The Dead Hand by David Hoffman Page B

“For reasons which you will understand, I will not be able to chair meetings of the Politburo and Secretariat in the near future. I would therefore request members of the Central Committee to examine the question of entrusting the leadership of the Politburo and Secretariat to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.” Volsky was stunned. He consulted two other aides, and they, too, weretaken aback. Until then, Konstantin Chernenko had been considered the number two leader in the party. Andropov was proposing to skip Chernenko and go right to Gorbachev to lead the country. The aides took the precaution of photocopying Andropov’s note, and then submitted it to the Central Committee apparat to be typed and included with Andropov’s other remarks for distribution before the meeting.
    Two days later, at the plenum, Volsky opened the red-leather-covered portfolio and discovered the last paragraph written by Andropov was missing. When he protested, he was told to keep quiet. The aging dinosaurs at the helm of the Soviet Union—Chernenko, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Tikhonov—had quietly blocked Andropov’s attempt to name Gorbachev his successor. The old guard had kept their grip on power. 2
    Andropov died February 9, 1984, and the ailing Chernenko was chosen as his successor. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Moscow for the funeral, arriving on February 13 in the bitter cold. On the day of the funeral, she met Chernenko for a short, private meeting. He read rapidly from a text, stumbling over his words from time to time. Thatcher recalled that she had been urged to wear fur-lined boots; at the Andropov funeral, guests had to stand for a long period in the cold. The boots had been expensive, she said. “But when I met Mr. Chernenko, the thought crossed my mind that they would probably come in useful again soon.” 3
    At seventy-two years old, Chernenko had never been more than a shadow of Brezhnev as his chief of staff and a party apparatchik. Suffering from an advanced stage of emphysema, Chernenko faltered during his televised inaugural speech from a podium atop Lenin’s tomb, running out of breath in the middle of sentences. He was unable to hold a salute to the military parade as it passed before him in Red Square. At one point during Andropov’s funeral, Gromyko turned to Chernenko and instructed him in a whisper—loud enough to be picked up by microphones—“Don’t take off your hat.” 4 Two weeks later, in another televised address, Chernenko stumbled, lost his breath, paused for half a minute and, when he resumed, skipped an entire page of his text. Chernenko was a transitional figure, and his colleagues sensed it. “Whom did we acquire in the post of General Secretary?” asked Gorbachev. “Not merely a seriously sick and physically weak person but, in fact, an invalid.It was common knowledge, and immediately visible with the naked eye. It was impossible to disguise his infirmity and the shortness of breath caused by emphysema.” 5
    Anatoly Chernyaev, who was then deputy director of the International Department in the Central Committee, recalled that when Chernenko was to meet the king of Spain, aides wrote out his main points on small cards, with no long sentences, so that Chernenko would seem to be talking and not reading. “That was in the beginning,” Chernyaev said. “Later, Chernenko couldn’t even read the notes anymore, but just stumbled through them with no idea what he was saying.” 6
    What if the ailing Chernenko had to make a decision about nuclear attack? For the Soviet leadership, the ultimate catastrophe would be a bolt-from-the-blue first strike that would destroy the Kremlin in minutes. There was a special underground train out of the Kremlin to the war bunkers—but what if they were facing sudden death, if the missiles were only minutes away, a decapitation? With the leaders gone, who would order retaliation? Who would