Konstantin Chernenko: 1911-1985: The Caretaker From Siberia

He was, in the words of Mikhail Gorbachev last week, “a faithful servant of our party and people, a staunch champion of the ideals of Communism.” That final tribute to Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko was in keeping with the official adulation that enveloped the late Soviet leader during the 13 months that he ruled in the Kremlin. But there was always a hollow ring to the praise.

Tens of thousands of volumes of Chernenko’s collected essays and speeches and countless propaganda posters emblazoned with his quotations could not quite conceal the flaws of a man whose only real claim to power was his skill as a Communist Party functionary. Nor could they dispel the fact that Chernenko had come to power with little time to live. The record of his brief tenure in the Kremlin was etched with the painful images of his faltering struggle to rule and hold back the ravages of illness.

Speculation about who would eventually replace Chernenko began almost from the moment he was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party in February 1984. He delivered a wheezing, gasping eulogy at the Red Square funeral of Yuri Andropov and could not hold his hand up in a salute. During the months that followed, bouts of poor health forced him to slip out of public view for weeks at a time, but he always reappeared at Kremlin ceremonies that were carefully contrived to hide his trembling hand and stumbling step. Chernenko made his last public appearance on Feb. 28 to receive his credentials as a parliamentary deputy for the seat he had won in the elections held a few days earlier. It was a performance full of pathos. He clutched the back of a chair so tightly that he could not reach out for a bouquet of flowers and fumbled again as he put on his spectacles to breathlessly read a brief text. Two weeks later he was dead.

Chernenko was passed over once for his nation’s highest office and would probably have been relegated to a footnote in Soviet history books had Andropov not died after only 15 months in office. The Old Guard in the Kremlin turned to Chernenko, the oldest man ever to become party leader, to maintain the power balance in the leadership until a younger generation was ready to take over. Within two months of assuming power, Chernenko secured the additional titles of President and chairman of the Defense Council. They carried more honor than substance: Chernenko was said to defer to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko on diplomatic matters and to defense leaders on military questions. Indeed, Gromyko sometimes appeared so confident of his power that he would interrupt Chernenko during meetings with foreign delegations.

If Chernenko was no giant on the world stage, he was, by virtue of his position, bound to play a central role in the ponderous drama of superpower relations. Initially, he seemed prepared to wait indefinitely for the Reagan Administration to make the first move in changing the frosty climate that had built up between Washington and Moscow. But in the end, Chernenko apparently ! did take a personal hand in the reopening of U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations. After the U.S. elections, President Reagan sent a conciliatory note to Chernenko. Ten days later, the General Secretary replied, formally proposing that U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Gromyko hold preliminary talks. The meeting took place in January and prepared the way for the resumption of arms-control negotiations last week in Geneva.

There was little change in Soviet domestic policies. Instead, the Chernenko era conveyed a palpable sense of drift. The late Soviet leader remained faithful to Andropov’s modest program of economic reform, raising his voice against “slackness” and “irresponsibility ,” but offered few initiatives of his own.

Chernenko was born in the Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes on Sept. 24, 1911. Like most young Russians of his generation, this son of peasants was profoundly changed by the Bolshevik Revolution. “New Soviet life was coming into its own,” he recalled in an autobiography, “and I felt its fresh winds when I joined the Communist Youth League.” He spent the rest of his life working for the party.

He could not boast of having a heroic military record, though Kremlin mythmakers extolled his service as a border guard on the Chinese frontier in the ’30s. His higher education consisted primarily of propaganda classes at the party school in Moscow and courses at the Kishinev Pedagogical Institute. He would undoubtedly have become one among thousands of little-known party bureaucrats had he not met Leonid Brezhnev in Moldavia at the end of World War II.

As Brezhnev rose through the ranks, he carried Chernenko with him. Taking power after Nikita Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, Brezhnev appointed Chernenko his personal chief of staff and head of the party’s General Department. Whenever Brezhnev traveled abroad, Chernenko arranged his briefing books; he even monitored how many cigarettes Brezhnev smoked. Chernenko attracted Western attention when he appeared at Brezhnev’s side during the party leader’s meeting with President Jimmy Carter in Vienna in 1979. But though he attended every session, Chernenko never uttered a word and, according to former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Malcolm Toon, appeared to be “a dullard.”

At home Chernenko gained political status because of his role as Brezhnev’s chief aide. In 1979 Brezhnev rewarded him with full Politburo membership, prompting speculation that Chernenko was the chosen successor. Yet when – Brezhnev died in November 1982, the inner circle passed over Chernenko in favor of Andropov.

When Chernenko finally came to power 15 months later, the world got its first glimpse of his personal life. Soviet picture agencies distributed photographs showing the new leader in shirtsleeves with his wife Anna, their daughter and a grandson. Other snapshots depicted Chernenko relaxing in a rustic setting. His detractors saw the studied informality as yet another sign that he was only a shadow of Brezhnev.

History will not deal in detail with this party functionary who rose from a village in Siberia to rule a superpower. He left little to remember and no policies of his own. He did provide an example of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet system. But at a time when his nation needed new direction, more was required.