Konstantin Chernenko

Konstantin Chernenko Константин Устинович Черненко
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General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
In office February 13, 1984 – March 10, 1985
Preceded by	Yuri Andropov
Succeeded by	Mikhail Gorbachev
Personal details
Born	(1911-09-24)September 24, 1911 Bolshaya Tes, Russian Empire
Died	March 10, 1985(1985-03-10) (aged 73) Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR
Nationality	Russian
Political party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko (Template:Lang-ru, Konstantin Ustinovič Černenko; September 24, 1911 – March 10, 1985) was a Soviet politician and General Secretary of the CPSU. He led the Soviet Union from February 13, 1984 until his death just thirteen months later on March 10, 1985. Chernenko was also Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from April 11, 1984 until his death.

Early life

Chernenko was born to a poor family in the village of Bolshaya Tes (now in Novosyolovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai). His father worked in copper and gold mines while his mother took care of the farm work. Chernenko joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) in 1926 and the Communist Party in 1931. From 1930 to 1933, he served in the Soviet frontier guards on the Soviet-Chinese border and subsequently specialized in propaganda activity for the Communist Party. In 1945, he acquired a diploma from a party training school in Moscow, and in 1953 he finished a correspondence course for schoolteachers.

The turning point in Chernenko’s career was his assignment in 1948 to head the Communist Party’s propaganda department in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. There he met and won the confidence of Leonid Brezhnev, the first secretary of Moldova from 1950 to 1952 and future leader of the Soviet Union. Chernenko followed Brezhnev in 1956 to fill a similar propaganda post in the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow. In 1960, after Brezhnev was named chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (titular head of state of the Soviet Union), Chernenko became his chief of staff.

Brezhnev's shadow

In 1965, Chernenko became Director of Personnel in the party's General Department. He continued his work as a clerk, but he now held a powerful position. He had knowledge about all the top people in the party and monitored wiretapping and surveillance devices in offices, but his main job was to sign hundreds of documents every day. He did this for 20 years. Even when he became General Secretary, he continued to sign papers, although because of the structure of the Soviet bureaucracy, his signature meant little more than it did in his previous position. Eventually, when Chernenko became ill, he was no longer physically able to sign documents and a facsimile was used instead, further devaluing his signature.

Following Brezhnev's death in 1982, Chernenko lost a power struggle to succeed him. Instead, Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB, was nominated as General Secretary.

Leader of the Soviet Union

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Chernenko in 1984 months before he died

Andropov died in February 1984, after just 15 months in office. Chernenko was then elected to replace Andropov, despite concerns over his own health. Yegor Ligachev writes in his memoirs that Chernenko was elected general secretary without a hitch. At the Central Committee plenary session on February 13, 1984, four days after Andropov's death, Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and Politburo member Nikolai Tikhonov moved that Chernenko be elected general secretary, and the Committee duly voted him in.

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Breathless Chernenko reading an eulogy at Andropov's funeral at the top of the Lenin Mausoleum. Right to him standing Tikhonov, Gromyko and Grishin

Arkady Volsky, an aide to Andropov and other general secretaries, recounts an episode that occurred after a Politburo meeting on the day following Andropov's demise: As Politburo members filed out of the conference hall, either Andrei Gromyko or (in later accounts) Dmitriy Ustinov) is said to have put his arm round Nikolai Tikhonov's shoulders and said: "Its OK, Kostya is an agreeable guy (pokladisty muzhik), one can do business with him...." Even more irksome was the Politburo's failure to pass the decision for him to run the meetings of the Politburo itself in the absence of Chernenko, who predictably began to miss those meetings with increasing frequency. As Nikolai Ryzhkov describes it in his memoirs, "every Thursday morning he (Mikhail Gorbachev) would sit in his office like a little orphan - I would often be present at this sad procedure - nervously awaiting a telephone call from the sick Chernenko: Would he come to the Politburo himself or would he ask Gorbachev to stand in for him this time again?"

