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The Soviet Union: The Next Decade

By Robert A. Ford
Summer 1984
Article Summary and Author Biography

Crucial to any analysis of relations between the West and the Soviet Union is a realistic concept of what kind of country, what kind of society and above all what kind of leadership we are going to have to deal with in the next decade.

Robert A.D. Ford served as a diplomat in the U.S.S.R. for more than 20 years, including 1946-1947 and 1951-1954; from 1964 to 1980 he was Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Since leaving Moscow, the author has been Special Adviser on East-West Relations to the Canadian Government and a member of the Palme Commission.

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Crucial to any analysis of relations between the West and the Soviet Union is a realistic concept of what kind of country, what kind of society and above all what kind of leadership we are going to have to deal with in the next decade.

Shortly after Yuri Andropov became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), several points seemed clear. First, the old guard had opted for one of their own. Second, they had rejected the idea of a continuation of the immobilism of Leonid Brezhnev. Third, it had almost inevitably to be a transitional regime. The latter judgment was based on known facts about the health of 69-year-old Andropov (in 1978 he had disappeared from the Moscow scene for a prolonged period and knowledgeable Russians admitted he had a health problem), and the nature of his power base. He had been absent too long from the Secretariat to be able to build quickly the network of personal support in the Party which he required to supplement the backing he had from the police apparatus and that which he had been offered by the military...

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