whispers: power politics inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev.

• Author: Reed, Leonard

Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev.

DuskoDoder. Random House, $19.95. Among the best of a long line of good Washington Post correspondents assigned to the Moscow beat, Doer's instinct for nuance and intrigue suited him admirably for the post during a series of power struggles within the Kremlin hierarchy. From 1981 to 1985, he saw the leadership of the Soviet Union shift from the tired rule of Leonid Brezhnev to the dynamic but short reign of Yuri Andropov, then give way to a last gasp of the old guard under Konstantin Chernenko, and finally revert to Andropov's young protege, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Correspondents in the outsideworld get their stories through legwork, leaks, interviews, and press conferences; Moscow correspondents figure things out by comparing rumors and clues. By putting together a number of clues--such as Moscow radio canceling a jazz program, then a humor program, and substituting classical music, and all the lights being on in the offices of the Ministry of Defense--Doder concluded that the ailing Andropov had probably died and wrote a story to that effect. Andropov was indeed dead, but the Post checked out the story in Washington with Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who checked with the American Embassy in Moscow and told the Post: "It's bullshit.' The Post then toned down the story and played it on page 28.

In the waning years of Brezhnev'srule, clues of the maneuverings about the various centers of power--the KGB, the military, the Party, the intelligentsia--were there for perceptive observers to see. A thinly-veiled satire on Brezhnev's lax rule appeared in the Leningrad magazine, Aurora. In 1982, after a corruption scandal involving the lover of Brezhnev's daughter, a Pravda article contained this sentence: "Children reveal, as if in a mirror, the psychological conditions and convictions that prevail in their familities.' The KGB and the armed forces in particular were alarmed by the drift in policy and the growing economic weakness under Brezhnev. But, as Doder notes, a coup--as in the Khrushchev affair--would have been so traumatic that the various elites preferred to wait for the death of a leader.

When Andropov succeededBrezhnev, it was with the support of the military and the KGB rather than the Party. For one thing, the years of rich living and corruption had made too many Party officials vulnerable to the ire of the ascetic Andropov; for another, the...