Chernenko — is he a man the West can deal with?

Press, 24 February 1984, Page 15

Chernenko — is he a man the West can deal with?

From

MARK FRANKLAND,

in Moscow

Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko. the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, comes from the Soviet Union's apparently inexhaustible supply of old men. At 72, he is the oldest to lead the country. Like all the older Soviet leaders, he belongs to the generation that did not make the Revolution but inherited it.

Too young to fight in 1917, they were the age to become Stalin’s men when Stalin hijacked Lenin’s Russia and eliminated most Communists of any experience and maturity.

He was born on September 14, 1911. in the village of Bolshaya Tes, slap in the middle of Siberia. He is the first Siberian to lead the Soviet Union and the first true peasant to rule in the kingdom of the proletariat.

The family was large and poor and his mother died when he was still a young boy. He probably had only the scrappiest of schooling for when he was 12 he went to work for richer farmers — “Kulaks” who, one must suppose, were soon to feel the knife of collectivisation on their necks.

Mr Chernenko joined the village Komsomol when he was 15 and by the time collectivisation began in

1929 he was its “Agitprop” organiser for his district. Agitprop (agitation and propaganda) is the crudest form of Communist political education and Chernenko was to build his early career on it. In Siberia in 1929, the job was to justify the violent overthrow of peasant customs and the persecution of many farmers whom only fanatics could see as rich.

Recently, some fine writers, Siberians among them, have hinted at the horror and injustice of that time. Mr Chernenko last year clashed swords with them and one can understand why. He remembers the “underfed and poorlyclothed” 18-year-old village boy, his head full of Bolshevik dreams, who no doubt thought he was destroying the old to build a fine new world. He also knows now what he surely cannot have understood then: that Stalin consciously built the Soviet might that Mr Chernenko has now inherited on the sacrifice of the Russian peasant. Mr Chernenko escaped from the village as country boys have always done. He joined up. His ambition, he said many years later, was to become a frontier guard and he achieved it in 1930, when he started service along the Siberian

border with China. But after three years he returned to his home region, and started to work his way up the “Agitprop” hierarchy. When Hitler invaded in 1941, he was a figure of modest local importance, a secretary in the Krasnoyarsk territorial party committee. He did not fight in the war. “I immediately volunteered for frontline duty,” he felt it necessary to explain a few years ago, “but all my requests were turned down.” Stalin’s evacuation of Russia’s riches to the east, beyond the reach of Hitler’s army, was one of the war’s great triumphs but Mr Chernenko’s role in it seems to have been only modest. It was not a patch on that of his Politburo colleague, Defence Minister Ustinov, who as a young Commissar for Armaments masterminded the fabulous production of weapons. Mr Chernenko is thus the first Soviet leader with no claim to wartime glory. Mr Khrushchev and Mr Brezhnev served as high-rank-ing military commissars, though both later exaggerated their importance, Mr Brezhnev almost

laughably so. Mr Andropov at least organised young partisans behind enemy lines in Karelia. Anyone who played a prominent role in the war enjoys vast credit in the Soviet Union and Chernenko’s utter lack of this was to cast a shadow on his claim to power. At the war’s end his future looked quite run of the mill. He had been sent for two years to the Central Committee's school for party organisers (this and a later correspondence course at a teacher training college were to be the sum of his formal education). It is hard to believe that he could have hoped to become anything grander than a regional party boss and perhaps even that was aiming too high. The magical year in his life was 1950. For two years he had been working as head of the “Agitprop” department in the Moldavian Republic. Then Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Moldavia as the local party leader. He was almost five years older than Mr Chernenko — a big, handsome, outgoing man. He was incomparably more important

than Mr Chernenko but something between them clicked. Mr Chernenko became a Brezhnev man and Mr Brezhnev took him to the top. At first he seemed nothing more than the “kitchen cabinet friend” that every great man needs. Short, with a thick neck and shrewd eyes above high Slav cheekbones, he did not threaten to overshadow the more glamorours Mr Brezhnev in any way. A few months before his death Mr Brezhnev praised Mr Chernenko for his “tactfulness and responsiveness" and his “selflessness." He praised too Chernenko’s memory on which the invalid leader by then heavily relied: “I can remember no occasion on which you ever forgot anything." At some point Mr Chernenko decided he could do his mentor's job — and Mr Brezhnev succeeded Mr Khrushchev as party leader and put Mr Chernenko to run the Central Committee's general department, a sort of outer office for the party leadership. It was by far the most important work Chernenko had ever had. It gave him a chance to learn the machinery of party power and to make friends of Mr Brezhnev’s friends and new ones of his own. In a country where groupings along

political lines are taboo the personal "clan" takes over. It is doubtful whether most of the Politburo took him seriously. In the battle for Mr Brezhnev's succession, which had started by the spring of 1982, Mr Andropov's supporters successfully spread the idea that the people who count in Moscow, including the soldiers, would not tolerate Mr Chernenko as leader. Now, it seems, they do. Presented with a chance to pick a younger man, the Kremlin felt safer going back into a well-known past. Unpopular though the choice may be among the bolder party intellectuals and the Soviet intelligentsia, it was the easiest way for the Soviet establishment. A man who first started to think in categories of Stalinist “Agitprop" is unlikely to search for ways to make deep changes in Soviet society. That, of course, is not the West’s business. But if Mr Chernenko meant what he said (as Mr Brezhnev’s shadow) about coexistence and the lunacy of nuclear war, he is a leader the West can deal with. Copyright—London Observer Service.