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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."