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 goldmines 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 school teachers.
The turning point in Chernenko’s career was his assignment in 1948 to head the party’s propaganda department in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). 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 thanks to Soviet bureaucracy, his signature meant little more than it did in his previous position. Eventually, when he became ill, he was no longer physically able to sign documents and a facsimile was used instead, further devaluing his signature.
Following the death of Brezhnev in 1982, Chernenko lost the power struggle and instead Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB, was nominated as General Secretary.
Leader of the Soviet Union
File:Chernenko 1984.jpgChernenko in 1984 months before he died
When Andropov died in February 1984, after 15 months in office, Chernenko was elected to replace him, despite concerns over his health. Yegor Ligachev writes in his memoirs that Konstantin Chernenko was elected general secretary without a hitch. At the Central Committee plenary session on February 13, 1984, a full four days after Andropovs 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.
Arkady Volsky, aide to Andropov and other general secretaries, recounts an episode that occurred after a Politburo meeting on the day following Andropovs demise. As Politburo members filed out of the conference hall, Andrei Gromyko, he later Volsky changed it to 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 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?"
Those present at Andropov's funeral strained to catch the meaning of what he was trying to say in his eulogy. he speaked 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 bodygurards.
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.
In the spring of 1984, Chernenko was hospitalized for over a month, but kept working by sending the Politburo notes and letters. In 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 astronauts and writers in his office, and 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, i.e. liver failure with its transformation into cirrhosis. The cirrhosis of the liver and the worsening dystrophic changes in the organs and tissues led to the situation where not with standing intensive therapy, which was administered actively on a daily basis, the state of his health gradually deteriorated. On March 10 at 3:00 p.m. he lost consciousness, and at 7:20 he finally died as a result of heart failure.
He was honoured with a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin necropolis.
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 the 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 he wanted the money for.
He was awarded with 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, the 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 deserved 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.
