The Quiet Siberian

By WilliamE. Smith.

One reason Westerners have had such difficulty analyzing and describing Konstantin Chernenko is that the Kremlin's penchant for secrecy as well as the lack of a real electoral process tends to cloak the private lives of Soviet rulers in multiple shadows. Yuri Andropov was dead before the world knew he had a living wife; she suddenly appeared at his funeral. Another reason for the difficulty is that by the time a new man achieves leadership, the Soviet mythmakers have been long at work. Last week, for instance, there were reports in Moscow that Chernenko was often seen walking and even exercising near his dacha in the woods outside Moscow. Rumors that he might be in poor health needed to be quashed.

But Chernenko's personality and political experience are also at the heart of the uncertainty about what he represents. He is a Russian who was raised in Siberia, and his background marks him as both peasant born and a man of the people. He spent more than 40 years laboring patiently in the party apparatus. For 34 of those years, he was associated with Leonid Brezhnev, acting as a friend, confidant and aide-de-camp. It was Chernenko who turned up Brezhnev's hearing aid and, on occasion, ordered the translators to speak louder so the old man could hear. The best of good soldiers, he was Brezhnev's choice for the succession. But when Andropov was chosen, everybody assumed that Chernenko's career was finished. Instead, Chernenko apparently transferred his loyalty to his former opponent.

Unlike Andropov, who never traveled to a country that was not under Communist control, Chernenko is not unknown in the West. Still, a number of Westerners who have met him are unimpressed. "He is a dullard," says Malcolm Toon, the tart-tongued former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, who met Chernenko at the SALT II talks in Vienna in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration's National Security Adviser, remembers Chernenko as "a very cautious bureaucrat, very deferential to Brezhnev, not forceful, not dynamic." The fact that Chernenko was "the least competent, the least likely to innovate [of the contenders]," Brzezinski believes, is probably advantageous to the U.S. and perhaps for East-West relations.

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.

Chernenko visited Paris in 1982 to attend the 24th Congress of the French Communist Party. Afterward, he was given a rather grim reception by the French government, which was upset about the Soviet-inspired imposition of martial law in Poland only seven weeks earlier. But in Chernenko's talk with French Premier Pierre Mauroy, says a French official who attended the meeting, the Soviet visitor came across as "a man of conviction and even punch." At one point, Mauroy referred to "heaven" as he described the importance of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. This remark elicited a flash of that rarest of Chernenko's known qualities, a sense of humor. "Heaven," he quipped, "is already inhabited--by our cosmonauts."

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, he is far from a fool. As Alexander Rahr, a Soviet-born expert at Radio Liberty in Munich, puts it, "He is a quiet Siberian, a man who can be quite cunning, a man who knows what power is." But he is also said to have a common touch in dealing with subordinates. As a Soviet journalist who has seen him on numerous occasions observed, "He treats unimportant people like human beings."

Though the trip was scarcely noticed at the time and is barely remembered, Chernenko has visited the U.S. One day in 1974, retired U.S. Diplomat Nathaniel Davis recalls, Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin called him at the State Department and asked whether he could bring around a "personal guest" from Moscow. The guest turned out to be Chernenko, who had come to Washington to see his daughter. She was then either an employee or, more likely, the wife of an employee of the Soviet embassy. Chernenko was interested in discussing the State Department's experience with computers in handling personnel matters. Beyond that, he wanted to talk about how the department made its assignments, decided on transfers and dealt with other personnel business. After arranging the proper security clearance, Davis showed the white-haired visitor around the department and talked with him at some length. "It was clear that he was a man of some importance, because he was not lacking in presence," Davis recalls. "He was quiet but attentive, and he asked good questions."

