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Gorbachev, trained in both agriculture and law, was not elected a voting member of the Politburo until 1980. During Andropov's brief time in power, Gorbachev was put in charge of a high-level committee, studying ways to improve the economy. Unusually well traveled for a Soviet leader, he has been to Canada, France and West Germany. His foreign hosts have found him to be open and in formed. Gorbachev's name was mentioned in the succession to Andropov, but the Politburo's veterans presumably thought the moment was not yet ripe for the shift to someone who was barely a teen-ager at the end of World War II.
Gorbachev followed the proceedings from his seat just behind Chernenko's. A balding figure in a gray three-piece suit and wire-rim glasses, he fidgeted restlessly and riffled through the pages of his speech, which was bound in a red folder. Two hours before he stepped up to the polished, dark wood lectern to nominate Chernenko for President, his own name came up on a list of parliamentary committee chairmen. The neoclassical hall was wrapped in a post-luncheon lethargy and few delegates were in their seats when the announcement was made that Gorbachev had been appointed head of the Foreign Affairs Commission. The choice was significant, for the post has traditionally been held by the party's second-ranking secretary. The appointment promised to give Gorbachev the experience in foreign affairs that he now lacks. Said a Western diplomat: "It looks like they are grooming him for stardom."
As part of the process of establishing his authority, Chernenko has been the beneficiary of a campaign to bolster his image. Photographs have been distributed showing the grandfatherly leader in informal poses that recall Brezhnev. The day before Chernenko was elected President, Krasnaya Zvezda, the Defense Ministry's official newspaper, published an article that patched what had been a large hole in the new leader's career: his military record. Chernenko did not fight on the front lines in World War II, but, according to Krasnaya Zvezda, he did battle bandits and anti-Soviet rebels while guarding the border in eastern Kazakhstan in 1930. The article, illustrated by a photo showing a youthful Chernenko in the back row of a group of border guards, pointed out that the future Soviet leader was not only a "skilled horseman" but also a "good marksman with a rifle and a light machine gun" who "hurled grenades accurately."
After two months the outlines of the Chernenko era remain indistinct. There was little about last week's meetings of the Communist Party Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet that suggested what direction the new leader intended to take. Chernenko has not openly abandoned the modest economic reforms begun by Andropov, but he has not pursued them with great vigor either. He devoted most of his address to the Central Committee to the topics of school reform and greater popular participation in government.