Word: chernenko
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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...Soviet standards, the career of new Politburo Member Konstantin Chernenko, 67, has zoomed upward meteorically. A husky, silver-haired bureaucrat, Chernenko has for years served in effect as Brezhnev's chief of staff and virtual alter ego. He is a member of the so-called Moldavian Clan, the group of Soviet apparatchiks who hitched their careers to Brezhnev's when he served as first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party in the early '50s. Chernenko headed the Moldavian party's propaganda department. After Brezhnev succeeded Nikita Khrushchev as party chief in 1964, his protege first became...
...Chernenko's thoughts have ever differed from Brezhnev's on any issue, he has kept quiet about it; one Western diplomat in Moscow refers to him as Brezhnev's "paper shuffler." Nonetheless, Chernenko now ranks fourth in the party hierarchy, after Brezhnev, Ideologist Mikhail Suslov, 76, and Central Committee Secretary Andrei Kirilenko, 72. Chernenko now must be considered as a possible successor to his patron, or at least as a behind-the-curtain bossmaker in a post-Brezhnev...
...notable as Chernenko's rise was the political eclipse of Kiril Mazurov, 64, a Politburo member and First Deputy Premier since 1965. He was ousted from both jobs last week "for reasons of health and at his own request." Mazurov's backer was Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, 74, who is not in the best of health, and whose influence has long been on the decline...