Word: chernenko
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...Joseph Stalin a "cruel man" who "created a monstrous ) tyranny," a view consistent with the latest winds of glasnost, but he refuses to condemn Stalin's terror outright. One of the most revealing anecdotes in the book is Gromyko's account of a telephone call he received from Konstantin Chernenko one day in 1985 in which the ailing Soviet leader asked whether he should resign because of ill health. "There's no need to hurry," Gromyko cautioned. Three days later Chernenko was dead...
...already a candidate to succeed his former mentor. At Andropov's funeral, Gorbachev made a telling gesture of his closeness to the late General Secretary: he was the only Politburo member publicly to console Andropov's bereaved widow Tatyana. But the Old Guard made a final stand, choosing Chernenko instead. Gorbachev went along, and even agreed to make the nominating speech. He probably knew his turn would come soon enough. Ailing and 72, Chernenko was not going to last long. In fact, through much of his year in power Chernenko was so ill that Gorbachev, his principal deputy, in effect...
Even so, he had opposition. Grigori Romanov, the hard-line former Leningrad party boss who was once thought to be Gorbachev's chief rival, had apparently given up on winning the top job for himself. But at the Politburo session called immediately after Chernenko's death, Romanov reportedly tried a stop- Gorbachev maneuver, nominating Moscow Party Boss Viktor Grishin for General Secretary. By some accounts, however, KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov hinted that his agency had compiled dossiers on corruption in the Moscow party apparatus that could be highly embarrassing to Grishin. (Chebrikov was then a candidate member of the Politburo...
...Chernenko's funeral in 1985, Gorbachev encountered Armand Hammer, the American businessman who has been trading with the Soviets since Lenin's day, and denounced Ronald Reagan to him as a man who wanted war. He mellowed after meeting the U.S. President later that year at their first summit in Geneva, and today speaks respectfully of Reagan. Still, when Hammer called at the Kremlin in 1986, Gorbachev told him, "Your President couldn't make peace if he wanted to. He's a prisoner of the military-industrial complex," which in Gorbachev's mind seems to be both all powerful...
...brief time. In one of the more remarkable moments in Soviet history, four men who were all to serve as General Secretary found themselves on the same narrow station platform: Brezhnev; Andropov, who had come over from the nearby spa and in 1982 would succeed Brezhnev; Konstantin Chernenko, then Brezhnev's chief aide and in 1984 Andropov's successor; and Gorbachev, who would take over from Chernenko as General Secretary the following year. Less than a month after that gathering, Gorbachev was plucked out of Stavropol to become, at 47, a member of the national hierarchy, ranking 20th among...