Konstantin Chernenko

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko became the de jure leader of the Soviet Union on the 13th of February 1984, and by the time he died just over thirteen months later, Soviet newspapers ran his obituary on page two while page one celebrated his successor. That sequencing tells you almost everything you need to know about his tenure. Who was this man who rose from a poor Siberian family to the highest office in one of the world's two superpowers, only to govern in a wheelchair, his signature replaced by a facsimile? How did a heavy smoker who had been absent from his duties for three months the year before taking power come to lead a nuclear state? And what does it mean that, when his safe was finally opened after his death, it held a small folder of personal papers and several large bundles of money whose origin no one could explain?

• 2. A Siberian Beginning

  ›

  Chernenko was born on the 24th of September 1911 in the Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes, now part of Novosyolovsky District in Krasnoyarsk Krai. His family was poor, and the region was remote. He joined the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, in 1929, and became a full member of the ruling Communist Party two years later in 1931. Between 1930 and 1933 he served in the Soviet frontier guards on the Soviet-Chinese border, a posting that placed him at the geographic edge of the empire. After completing that service, he returned to Krasnoyarsk as a propagandist, working in the Propaganda Department of the Novosyolovsky District Party Committee in 1933. He was then promoted to head the same department in Uyarsk Raykom. Chernenko rose steadily, becoming Director of the Krasnoyarsk House of Party Enlightenment and then Deputy Head of the Agitprop Department of Krasnoyarsk's Territorial Committee by 1939. In the early 1940s, he cultivated a close relationship with Fyodor Kulakov and was named Secretary of the Territorial Party Committee for Propaganda. His formal education came late: a diploma from a party training school in Moscow by 1945, followed by a correspondence course for schoolteachers completed in 1953. He had started smoking at the age of nine, and that habit would follow him into the Kremlin.

• 3. The Brezhnev Connection

  ›

  The assignment that redirected Chernenko's entire career came in 1948, when he was sent to head the Communist Party's propaganda department in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. There he encountered Leonid Brezhnev, who served as the Moldavian branch's first secretary from 1950 to 1952 and who was destined to lead the Soviet Union. Chernenko won Brezhnev's confidence, and when Brezhnev moved, Chernenko followed. In 1956, Chernenko took a similar propaganda post at the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow. When Brezhnev was named chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1960 and became the titular head of state, Chernenko became his chief of staff. By 1965, Chernenko was nominated head of the General Department of the Central Committee, which gave him the mandate to set the Politburo agenda and prepare drafts of Central Committee decrees and resolutions. He also monitored telephone wiretaps and covert listening devices in the offices of senior Party members. One of his daily duties was to sign hundreds of Party documents, a job he performed for the next twenty years. In 1971 he was promoted to full membership in the Central Committee, and by 1978 he was a full member of the Politburo, second only to the General Secretary in the Party hierarchy. He took part in the Vienna arms limitation talks in 1979, accompanied Brezhnev to important meetings abroad, and served on the commission that revised the Soviet Constitution in 1977. When Brezhnev died in November 1982, many expected Chernenko to claim the top post, but he could not rally enough support, and KGB chief Yuri Andropov prevailed instead.

• 4. Thirteen Months in Power

  ›

  Yuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984, at age 69, of kidney failure at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital. Andropov had in fact wanted Mikhail Gorbachev to succeed him, but the Politburo's Old Guard elected Chernenko instead on the 13th of February 1984, and he was named Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on the 11th of April 1984. He was understood from the start to be a transitional figure, someone who could buy the old guard time to select a candidate from the next generation. Chernenko represented a return to the policies of the late Brezhnev era, though he did support a greater role for labour unions and some reform in education and propaganda. The one major personnel change he made was the dismissal of the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, who was replaced by Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev. In foreign policy, he negotiated a trade deal with China and met with British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock in November 1984. He did little to prevent the escalation of the Cold War with the United States; the Soviet Union prevented East German leader Erich Honecker from visiting West Germany in 1984. On the 8th of May 1984, the USSR under Chernenko announced it would not participate in the Los Angeles Summer Olympics, citing security concerns and what it called anti-Soviet hysteria in the United States. Fourteen Eastern Bloc satellites and allies joined the boycott, including Cuba but not Romania. The boycotting nations organised their own Friendship Games that summer. In late autumn 1984, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to resume arms control talks in early 1985. Before his death, Chernenko signed preliminary documents stating that on the 9th of May 1985, the 40th Victory Day Parade, the city of Volgograd would be renamed Stalingrad. He also wrote to Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva about what he described as the upcoming restoration of justice in relation to the memory and heritage of Stalin, suggesting he intended a political rehabilitation of the former leader.

• 5. Governing From a Hospital Bed

  ›

  Historian John Lewis Gaddis described Chernenko, when he succeeded Andropov in 1984, as an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports. Long before taking office, he had developed emphysema and right-sided heart failure. In 1983, a year before becoming General Secretary, he had been absent from his duties for three months due to bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia. In early 1984, he was hospitalised 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; on the day of his arrival, his health deteriorated and he contracted pneumonia. He did not return to the Kremlin until later in 1984. He awarded Orders to cosmonauts and writers in his office, but was unable to walk through the corridors and was driven in a wheelchair. At Andropov's funeral, he could barely read the eulogy. Because of his feeble hold on power, he governed as part of an unofficial triumvirate alongside Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. According to historian Vladislav M. Zubok, Ustinov and Gromyko retained a virtual monopoly in Soviet military and foreign affairs. By the end of 1984, Chernenko could hardly leave the Central Clinical Hospital in west Moscow, a heavily guarded facility, and the Politburo was affixing a facsimile of his signature to all letters, just as Chernenko himself had done with Andropov's signature when Andropov was dying.

• 6. Death and What Followed

  ›

  Chernenko's illness was first publicly acknowledged on the 22nd of February 1985 by Viktor Grishin, the First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee, during a televised election rally in the Kuibyshev Borough of northeast Moscow. Two days later, in a televised scene that shocked the nation, Grishin dragged the terminally ill Chernenko from his hospital bed to a ballot box to vote. On the 28th of February 1985, Chernenko appeared on television once more to receive parliamentary credentials and read a brief statement: the election campaign is over and now it is time to carry out the tasks set for us by the voters and the Communists who have spoken out. His emphysema and the associated lung and heart damage worsened sharply in the last three weeks of February 1985. The Chief Kremlin doctor, Yevgeniy Chazov, also confirmed that Chernenko had developed both chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. On the 10th of March at 15:00, Chernenko fell into a coma and died that evening at 19:20, at age 73. The autopsy listed the cause as a combination of chronic emphysema, an enlarged and damaged heart, congestive heart failure, and liver cirrhosis. He was the third Soviet leader to die within two and a half years. Upon being informed in the middle of the night, U.S. President Ronald Reagan reportedly remarked: how am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me? Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary the following day. Soviet newspapers that day gave page one to Gorbachev's biography and photograph; Chernenko's obituary ran on page two. India, Brazil, Iraq, Syria, and Nicaragua all declared three days of mourning; Pakistan, North Korea, and Guinea-Bissau declared two days; East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia declared one day. Chernenko was honored with a state funeral and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the twelve individual tombs located between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin Wall. He is the last person to have been interred there. When Gorbachev had Chernenko's safe opened, it held a small folder of personal papers and several large bundles of money; more money was found in his desk. Where it came from and what it was intended for has never been established.