Word: konstantine
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...Konstantin Chernenko's funeral, TIME's Nancy Traver walked through the streets of Moscow asking many people for their thoughts about their former leader, about Mikhail Gorbachev and about their hopes for the future. Several of the citizens she questioned asked for her identification; one man threatened to call a policeman. The elderly were wary of talking to an American, the young relatively eager. Nearly all gave a strikingly uniform response: they knew little about their country's leaders and were not unduly concerned about what they did not know. "I'm afraid it is all a matter of utter...
...ought to feel as if we knew considerably more about the Soviet Union after these 28 months. Certainly, we try hard enough to know. Before Konstantin Chernenko's death, Gorbachev was already being tracked like a meteor: Margaret Thatcher likes what she saw of him; he has a lovely wife and a grandchild; did you hear the delightful joke he made about Marx and the British Museum? Yes, but one has to watch the silver; just because he is educated and urbane does not mean he is soft. Clearly, he is out to kill Star Wars. And he does have...
...that the people who run it cling to their posts either until their comrades turn against them and throw them out, as happened with Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, or until Comrade Death intervenes, as occurred with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and, last week, with Konstantin Chernenko. One of the more ironic flaws of the Soviet system is that while it is dedicated to the acquisition, consolidation and extension of power, while it prides itself on discipline and the subordination of the individual to the institution, it is incapable of providing for the timely transfer...
...procedure for ensuring smooth management succession. Soviet leaders love to award one another ribbons and stars and medals, but never gold watches. Retirement seems a dishonorable estate, a form of internal banishment. So Khrushchev discovered. So Brezhnev no doubt recalled as he grew feeble. Andropov after him. And then Konstantin Chernenko...
...Gorbachev's contemporaries, members of the long-awaited new generation of Soviet leaders. The generational distinction may mean less in the future than it has in the past, however, largely because Gorbachev shrewdly deferred to his elders during the transition from the leadership of Yuri Andropov to that of Konstantin Chernenko and avoided an old-young confrontation. As a Western diplomat in Moscow puts it, "Gorbachev was smart not to push Chernenko out. He just waited for the old man to drop...