Konstantin Chernenko

September 24, 1911 – March 10, 1985

Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985) was a Soviet politician who served as the de facto leader of the Soviet Union from February 1984 until his death in March 1985. Born to a poor family in Siberia, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1931 and rose through a series of propaganda posts, becoming head of the propaganda department in Moldavia in 1948.

Who else was alive Wikipedia

Biography

Konstantin Chernenko was born in 1911 into a poor family in the Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes. He joined the Komsomol in 1929 and the Communist Party in 1931, served in the frontier guards on the Soviet–Chinese border from 1930 to 1933, and then worked his way up through party propaganda posts in Krasnoyarsk.

His career turned in 1948, when he was put in charge of propaganda in the Moldavian republic and won the trust of Leonid Brezhnev, then the local party chief. Chernenko followed Brezhnev to Moscow and from 1965 ran the General Department of the Central Committee, setting the Politburo's agenda and preparing its decrees. He became a full member of the Central Committee in 1971 and of the Politburo in 1978.

Passed over in favour of Yuri Andropov in 1982, Chernenko succeeded him as General Secretary on 13 February 1984 and became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet that April. Already gravely ill with emphysema, he was seen as a stopgap leader and governed alongside Andrei Gromyko and Dmitry Ustinov. His brief rule largely returned to Brezhnev-era policies, and the Soviet Union led a boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. He died in Moscow on 10 March 1985 and was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev.