SYMPTOMS RECOGNIZED, CURES REJECTED 55quiet for a sick old man. He had once gone there for its hunting. Now
he repaired to Zavidovo to convalesce.
He had a group of Politburo members around him who quietly
agreed the main lines of policy before submitting them to him. His
personal aide Konstantin Chernenko, whom he promoted to the
Politburo, was one of them. The others were KGB Chairman
Yuri Andropov, Defence Minister Dmitri Ustinov and Foreign Affairs
Minister Andrei Gromyko. Seeking to position himself well for the
succession, Andropov gained Brezhnev’s permission to leave the KGB
in May 1982 and become a Central Committee secretary. He and
Ustinov were on friendly terms, which had made for an axis of collab-
oration between the military-political and security-political sectors of
the leadership. Ustinov and Andropov were close to Andrei Gromyko.^8
They settled policy among themselves on many occasions before
turning to the rest of the Politburo. Although Gromyko tended to
monopolize foreign policy, this was always on the understanding that
he would do nothing to incur the disapproval of the others. Ustinov
was known as a tremendously hard worker. This was just as well since,
after the death of Marshal Grechko in 1976, he was both Defence
Minister and Central Committee secretary.^9
International relations were a peculiarity in the Soviet political
setting. All other areas of official policy were held subject to robust,
regular control by the Party Secretariat. The exception was the Secre-
tariat’s International Department, which had no authority over the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The General Secretary and the Politburo
alone could call Andrei Gromyko, the Foreign Affairs Minister, to
account.^10 His ministry was on Smolensk Square, a few minutes from
the Kremlin by car. The minister’s office was no. 706, six floors above
ground level.^11
On 22 November 1982 Andropov gave a grim report to the Party
Central Committee on the USSR’s economic plight, so grim that his
words were withheld from the press:
Comrades, what we’re talking about is the practice that has
become a fixed one for us: the buying of grain and other products
abroad.
We went to this length several years ago in a dreadful period
after a bad harvest. We went without hesitation. And the first
person who for a long time didn’t agree to this was our own dear
Leonid Ilich: ‘How can we, a grain-producing country, suddenly
go to the Americans to buy grain!’ But subsequently we became