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.