Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich 1911-85
Soviet politician

Born of peasant stock in Bolshaya Tes in Central Siberia, he joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) in 1929 and the Communist Party (CPSU) in 1931. During the 1940s, he worked as a specialist in party propaganda in, first, Krasnoyarsk (Siberia) and then Moldavia, where he impressed Leonid Brezhnev, who adopted Chernenko as his personal assistant and took him to Moscow to work in the central apparatus in 1956. He was inducted into the CPSU Central Committee in 1971, the secretariat in 1976 and into the politburo, as a full member, in December 1978. During his final years in power, Brezhnev sought to promote Chernenko as his heir-apparent, but on Brezhnev's death in 1982 Chernenko was passed over in favour of Yuri Andropov. However, when Andropov died in 1984 Chernenko was selected as the CPSU's stop-gap leader by cautious party colleagues. In 1984 Chernenko was also elected State President. As Soviet leader he sought to promote a new era of d�tente, but from mid-1984, suffering from emphysema, he progressively retired from the public gaze. He was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Bibliography: Ilya Zemtsov, Chernenko: Sovetskii Soiuz v kanum perestroiki (1989)