Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mikhail Suslov was a Soviet politician who served as Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1965 until his death in 1982. He was also the longtime Central Committee Secretary of Ideology and was regarded as the chief ideologue of the Communist Party during the Brezhnev era, wielding enough influence to block Brezhnev from consolidating personal rule.
Suslov came to Stalin's attention when Stalin's secretary Lev Mekhlis, a classmate of Suslov's, needed to locate Lenin's opinion on a narrow economic question and turned to Suslov, who found the answer immediately from his meticulous card-index of Soviet canonical texts. An impressed Stalin promoted Suslov to a secretary of the Rostov Regional Committee in 1937.
Suslov led the "Moscow faction" inside the Central Committee that organized opposition to Khrushchev throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. He played a central role in the 1964 campaign to oust Khrushchev, though he had fallen seriously ill during a trip to China the previous year, leaving Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin to lead the final operation.
Suslov chaired the Politburo Commission established on the 25th of August 1980 to manage the Polish crisis. When the commission considered military intervention on the 28th of August, Suslov agreed with Polish First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski that troops would worsen the situation, stating that their introduction "will mean a catastrophe." He instead backed the imposition of martial law in Poland.
Suslov died on the 25th of January 1982 at 16:05 from arteriosclerosis and diabetes, two days after suffering a coronary thrombosis. His death was seen as triggering the succession battle that followed Brezhnev's own death later that year, and Yuri Andropov moved into Suslov's seat in the Secretariat before eventually sidelining rival Konstantin Chernenko.
Suslov contracted tuberculosis in his youth, and the illness was worsened by his time leading partisan guerrilla forces in the dense forests during World War II. Fearing further relapses, he wore galoshes, a hat, and a raincoat at all times for the rest of his life, regardless of the weather, which made him a subject of jokes among his colleagues in Brezhnev's Politburo.