He was the oldest person to be elected in the history of the Soviet Union, having served four terms as head of state before being elected leader at the age of 73. The regime of the elderly with the largest average age in the USSR. He was the shortest-lived leader of the Soviet Union, spending six of his 13 months in office bedridden and subsequently dying. He is the often overlooked seventh leader of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Uskinovich Chernenko.
On September 24, 1911, Chernenko was born in a peasant family in the village of Vesik Tesi in Siberia, his father worked as a miner in the gold and copper mines, and his mother worked as a farmer at home. Chernenko worked as a child worker to subsidize the household and was often bullied by his employer. Fortunately, he grew up in the era of the rise of the Soviet Union, joined the CPSU at the age of 20, and at the age of 30 was appointed secretary of the Krayarsk Territory Committee.
In 1948, Chernenko was sent to work in the propaganda department of the Republic of Moldavia, and soon he became acquainted with Brezhnev, who was recommended by Khrushchev as the first secretary of Moldavia. It is worth mentioning that in his early years, Chernenko was engaged in almost all ideological propaganda and party affairs, which laid the foundation for his later work at the side of Brezhnev. However, he had never been tempered by the leadership of grassroots and independent regions, and lacked the basic knowledge and experience of workers, peasants, and various industries, which also laid a hidden danger for his later administration.
In 1956, Chernenko was transferred by Brezhnev to work in Moscow. After Brezhnev became leader, he was appointed **Public Minister. Chernenko was the Minister of Public Affairs for 17 years. Originally, the Ministry of Public Affairs was a department that provided organizational and technical services, but in Chernenko's hands it became the department of power and the management of the first organs. It is impossible for any documents to bypass the Public Ministry, and even those that are top secret will go through Chernenko's hands. He decided which documents could be placed on Brezhnev's desk and who could present his opinion to Brezhnev. Even the KGB documents went through Chernenko.
KGB Chairman Andropov was able to see Brezhnev alone only once a week, and Chernenko met not only once a day, but more than once. At the same time, Chernenko, the number one thinker in controlling Soviet propaganda, was deeply loved by Brezhnev for his main job of touting Brezhnev. At that time, Brezhnev gathered a group of former colleagues and good subordinates, most of whom came from the rovsk and Moldavian regions of Tinebi, so the West called the small circle around Brezhnev the Devsk state of Tiniebi, and only those who had a relationship with Tinieb could have a smooth career.
Chernenko was the chief who helped Brezhnev manage the Dinieboon, and he was a veritable Diniebo. Thus, Chernenko at this time was considered one of the contenders for the place of Brezhnev. However, history has once again proved that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. After Brezhnev's death, Andropov, Chernenko's old colleague and who was in charge of the KGB, counterattacked to the top with military strength and became the leader. After coming to power, Andropov dealt with corruption and liquidated a large number of bureaucrats, but Chernenko, who lived a simple life, was not among them.
After years of kidney disease after April 1983, Andropov began to worsen and died in February of the following year. Andropov's favorite heir was Gorbachev, but the KGB forces behind Andropov felt that Gorbachev was difficult to manipulate, and in order to maintain their political status, they chose the elderly and weak Chernenko.
After taking office, Chernenko will renominate the prime minister and form a cabinet. The new prime minister was the previous prime minister, Tikhonov, who was 80 years old at this time. So the Kremlin has the oldest prime minister in the 1,000-year history of the fighting nation. The next day, Tikhonov presented the list of ministers to the Supreme Soviet, again his original team. This is the situation that the group of KGB elders in the Chernian department wants to see. It was the oldest and most numerous in the world, with three first deputy prime ministers, 11 deputy prime ministers, 62 ministers, 23 chairmen of state committees and 15 prime ministers of the union republics, of whom 1 4 were over 70 years old, ** Gromyko was 75 years old, and Defense Minister Uskinov was 76 years old. The oldest is Slavsky of the Ministry of Nuclear Industry, 86 years old, undoubtedly the oldest newly elected minister in the world.
The age of this cabinet is unmatched not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the world, and it is a well-deserved old man's regime. There was a political joke at the time, and civilized Muscovites said that the middle-aged man in the Kremlin was only 70 years old.
In the Chernenko era, some party and government leaders could not even get up and sit down on their own, and could not even button their coats when walking without help, and the Kremlin was turned into a high-end retirement home. During Chernenko's tenure in power, Andropov's political and economic policies were largely continued. In terms of foreign relations, the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were-for-tat, and he inherited the relatively tough attitude towards the United States during the Brezhnev period.
In December 1984, he met with Hammer, the director of the American Occidental Petroleum Company, who was of militant ethnic descent and whose father was still a member of the Communist Party of the United States. In '72, he attached great importance to the ideological education of young people, vigorously called for putting an end to the infiltration of Western culture, and advocated the reform of primary and secondary school education.
On the whole, although Chernenko did not do much during his tenure, he basically maintained the stability of the Soviet Union. It may be unfair to identify him as mediocre as his former boss, and it took Brezhnev 18 years to prove that he was indeed mediocre, but the ailing Chernenko was only 13 months.
At that time, there was a joke in the Soviet Union about the lifelong cadre system, saying why Andropov was elected first, and then Chernenko was unanimously elected at the Communist Party Congress, because Andropov had the worst results in the kidney test and Chernenko had the worst electrocardiogram. Chernenko was, as the joke suggested, just as ill as his old colleagues.
He became the supreme leader in February 1984, began to have difficulty breathing in April, and could not leave the hospital bed in August, and fate was anxious to hand over the Soviet Union to the young elite appointed by Andropov, urging Chernenko to quickly relinquish power. In March 1985, Chernenko, who had been bedridden for six months, died of illness. As the last defender of the Stalinist system, he spent eleven months standing on the last shift. Biography of people in the world