Soviet Gerontocracy is live and well… and safely residing in Washington DC
Is 82 yo Sleepy Joe Biden a better fit than 70 yo Kremlin Elder Leonid Brezhnev?
The term “Soviet Gerontocracy” was coined by The New York Times on March 7, 1976 when an original article with the same title was published.
The article referred to the clique of elderly gentlemen that has ruled the Soviet Union during the 1970’s. The authors lamented that the 25th Soviet Communist Party Congress largely failed to bring in “new blood” to the Kremlin’s leadership.
Throughout the entire Communist Congress №25, it was evident that the effort was to convince both the Soviet people and the outside world that continuity and stability are the key features of Soviet rule.
The West has largely supported the rule of the Kremlin Elders. Citing the article: “The popular belief was that the ruling Soviet 70‐year‐olds are hardly likely to push an adventurous course that would pose serious risks of thermonuclear war. Their instinct for aggression seems more likely to be expressed in trying to capture isolated targets of opportunity — future Angolas where the dead can be Cubans or Africans rather than Russians”.
Let’s check the ages of the members of the Soviet Gerontocracy at the time of the article:
- Leonid Brezhnev — 70 years old
- Aleksey Kosygin — 72 years old
- Andrei Gromyko — 67 years old
- Dmitriy Ustinov — 68 years old
The famous Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union consisted of 28 Party bosses with an average age of 64.21 yo. The oldest member of the Politburo was Latvian communist Arvid Pelshe who was 77 years old; the youngest one was 45-year old Mikhail Gorbachev who was 17(!) years younger than “eternal teen” Tom Cruise.
In this Congress, the average age in the House of Representatives was 57.9 years, and the average age in the Senate was 64 years. Not too different from the Soviet Politburo age-wise.
Let’s look at the Presidency of the world’s most developed economy.
- President 46 Joe Biden is showing off his 82 years of age
2. President 45 and 47 Donald Trump is a burger-munching vigorous 78 year old and will turn 82 at the end of his term
So watching the last presidential election was like watching a push chair race at a retirement home. At one point, a nurse had to enter the race to help out a frail participant.
I am still inclined to believe that age is just a number — Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew effectively ruled his city state until turning 88; Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had leading positions in Malaysia and resigned only when he turned 95. 87 year old Pope Francis is ruling over 1.3 billion Catholics.
Still the article correctly predicted that the Soviet Union might face a power vacuum in the 1980s, when the top leader start dying out “en masse”. With no appropriate succession system, the USSR was posed for some major upheavals. And exactly that happened — after 3 deaths of Supreme Leaders (General Secretaries of the Party) Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko within 3 years, the older Kremlin clique was decimated and in 1985 the throne went to relatively young (54 years old) Mikhail Gorbachev. Within 6 years, the Soviet Union was dead.
