Word: chernenko
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...shield that would render Moscow's nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete." Whether or not the U.S. could build such a Star Wars shield was less important than the Soviets' knowledge that they themselves never could. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) quickly became an obsession of the Soviet leadership. Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to derail it through propaganda and arms control. But Reagan steadfastly refused to give...
...urgent phone call had reached me the evening before. I recall it was Sunday, because on a weekday I would never have been home earlier than 10 p.m. The caller told me that Konstantin Chernenko, the General Secretary of the party and leader of the Soviet Union, was dead...
...ensure that event. In December 1983, two months before his death, Andropov sent a written message to the Central Committee plenum, suggesting that "Gorbachev should be entrusted with actual leadership." I did not know that he did this. And neither did the plenum. In 1988, I learned that Chernenko had simply cut off that part of the message and concealed it. And so he became General Secretary. If Chernenko did not exist, the Old Guard would have invented...
Still, with Chernenko so feeble and ill, it was I who had to preside over the Politburo sessions throughout most of his tenure. Thus, it fell to me to convene the emergency session at his death. I called Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, one of the longest-serving and most influential members of the Politburo, and arranged to meet him privately half an hour before the session. I told Gromyko: "Too many problems have piled up in the country. I believe you and I have to tackle them together." Gromyko answered: "I fully agree with your appraisal of the situation...
FEBRUARY 1985: The Kremlin assures a CNN reporter that President Konstantin Chernenko's five-week absence is attributable to a winter vacation. A month later, he dies...