ABSTRACT
The death of the leader is never officially forewarned in the USSR. The totalitarian essence of the Soviet society precludes any reports on the health of the leaders or explanations for their frequent absences from the political scene, which are often the results of their advanced ages and fragile constitutions. At least until Leonid Brezhnev's death the Soviets lacked a genuine and precedent for the behavior of the top party and state institutions at the time of the leader's death. The situation in 1982 was quite different. The all-pervading atmosphere of fear that dominated the Stalin period no longer existed. Although Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin's death and the events following it could be considered a partial though distant precedent, Khrushchev's ousting in October 1964 clearly resulted from a plot among his colleagues in the Politburo. During the succeeding days the Soviet media carried extensive reports on the activities of new leaders, clearly hinting at Brezhnev's superiority over Aleksey N. Kosygin.
