(Born into a large and poor Siberian peasant family, Konst...)
Born into a large and poor Siberian peasant family, Konstantin Chernenko, the new leader of the Soviet Union, joined the Young Communist League when he was 15. He was a close adviser to President Brezhnev, and the top Party and Government jobs which he had held in Moscow over the period of 20 years prepared him for a smooth take-over of the leadership of his country. This selection of Konstantin Chernenko's Speeches and Writings, made during the years 1975 to 1984, including his acceptance speech on his election as General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, provides a wide-ranging introduction to the opinions and views of the new Soviet leader.
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(Book by Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich)
Book by Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0717805883/?tag=2022091-20
Chernenko was born to a poor family in the Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes (now in Novosyolovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai) on 24 September 1911. His father, Ustin Demidovich (of Ukrainian origin), worked in copper mines and gold mines while his mother took care of the farm work.
Strongly believing in the value of education, from 1943 to 1945 Chernenko attended the Moscow High School of Party Organizers (a solid stepping stone for promotion) and after finishing the courses, he was given a series of more and more important assignments.
He himself enrolled in the Kishinev Pedagogical Institute and in 1953 he completed a correspondence course for schoolteachers. Chernenko also promoted the translation of Lenin's works into Moldavian.
In 1933 he worked in the Propaganda Department of the Novoselovo District Party Committee and, a few years later, was promoted head of the same department in the Uyarsk Raykom.
In 1938 Chernenko became the Director of the Krasnoyarsk House of Party Enlightenment then in 1939, the Deputy Head of the AgitProp Department of Krasnoyarsk Territorial Committee and finally, in 1941 he was appointed Secretary of the Territorial Party Committee for Propaganda.
In 1945 he served as the Party Secretary for Ideology at Penza Provincial Committee and in 1948 he was nominated Head of the Agitation and Propaganda (AgitProp) Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldova (one of the Soviet Union's 15 republics).
It was the turning point in Chernenko's career. The tasks of economic and ideological reconstruction in this newly acquired and largely Romanian corner of the USSR were formidable and put Chernenko to the test which he passed with flying colors. He successfully combined ideological work with journalism (writing for the newspaper Sovetskaya Moldavia), always paying much attention to improving the educational and theoretical level of leading cadres.
It was in Moldova that he developed a close association and friendship with Leonid Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldova from 1950 to 1952 and future leader of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was exceptionally impressed by Chernenko's skill in propaganda activities and by his organizational capabilities.
Brezhnev successfully brought the new republic under the control of the Communist Party. This impressed Joseph Stalin and in 1952 Brezhnev was invited to join the Central Committee (CC). Chernenko followed Brezhnev to fill a post in the CC's Agitation and Propaganda Department in Moscow in 1956. As in Moldova, he became fully engaged in both political and journalistic activity as the supervisor of the Agitator newspaper.
In 1960, after Brezhnev was named Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (titular head of state in the Soviet Union), the leading governmental position outside the CPSU hierarchy, Chernenko became Head of the Secretariat of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (in effect the chief-of-staff).
Under his initiative, new departments were created in the secretariat (for example, the Department for International Affairs), and bureaucracy was reorganized. Chernenko's unit was among the very first to be equipped with computers.
When Brezhnev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union CPSU after the deposition of Khrushchev in 1964, Chernenko's career continued successfully. In 1965 he was nominated Head of the General Department of the CC with the mandate to set the Politburo agenda and prepare the drafts of numerous CC decrees and resolutions. He had knowledge about all the top Party members and monitored telephone tapping and surveillance devices in offices.
Another important job was to sign hundreds of documents every day, which he did for 20 years. Even when he became General Secretary, he continued to sign papers referring to the General Department (when he was no longer physically able to sign documents, a facsimile was used instead).
In 1971, at the end of the 24th Party Congress, he was promoted a full member of the CC: he had control over the Party work and over the Letter Bureau, dealing with correspondence. In 1976 he was elected a secretary of this all-important body. From 1978 onwards he also served as a full member of the ruling Politburo and, de facto, was second only to the General Secretary in terms of Party hierarchy.
In the years preceding his election as General Secretary, Konstantin Chernenko fully immersed himself in ideological and party work; he headed Soviet delegations abroad, accompanied Brezhnev to important conferences (including the one that took place in Helsinki in 1976), and was in the commission that set up the new Constitution passed in 1977. He also participated in Communist Party congresses in Austria, France, Denmark and Greece and frequently met with foreign visitors and delegations. In 1979 Chernenko took part in the Vienna arms limitation talks.
According to some observers, Brezhnev apparently expected Chernenko to succeed him as General Secretary and groomed him for the post. However, Chernenko's political ascent was blocked by anti-Brezhnev forces, including the KGB and the military and after Brezhnev 's death in 1982 Chernenko was unable to rally a majority of the party factions behind his candidacy and lost out to Yury Andropov, the former KGB chief, who became General Secretary on November 12, 1982.
Known as a moderate and a compromiser, unwilling or unable to initiate sharp changes in Soviet policy or to offend various groups of Kremlin leaders, Chernenko seemed to accept Andropov's victory with good grace and political acumen, keeping a place for himself as party ideologist and chief theorist.
However, Andropov had become mortally ill by the following August, and after his death six months later, Chernenko succeeded him and on Feb. 13, 1984 became General Secretary of the CPSU, despite concerns over his own health.
On April 10, 1984, Chernenko was appointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and Chairman of the Supreme Defense Council. His brief tenure at all these posts at the age of 72 seemed to be a final reward for decades of devoted service as a career party politician in spite of his lack of leadership qualities.
