Word: brezhnevs
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Whether Chernenko will use that power any differently is another matter entirely. As a protégé of former Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev, he may believe in détente. His gesture on chemical weapons was encouraging, but it is too soon to make any sure judgments. Says a senior Disarmament Agency official: "Let's see how they follow up. The Soviets have a way of making a two-step look like a ballet." -By Evan Thomas. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/ Moscow and Barrett Seaman/ Washington...
...Moscow these past two weeks. After the obsequies and the miles of citizen mourners, half the world closes ranks behind another mystery. Who is this Chernenko, Brezhnev's former water boy turned master of the house? After Iowa, who is Mondale? Walter, we thought we knew you, but now we'd better look a bit closer at him who may become the leader of the other half of the world. Which leaves us with Sarajevo, the least important place on our current events map. Perhaps...
People who have known Chernenko say that his most impressive attribute is his prodigious memory. In presenting him with the Order of Lenin on his 70th birthday three years ago, Brezhnev is supposed to have told his loyal deputy, "I can think of no case in which you have ever forgotten anything, even when it dealt with things that seemed negligible at first glance." That accolade earned Chernenko the potentially alarming sobriquet "the man who never forgets." Stored in his capacious memory are countless files, names, incidents, favors given and favors received. In the view of many Soviet analysts...
Others who have met Chernenko are less eager to rush to judgment. Former President Jimmy Carter, who also watched him at Vienna, agrees that Chernenko was Brezhnev's right-hand man at the conference, but feels he was by no means merely a subservient functionary. Chernenko was taciturn, Carter recalls, yet he was frequently consulted by his Soviet colleagues...
...diploma from a teachers' college, the Kishinev Pedagogical Institute. The luckiest break in his career came in 1948, when he was sent to the former Rumanian province of Moldavia, where a frenzied "Sovietization" campaign was in progress. Chernenko became the chief of Agitation and Propaganda, or Agitprop. Leonid Brezhnev subsequently was named first secretary of the Moldavian branch of the party. Not long after Brezhnev took over the Soviet party leadership from Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, he moved Chernenko to Moscow and made him head of the party's General Department, where he ran the day-to-day activities...