THE MAN YURI MADE:

Gorbachev, too, had crucial connections with the KGB at the highest level. He probably would never have ascended to power without the patronage of Yuri Andropov, the head of Soviet intelligence for fifteen years before he became party leader in 1982. Taubman tells us that Andropov met Gorbachev in 1968, soon after he took over the KGB. One of the youngest provincial party chiefs in the USSR, Gorbachev combined a reputation for loyalty with a fertile mind, pragmatism, and a talent for innovation--qualities that Andropov felt the country sorely needed.

Andropov's position gave him access to data on the deterioration of Soviet society. The economy was anemic, the governing structures were rigid and inefficient, and laws were ignored or unjust. Factory towns polluted the air and water as they churned out armaments while ordinary citizens had to stand in long lines for paltry supplies of food and shoddy goods. Collectivized agriculture made the lives of farmers and their customers miserable. Public health services were abysmal, and the population, especially the Slavic majority, suffered from pervasive alcoholism, low birthrates, and decreasing life expectancy. Andropov faulted the complacent and stultifying policies of Leonid Brezhnev, the ponderous, beetle-browed apparatchik who replaced Khrushchev in 1964.

Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in 1982. His kidneys were failing and within a few months he was working mostly from his dacha, tethered to a dialysis machine. From a hospital bed in 1983 he urged his underlings to choose Gorbachev as his successor. But when Andropov died the following February, they had already decided that Konstantin Chernenko, a seventy-two-year-old party hack, would be a safer pick, although he was afflicted with emphysema, pleurisy, pneumonia, and heart disease. They were organizing Chernenko's funeral just thirteen months later.

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