Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev<i> by Dusko Doder (Random House: $19.95; 327 pp.) </i>

After years of stagnation and immobility associated with Leonid I. Brezhnev’s last years in power, things are changing quickly in the Soviet Union. Nobody can predict with certainty how successful Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s “revolution” from above is going to be. But by now, there is little doubt that the new Soviet leader is serious about attempting to modernize the Soviet economy and, indeed, the Soviet society as a whole.

The fate of Gorbachev’s reforms depends to a large extent on Soviet macro-politics: his ability to build a formidable coalition in favor of change, to mobilize the population in support of his vision, to overcome the conservatism of Soviet political culture. But the Kremlin’s micro-politics are also very important. To stay on top, the general secretary has to be skilled in the art of political maneuver, must have a talent for Machiavellian intrigue--Soviet style. The Soviet Union is no longer Churchill’s “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The West knows a great deal about the Soviet economic development, political process and, especially, foreign policy conduct. Yet Gorbachev’s glasnost-- openness--campaign notwithstanding, the outside world has very little information about what transpires inside top Soviet decision-making bodies, what key Soviet officials think and how they relate to each other.

The task of penetrating the Kremlin walls is not easy. In the absence of reliable evidence, Western Kremlinologists inevitably have to rely on clues in the Soviet media, on hints from official and unofficial Soviet sources and on revelations of foreigners who have had direct exposure to Moscow’s inner circle. Even pursued most carefully and competently, Kremlinology is a very imperfect art. Media references to power struggles are, as a rule, ambiguous and subject to interpretation. Unofficial Soviet citizens--particularly dissidents eager to share their insights with foreigners--rarely have access to the top echelons of Soviet bureaucracy. Their perspective is often based more on Moscow’s notorious rumor mill than on any hard facts.

The difficulty with official Soviet representatives is different. It is not so much their actual knowledge (which is also overstated, of course, on occasion) but rather their sincerity in sharing it with Westerners that represents a problem. In any capital, government types try to manipulate the foreign media. But only in a few places would they have such a free ride as in Moscow, where efforts to verify leads from official informants are usually an exercise in futility.

Similarly, foreigners who have had a chance to see Soviet leaders usually meet with them only briefly and in a carefully controlled environment. Such foreigners are also likely to have their own agendas. Try to remember, for instance, a single Soviet general secretary who failed to impress Armand Hammer as a formidable statesman and a man of peace.

Still, despite obstacles, Western Kremlinologists have had some remarkable successes. The most notable among them is a 20-year-old book by former Le Monde correspondent in Moscow, Michel Tatu, “Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin,” which is truly a masterpiece of painstaking research and analysis by a leading French journalist. I have had my share of disagreements with Tatu. But he has demonstrated that Kremlinology--if properly practiced--may be a respectable profession.

A new book by another prominent reporter, Dusko Doder of The Washington Post, is useful in a somewhat different way. His “Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev” is rich with interesting observations about the recent political succession in the Soviet Union. Doder, after all, is fluent in Russian and experienced in covering the Soviets. Before arriving in Moscow in 1981, he had already had a tour there in 1968-1971 as a reporter for United Press International.

Unfortunately for Doder, most of what is truly insightful in his book is no longer new. First, the book rarely goes beyond what Doder himself wrote in his dispatches from the Soviet Union. Second, there is already an abundance of Western literature about the man who is the focal point of “Shadows and Whispers”--Yuri V. Andropov. Doder has little to add to numerous descriptions of the career, rise to power and the brief rule of this formidable but sinister figure.

Nevertheless, reading Doder’s book is not a waste of time. Where the author makes a unique contribution is in disclosing how exactly Western correspondents (or at least the correspondent in question) go about covering the Soviet Union. And the picture he presents is both fascinating and disturbing. It is fascinating because, to the best of my recollection, no American journalist stationed in Moscow has been so outspoken describing his modus operandi. Doder’s regular visits to the U.S. Embassy snack bar, his socializing with the Foreign Ministry press aides, his watching of lights in official buildings in Moscow explain the origin of what we often read in American correspondents’ stories from the Soviet Union. This frankness is to Doder’s credit. Still, the way he handled his assignment raises a number of troubling questions.

First, Doder confidently claims to know things that no outsider, even a well-connected outsider, could be sure of. He writes, for example, that Andropov was “one of the few top Soviet officials who never had a mistress.” There is no way to be sure of something like that. Similarly, Doder displays an excessive confidence in describing what Andropov thought of Gorbachev when they met back in the ‘70s: “The older man liked the younger man’s wit and intelligence, his energy and capacity for teamwork, and the fact that Gorbachev and his family were untouched by any whiff of corruption.” Statements like “Chernenko felt that the government had fallen into the hands of amateurs . . . “ are appropriate only if there is an explanation of how the American reporter became privy to the Soviet leader’s thinking. Doder provides none.

Second, Doder is often imprecise. The Soviet government is headed by the chairman of the Council of Ministers--not by the premier as he says. The title of the head of the Supreme Soviet Presidium is chairman, not president. The Council of Defense is definitely not “the high military command.” Rather it is a civilian-dominated committee responsible for national-security policy formulation. Nikolai Inozemtsev, for whom I used to work in Moscow and whom Doder says he saw “frequently, never without profit,” at no point served as “a senior aide to Khrushchev.” And the think-tank he headed was called the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, not the Institute of International Economic Relations.

More serious are distortions that convey an unwarranted message to the reader. Doder claims that in proposing Gorbachev’s candidacy for the general secretary’s job to the Central Committee Plenum in March, 1985, Andrei Gromyko stated that “this man has a nice smile, but he has got iron teeth.” This description, which upon being reported by Doder from Moscow instantly became a cliche in the West, has never appeared in any Soviet publication as part of the text of the Gromyko speech. Two Soviet officials present at the Plenum have categorically denied to me that Gromyko said anything so graphic. And for those familiar with Gromyko’s formal and unhumorous style, the language attributed to him by Doder sounds next to inconceivable.

Nor does it appear likely that as a student at the Moscow State University School of Law during the early ‘50s, “Gorbachev had to read authors as diverse as Rousseau, Hegel, Machiavelli and Mill.” None of them were a part of the obligatory curriculum at the time.

Doder is perfectly entitled to be mesmerized by Andropov and to give Gorbachev every benefit of the doubt. He is entitled to argue that it was “a combination of talent and luck” that shaped Andropov’s destiny, deemphasizing such less appealing traits of the former KGB chief’s personality as ruthlessness and conformism. And Doder has every right to believe that “Gorbachev’s Russia, in short, is on the verge of becoming a complex and rich society. . . .” What an American reporter should not feel free to do, however, is to be highly selective in his attitude toward Soviet sources and toward Soviet politics in general. Doder had little use for dissidents, being “especially wary of those who seemed excessively anti-Soviet.” He was much more comfortable with Soviet officials who, according to Doder, would never “lie deliberately” in a private interview with the Washington Post correspondent. No wonder such attitudes allowed Doder to develop impressive contacts among the Soviet bureaucracy. Those connections helped him with an occasional scoop. But the price in terms of his ability to provide a balanced picture of a very complex and important period in Soviet history to the American reader was excessive.