It was Chernenko's health that became his true enemy. He was affected by serious lung disease. At Andropov's funeral, those present strained to catch the meaning of what Chernenko was trying to say in his eulogy. He spoke rapidly, swallowed words, kept coughing and stopped repeatedly to wipe his lips and forehead. He ascended Lenin's Mausoleum by way of a newly installed escalator and descended with the help of two bodyguards.
However, KGB pressure on Soviet dissidents also increased. Stalin was unofficially rehabilitated as a diplomat and a military leader, and there was a covert discussion of returning the name Stalingrad to the city whose name had been changed back to Volgograd during the anti-Stalinist wave of the 1950s. The one major personnel change 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.
When Chernenko died on March 10, 1985 Soviet citizens received the news with little apparent distress. Many probably felt conditions in the Soviet Union could begin to improve under new, more vigorous leadership.
Chernenko was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, 1976, in 1981 and in 1984 he was awarded Hero of the Socialist Labour: 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 the Bulgarian Order of Georgi Dimitrov and in 1982 he received the Lenin Prize for his "Human Rights in Soviet Society".
Chernenko was honored with a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. He is the last person to have been interred there.
Chernenko also published numerous articles on the pages of the most prestigious Soviet newspapers and, by the '80s, he had written more books than all the other Politburo members put together. Chernenko's books addressed a wide range of topics and ideas: from the orthodox principles of Marxist and Leninist thinking to women's rights, from school reforms to the economy, from human rights to ways of improving the efficiency of Soviet bureaucracy.
Among Chernenko's writings are titles such as “Soviet Democracy: Principles and Practice,” “Human Rights in Soviet Society,” “The Avant-garde Role of the CPSU,” “To Reaffirm the Leninist Style in Party Work,” “The Work of the Party and the State Apparatus,” to name just a few.
It is remarkable (and often forgotten) that some of Chernenko's ideas, as they were elaborated in his books and expressed in his speeches, anticipated both purposes and slogans that would become Gorbachev's war-horses, such as the criticism of bureaucracy, the necessity for decision-makers, enterprise administrators and anyone else with important responsibilities to rely more on their own initiative instead of passively waiting for directives from the top; or, the frequent appeals and efforts “to strengthen the Party's responsibility and discipline” and to “resolve the gap between theory and practice.”
The very words glasnost and perestroika (in terms of Party activities) appeared in Chernenko's speeches and writings long before they became widely recognized. Such ideas were premature at the time (15 years before Gorbachev took them up again) and thus remained ineffectual.
(Born into a large and poor Siberian peasant family, Konst...)
(Book by Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich)
In foreign policy, Chernenko negotiated a trade pact with the People's Republic of China. Several times in his speeches or interviews he stated his desire to meet U. S. President Ronald Reagan to promote the international détente and world peace. Despite calls for renewed détente, little progress was made toward closing the rift in East-West relations during his rule.
The USSR, while under his administration, together with 14 Eastern Bloc countries, boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, citing security concerns and stating that “chauvinistic sentiments and anti-Soviet hysteria were being whipped up in the United States. ” But many saw it as a mere act of revenge for the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games.
In the late summer of 1984, the Soviet Union also prevented a visit to West Germany by East German leader Erich Honecker. War in Afghanistan also intensified, but in the late autumn of 1984 the United States and the Soviet Union did agree to resume arms control talks in early 1985.
Quotations:
"Washington's adventuristic policy, whipping up international tension to the utmost, is pushing mankind towards nuclear catastrophe. "
"The Soviet Union has long been proposing to outlaw chemical weapons, to remove them from the arsenals of states. We are prepared for resolution of this problem either on a global basis or piece by piece. As one of the first steps the USSR and the other socialist countries proposed in January 1984 that agreement be reached on ridding Europe of all types of chemical weapons. "
"As a great socialist power the Soviet Union is fully aware of its responsibility to the peoples for preserving and strengthening peace. We are open to peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation with states on all continents. We are for the peaceful settlement of all disputable international problems through serious, equal, and constructive talks. "
He was known as a moderate and a compromiser, unwilling or unable to initiate sharp changes in Soviet policy or to offend various groups of Kremlin leaders.
Chernenko started smoking at the age of nine, and he was always known to be a heavy smoker as an adult. Long before his election as general secretary, he had developed emphysema and right-sided heart failure.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis describes him as "an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not" when he succeeded Andropov in 1984.
Quotes from others about the person
"Sverdlov Hall was already nearly full. .. The provincial elite were all there. And it was all the usual things: people kissing each other and shouting greetings across the rows of seats, chattering about the snow and the harvest prospects and generally feeling themselves to be masters of their fate. In all the cacophony I didn't hear the name of Andropov mentioned once, not anything said about his death. At twenty minutes to eleven the hall hushed. The waiting began. With each minute the tension rose and the atmosphere felt charged with electricity. .. The tension reached a climax. All eyes turned towards the door. .. Who would come through it first? At precisely eleven, Chernenko's head appeared in the doorway. He was followed by Tikhonov, Gromyko, Ustinov, Gorbachev and the rest. The delegates' reaction was silence. "
Arkady Volsky, an aide to Andropov, 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 Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko or (in some accounts) Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov said: “Its OK, Kostya is an agreeable guy; one can do business with him.”
Chernenko's personal life (as that of other Soviet leaders) was kept from public view. Many in both the USSR and the West saw his wife, Anna, and daughter, Yelena, for the first time at his funeral. He was married twice: from his first wife, whom he divorced, he had a son, who followed in his father’s footsteps and worked as a propagandist in Tomsk, Siberia.
His second wife, Anna Dmitrievna Lyubimova, gave him two daughters, Yelena, who worked at the Institute of Party History and Vera, who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and a son, Vladimir who graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and worked as editor at the State Cinema Committee (Goskino).
He was a Russian philosopher, best known for his innovations in the field of social and legal philosophy.
(m. 1944)
