Long spell of illness

Press, 12 March 1985, Page 1

Long spell of illness

NZPA-AP New York Konstantin Chernenko, the third Soviet leader in as many years, took over his country’s leadership 13 months ago in spite of rumours about his failing health. Mr Chernenko was the oldest person to take over the Soviet leadership when at the age of 72 he was selected on February 13, 1984, as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Observers have said that he suffered from emphysema. Until late February, when he appeared twice on Soviet television, Mr Chernenko was not seen in public for two months.

Among ceremonies he missed were the Red Square funeral of the Defence Minister, Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, in December and a voters’ meeting on February 22 where he should have given an election address. During Mr Chernenko’s most recent appearance, on February 28, when he received his credentials to the Russian Republic’s Parliament, he struggled for breath while giving a speech. Earlier that week he was seen voting during elections for seats in the Supreme Soviet, or Parliament, of each of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics. Western diplomats specu-

lated that the ballot-box seen in the film footage was taken to Mr Chernenko in a hospital. He also dropped out of sight for two months during the spring of 1983. Among the events he missed then was the May 1 Red Square parade — usually a must for high-ranking officials — because of what officially was said to be pneumonia. Mr Chernenko was a veteran ideologist who rose through the party ranks beside his long-time ally — a former President, Leonid Brezhnev, who died in November, 1982. He became party chairman and later Soviet President after the death of Mr Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov. Mr Chernenko was born to Russian peasants in the central Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, more than 3220 km east of Moscow, on September 24, 1911. He became chief of a Komsomol — Young Communist — department in 1929, joined the party in 1931, and 10 years later was a local party secretary. He graduated from the higher party school at Moscow in 1945 and from the

Kishniev Pedagogical Institute in 1953 — the extent of his higher education — and then began the long climb in party ideology and propaganda work on Mr Brezhnev’s coat-tails. Mr Chernenko was a Communist propagandist at 18, working near his native Krasnoyarsk, and later became a border guard. Like many young men at the time of the Stalinist purges of the 19305, Mr Chernenko rose rapidly in local Communist ranks. He left Krasnoyarsk for the higher party school in Moscow in 1943. His association with Mr Brezhnev began in the 19505, when he served with him as propaganda chief in the southern republic of Moldavia. In 1965, a year after Mr Brezhnev ousted Nikita Khrushchev from power, Mr Chernenko returned to Moscow to head the Communist Party’s general department. His rise was rapid by Soviet standards. In 1971 he became a member of the Central Committee, by 1976 a Communist Party national secretary, and in 1978 was named to the ruling Politburo.