Soviet Union Sick Leave

By William E. Smith.

How sick is Konstantin Chernenko?

The topic is discussed constantly in Moscow these days, for clearly understandable reasons. The Soviet party leader and President, 73, who is believed to be suffering from emphysema, has been absent from public view for about a month. Soviet television last showed an apparently frail Chernenko on Dec. 27, handing out awards at a Kremlin ceremony. Three days earlier he had missed the funeral of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, held in Red Square on a bitterly cold day.

By its own secretive standards, the Kremlin has been relatively candid about the fact that Chernenko is having health difficulties. A member of the Soviet Central Committee is reported to have told a visiting French official two weeks ago that Chernenko was ailing. Since then, the Kremlin has dropped hints that the President's condition is not serious. On Moscow's somewhat cloistered cocktail party circuit, Soviet officials have been quietly confirming to foreign diplomats that Chernenko is ill. Some of the Soviet gossipers have even averred that his condition is "quite" serious.

The problem, as always, is how to evaluate the ephemeral evidence. Chernenko's predecessor, Yuri Andropov, who died last February after being out of public view for six months, had been said by Kremlin officials to be recuperating from a slight ailment just a few weeks before his death. On Nov. 7, Politburo Member Victor Grishin told a Western newsman that Marshal Ustinov had only "a little sore throat." Ustinov died of cardiac arrest following pneumonia on Dec. 20.

Even though Chernenko's health probably caused the last-minute postponement of a Warsaw Pact summit meeting earlier this month, the Soviet press worked hard at creating the illusion that the President was at his desk in the Kremlin. With TV cameras recording the event on Jan. 19, party officials nominated him in his absence for a seat on the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic, a post of no significance. They released statements in Chernenko's name congratulating Syrian President Hafez Assad on his re-election as head of his country's ruling Baath Party, and greeting a Moscow peace conference.

Last week the Soviet press published the text of Chernenko's reply to a letter from a Canadian student, Laurie Piraux, 18, of Calgary, Alta., who had asked Chernenko what could be done to secure world peace. His letter was ominously reminiscent of the one Andropov sent two years ago to Maine Schoolgirl Samantha Smith, inviting her to visit the Soviet Union. By the time Samantha arrived with her parents in July 1983, Andropov was apparently too ill to receive her. He made one more public appearance, in August 1983, before , disappearing from public view. His death was announced on Feb. 10.

Late last week, the official Soviet news agency TASS announced an event that may offer further insight into Chernenko's condition: Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou will make an official visit to Moscow in mid-February. Because Papandreou is a head of government rather than a head of state, protocol requires only that he be received by Soviet Premier Nikolai Tikhonov. But Moscow has been courting Papandreou's socialist government assiduously of late, and Chernenko, health permitting, would almost certainly want to take part in Kremlin talks with the Greek visitor.

With U.S.-Soviet arms talks due to begin on March 12, the Kremlin obviously can ill afford another leadership crisis. In addition, there is domestic business to attend to: the Central Committee is reportedly eager to schedule the 27th Party Congress for some time later this year, a weighty occasion that would demand a high public profile on the part of the leadership. But as a Scandinavian diplomat notes, "they cannot prepare such an important event without knowing who the General Secretary of the party will be."

Foreign observers are fairly confident that they know the name of Chernenko's stand-in at the top of the Kremlin pyramid: Politburo Member Mikhail Gorbachev, 53. During Gorbachev's highly publicized trip to Britain last December, officials in the Soviet entourage made no effort to dampen assertions in the British press that their boss was Moscow's de facto No. 2.

Both Gorbachev's high-profile trip and Moscow's relative candor about Chernenko's illness have convinced foreign diplomats of one other thing about the Kremlin. Says a Western resident in Moscow: "They've become smarter in handling public opinion."

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow