The Party Man from Kiev

Anyone for a game of musical chairs? Shortly after Vladimir Ivashko, 58, was elected chairman of the Ukrainian parliament last month, he stepped down as first secretary of the republic's Communist Party. Then, two weeks ago, he abruptly resigned from his post in Kiev and won the key job of deputy to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ivashko has been described in the unofficial Ukrainian press as looking more like "a balding accountant in a collective farm than a man who manages people's destinies" -- but appearances are obviously deceiving. When Ukrainian party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky, a Brezhnev-era holdover, refused to be dislodged from his post, Moscow eased Ivashko, an ethnic Ukrainian, into the job of second secretary in 1988. Within a year Ivashko had replaced Shcherbitsky.

Ivashko has prospered by carefully treading the centrist path and, like Gorbachev, making the best of the inevitable. Interviewed in his Kiev office shortly before he took up his new job, Ivashko insisted that "the Ukrainian people are masters of their own land." But complete separation from the union, he said, was "not politically, economically, socially or culturally feasible" for the Ukraine.

Betraying his training as an economist, Ivashko sketched a bell curve on a + piece of paper and insisted that Ukrainian extremists on the right and left ends -- whom he termed "people made of reinforced concrete" -- are small in number and impossible to satisfy. But what happens when the leadership itself is divided, as it is in the political triangle made up of centrist Gorbachev, radical Boris Yeltsin and conservative Ivan Polozkov, the new leader of the Russian republic's Communist Party? "Fate has brought these three to such a position that they have no right to be responsible just for themselves," replied Ivashko. "They are all aware of this and will cooperate for the sake of common interests. A lot will depend on how much time it takes." And a lot will also depend on how Ivashko handles his job as Gorbachev's right-hand man in the party.