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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