Word: chernenko
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...sooner had Andropov been buried near the Kremlin wall last week than rumors began to circulate that Chernenko was not in the best of health. It was widely noted that he had disappeared for two months last spring, reportedly because of illness. As the new Soviet leader read a eulogy for Andropov from atop the Lenin Mausoleum, he spoke in short, icy gasps...
...observed by a Western analyst?and such observations are both the meat and the bones of Kremlinology?that Chernenko seemed to breathe at least three times as often as his neighbor on the reviewing stand, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, 75. Later, the new General Secretary was seen to be barely able to keep his arm raised in a salute as crack Soviet troops marched past...
After meeting Chernenko, British Social Democratic Leader David Owen, a physician, said that he thought the new Soviet leader was suffering from emphysema, a disease marked by shortness of breath...
Given the confusing circumstances of the latest succession, not the least of which was the fact that 93 hours passed before the Central Committee announced its decision, it was far too early to make judgments about Chernenko's future or be definitive about the direction that his regime might take. The coming months would show whether he was capable of amassing the same power that his recent predecessors had or whether he would have to share the titles and trappings of Soviet rule with his colleagues on the Politburo...
Warned Dimitri Simes, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "We overestimated Andropov. The danger now is to underestimate Chernenko...