The casual reference to Chernenko's daughter is all that is known about her to this day. Somewhat more information is circulating about the rest of his family, although it is hard to know how much is fact and how much is the work of Soviet mythmakers. The name of Chernenko's wife is Anna Dmitrievna. She is in her 60s and is apparently in good health. She is said to love the theater and the cinema, and on occasion has arranged private screenings of Soviet movies for other Kremlin wives. Chernenko's son Vladimir, who is in his late 30s, is an executive of Goskino, the state-run film-making organization. A graduate of the Institute of Foreign Relations, which trains young diplomats and journalists, Vladimir reportedly plays the piano and banjo and likes Western popular music and hard rock. Some sources say Chernenko has a second son, possibly from an earlier marriage, who works for the provincial propaganda department in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

Chernenko was born on Sept. 24, 1911, to a family of Russian peasants in the central Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes. In his youth he signed up with the Komsomol, or Young Communist League, the usual first step for people who want to become members of the Communist Party. In 1931 he joined the party, and a decade later became a local secretary. Chernenko is one of the few Soviet leaders of his generation who do not seem to have fought in World War II. He spent most of the war years in Moscow attending the Higher Party School, an ideological training ground for party officials. In 1953 he received a 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 of the Central Committee. Chernenko became a full member of the 300-member Central Committee in 1971 and of the Politburo in 1978.

Chernenko's early attempts to establish himself as a writer on ideological subjects were hampered by his lack of erudition. It is said that Mikhail Suslov, the party's chief ideologue in the post-Stalin period, had a poor opinion of Chernenko's abilities and was reluctant to let him publish articles in Kommunist, the party's main ideological publication. But after Suslov's death, in January 1982, Chernenko wrote frequently for Kommunist on general Soviet policy, especially on relations between Moscow and the foreign Communist parties. His attitude toward culture and the arts was as conservative and as ideologically provincial as his background would suggest. In an address last June to the Central Committee, he complained of literary characters who were "loose and whining" or worse, "God seeking." The purpose of art was to present positive Communist heroes, he declared, while plays and films that fell short of party ideals should be "stamped out resolutely."

His oratorical skills are weak, at least in the opinion of most Westerners who have heard him. He tends to speak rapidly, possibly because of his breathing problems, and to stumble over words. One frequently cited example is said to have occurred on Oct. 29, 1982, a few days before Brezhnev's death. Brezhnev had sent Chernenko to Tblisi, in Georgia, to stand in at a party meeting. Chernenko read his speech so badly that the Tblisi television studio stopped the sound. A TV announcer finished reading the text, while the TV cameras showed Chernenko churning bravely on to the end.

None of these failings particularly mattered to Brezhnev, to whom Chernenko had long since made himself indispensable. He traveled with Brezhnev to the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975 and to the signing of the SALT II agreement in Vienna in 1979. He attended Communist Party conventions in East Germany, Denmark, Greece, Cuba and France. He dutifully looked after the older man, even monitoring the number of cigarettes that Brezhnev smoked on his trips abroad. But because of this role it became too easy to lose sight of the fact that Chernenko was a highly valued adviser, as Brezhnev emphasized when he effusively praised Chernenko's fine memory as "my notebook." In the end it is probably his shrewdness, a sort of Soviet equivalent of street smarts, that really accounts for Chernenko's longevity in Politburo politics.

Even the death of Brezhnev and the rise of Andropov did not impair Chernenko's career. He confounded his enemies by remaining active in the hierarchy. Last spring he was out of sight for two months.

Inevitably there was speculation about his health and political status. But by June he was back in the public eye and, as Andropov's health declined, Chernenko appeared to fill the void. During the Red Square parade marking the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on Nov. 7, Chernenko stepped into Andropov's place at the center of the Politburo lineup atop the Lenin Mausoleum.

Perhaps above all, to cite a quality often attributed to Ronald Reagan, Chernenko is lucky. Says Soviet Expert Seweryn Bialer: "Chernenko is the master of the older generation that makes up the inner core of the Politburo. If Andropov had recovered and led the Soviet Union for another year or two, the succession would have gone to a younger man." Perhaps.

But Andropov did not recover. Chernenko was given a second chance, primarily because he had behaved in a way that would make a second chance thinkable to his peers. He is a shrewd politician with a long memory. The question now is whether a man with so firm a hold on the past will be able to embrace the future. --By William E. Smith.

Reported by Nancy Tracer/Moscow and Frederick Ungeheuer/Bonn, with other bureaus

With reporting by Nancy Tracer/Moscow, Frederick Ungeheuer/Bonn, with other bureaus