SOLOVYOV AND KLEPIKOVA
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the Komsomol, and
to
form.elite units of storm troopers from among
his Blackshirts.
Dmitri Polyansky's position was directly opposed to Shelepin's.
Against the "workers" banner hoisted by Shelepin, Polyansky raised a
"peasants" banner. At any rate, such was the coloration of his chauvin–
ist nationalism and reactionary views. By an ironical twist that one can
ascribe either
to
fate or to the rivals that overcame him, his first
demotion was to the position of Minister of Agriculture, the most
hopeless and demeaning slot in the Soviet hierarchy. Then he was sent
into honorable exile-as Ambassador to Japan. His neighbor in the
Orient, Vasily Tolstikov, was sent as Ambassador
to
China because he
had taken too much power into his own hands in Leningrad. He was
trying, it seems, to be more of a royalist than the king himself.
Podgorny was a member not only of the Politburo but of its
nucleus, the triumvirate; and he was at least the third most important
person in the state that he officially headed. (Brezhnev himself replaced
him as Chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.)
Podgorny was removed from all his posts immediately after his trip to
Africa, when he tried to make Soviet policy even more harsh and
extremist than it already was-something that ran counter to detente
and put a heavy strain on the Soviet budget besides . (Apparently, he
had tried to oust Brezhnev: the anti-Brezhnev lectures we have men–
tioned were given shortly before Podgorny's fall.)
Finally, Pyotr Shelest, the Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist
Party, was the chief architect of the occupation of Czechoslovakia. (The
chief one, that is, among the Soviet politicians: Walter Ulbricht also
played a leading role in that decision.) Shelest's aggressive style-his
Sturm und
Drang-is described in the memoirs of Joseph Smrkovsky,
one of the prime movers of the "Prague Spring."
Of those Politburo members who voted for the occupation of
Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops (rumor has it that at the Politburo
session the motion was carried by a simple majority of two), only one
remains: Leonid Brezhnev. The difference between him and the "fallen
angels" is a matter of circumstance: the responsibility of political
power restrains his natural political impulses. He is a hawk, but one
that has been trained: when necessary, he knows how to behave like a
dove. Such is the pattern (in our time, at any rate) : when the extremists
get into power, they become pragmatists-like Menachem Begin or
Robert Mugabe.
Yet Brezhnev's transformation was somewhat different: in him, the
bureaucrat suppressed the Stalinist. It is easy to imagine what the
