Soviets: Ending an Era of Drift

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It was 8 a.m. in Moscow last Monday and Yelena, a student in a technical school, had just turned on her television set expecting to watch her favorite exercise program. Instead, a news show on world events was on the air. Any place else, the change in programming would not have been all that unusual, but in the Soviet Union of the past three years it was more than enough to prompt the concern that it had happened again--a Soviet leader had died. The suspicion was all but confirmed when regularly scheduled broadcasts during the following six hours were replaced by nature films and classical music. Having mastered the macabre code used to signal the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 and that of his successor Yuri Andropov only 15 months later, millions of Soviet citizens were fully prepared for the announcement, which was finally broadcast simultaneously on radio and television at 2 p.m.: "Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet, died at 7:20 p.m. on March 10, 1985, after a grave illness."

The news about Chernenko's death was hardly unexpected, given his age, 73, and his increasingly poor health. The medical report, signed by Dr. Yevgeni Chazov, the chief Kremlin physician, revealed that Chernenko had died of heart failure brought on by chronic emphysema. The report noted that the late General Secretary had also suffered from "chronic hepatitis, which worsened into cirrhosis," a deterioration of the liver.

The real surprise came the next day when Soviet citizens lined up at newspaper kiosks to buy Pravda. The front page of the Communist Party daily was not dominated by a black-bordered picture of the late Soviet President, as had been the case when Brezhnev and Andropov died; readers had to turn to the second page for a glimpse of Chernenko. Instead, the front-page space was devoted to the official portrait of the new leader, a balding, round-faced man, and the announcement that Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, had been chosen by the Central Committee as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The decision to give over the front page of Pravda to Gorbachev was more a matter of protocol than an intended slight of Chernenko. But it did reflect the unprecedented speed of the latest succession in the Kremlin. News of Gorbachev's promotion to the highest post in the land came only five hours after Chernenko's death was announced. In Geneva, Soviet negotiators signaled the U.S. delegation, which had arrived there early last week to resume arms- control talks, that business would go on as usual, despite the death of Chernenko. Said a Moscow housewife: "It looks as if they are getting Chernenko out of the way in a hurry--as if they have a lot to do and they want to get on with it."