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Deathly ill Chernenko at center, Tikhonov at left and Gromyko at right saluting while Andropov's coffin is lowered to the grave at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

At Andropov's funeral, he could barely read the eulogy. Those present strained to catch the meaning of what he was trying to say in his eulogy. He spoke rapidly, swallowed his words, kept coughing and stopped repeatedly to wipe his lips and forehead. He ascended to the Lenin's Mausoleum by way of newly installed escalator and descended with the help of two bodyguards. Chernenko represented a return to the policies of the late Brezhnev era. Nevertheless, he supported a greater role for the labour unions, and reform in education and propaganda. The one major personnel change that Chernenko made was the firing of the chief of the General Staff, Nikolay Ogarkov, who had advocated less spending on consumer goods in favor of greater expenditures on weapons research and development.

In foreign policy, he negotiated a trade pact with the People's Republic of China. Despite calls for renewed détente, Chernenko did little to prevent the escalation of the Cold War with the United States. For example, in 1984, the Soviet Union prevented a visit to West Germany by East German leader Erich Honecker. However, in the late autumn of 1984, the U.S. and the Soviet Union did agree to resume arms control talks in early 1985.

Death and legacy

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Chernenko's open coffin taken to the grave in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

In the spring of 1984, Chernenko was hospitalized for over a month, but kept working by sending the Politburo notes and letters. During the summer, his doctors sent him to Kislovodsk for the mineral spas, but on the day of his arrival at the resort Chernenko's health deteriorated, and he contracted pneumonia. Chernenko did not return to the Kremlin until late autumn of 1984. He awarded Orders to cosmonauts and writers in his office, but was unable to walk through the corridors of his office and was driven in a wheelchair. By the end of 1984, Chernenko could hardly leave the Central Clinical Hospital, a heavily guarded facility in west Moscow, and the Politburo was affixing a facsimile of his signature to all letters, as Chernenko had done with Andropov's when he was dying. In what was almost universally regarded, even by his opponents, as a cruel act against Chernenko, Politburo member Viktor Grishin dragged the terminally ill Chernenko from his hospital bed to a ballot box to vote in the elections in early 1985. Emphysema of the lungs and the aggravated lung and heart insufficiency had worsened significantly in the last two or three weeks. Another, accompanying illness had developed - chronic hepatitis, or liver failure, with its transformation into cirrhosis. The cirrhosis of the liver and the worsening dystrophic changes in the organs and tissues led to a situation where the state of his health gradually deteriorated. On March 10 at 3:00 p.m. he fell into a coma, and at 7:20 he died as a result of heart failure. He was honoured with a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin necropolis.

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Chernenko's coffin is taken to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on March 13, 1985

The impact of Chernenko—or the lack of it—was evident in the way in which his death was reported in the Soviet press. Soviet newspapers carried stories about Chernenko's death and Gorbachev's selection on the same day. The papers had the same format: page 1 reported the party Central Committee session on March 11 that elected Gorbachev and printed the new leader's biography and a large photograph of him; page 2 announced the demise of Chernenko and printed his obituary. Cities with populations ranging from 250,000 to 600,000 had been named for Brezhnev, Andropov, and Ustinov at their deaths, but Chernenko's name was given to the Siberian town of Sharypo, with 20,000 inhabitants.

After the death of a Soviet leader it was customary for his successors to open his safe and look in it. When Gorbachev had Chernenko's safe opened, it was found to contain a small folder of personal papers, and more surprisingly, large bundles of money; money was also found in his desk. It is not known what Chernenko wanted the money for.

Chernenko was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour; 1976, in 1981 and in 1984 he was awarded Hero of the Socialist Labor: on the latter occasion, Minister of Defence Ustinov underlined his rule as an "outstanding political figure, a loyal and unwavering continuer of the cause of the great Lenin"; in 1981 he was awarded with the highest Bulgarian honour and in 1982 he received the Lenin Prize for his "Human Rights in Soviet Society."

He had a son by his first wife (whom he divorced) who became a propagandist in Tomsk. His second wife, Anna Dmitrevna Lyubimova, bore him two daughters, Yelena (who worked at the Institute of Party History) and Vera (who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC), and a son, Vladimir, who was a Goskino editorialist.

He had a Gosdacha in Troitse-Lykovo named Sosnovka-3 by the Moskva River with a private beach, while Sosnovka-1 was used by Mikhail Suslov.