#konstantin chernenko

[ministerforpeas]

Problems!

[uss-edsall]

signalis spoilers

When it was revealed the EULRs love ballet dancing and the owl music is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, and then you have to play it over the comatose/corpse-like Dear Leader of the facility? I busted a gut laughing so fucking hard I almost pulled something

The West doesn't know it too well but behind the Iron Curtain, in the Soviet Union and former Soviet states, Swan Lake has a reputation. Several times it played on loop to distract the masses in the last years of the USSR. If you saw Swan Lake on and it repeated itself, you knew something had gone wrong.

It was played on loop over (Leonid Brezhnev) and over (Yuri Andropov) and over (Konstantin Chernenko) and over (Berlin Wall) and over (August Coup) and over (Dozhd) and over again while the leaders of nations and the nations themselves die.

Great Leader is dead. The Nation is dying.

Play Swan Lake.

[heedzhee-art]

some of the hetalia fandom has accidentally given Ukraine "Chernenko" as a last name, which is a russified version of Chornenko, and also makes her share a last name with Konstantin Chernenko, general secretary of the CPSU and head of state of the Soviet Union. how awkward. but suits the canon, since there's nothing exclusively Ukrainian about her, and she can't exist as her own character and is mostly an asset to make russia more interesting, just like Belarus.

I came up with calling her Olena Tkachenko, both first name and last name are extremely common + the last name just means "descendant of a weaver" which compliments my headcanon of her having embroidery art as a special interest 🙂

edit: I haven't thought of this because I made that draft late at night but there is a possibility of the name deriving from a word that went out of use "чернь" (chern'): this word can refer to a dark or black substance, and historically, it could also mean "common people" or "masses"

[alliluyevas]

thinking about the personal life section of konstantin chernenko's wikipedia again

[nicklloydnow]

“But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”

I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

(…)

A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”

Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.

(…)

We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.

On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)

On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.

In Wicker’s words, “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive.”

And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.

It gets worse.

According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.

Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.

(…)

Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become.

(…)

In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”

Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.

It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to “deaths of despair,” a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity.

This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.

Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” In the United States, by contrast, “Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own,” they write. “It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs.”

(…)

The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.

The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title “To Live or to Drink?” Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) “an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators.” All they were missing was a sequel—“To Live or to Smoke?”—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain-smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism.

The statistics are as shocking as the scenes I remember witnessing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made even my native Glasgow seem abstemious. An analysis of 25,000 autopsies conducted in Siberia in 1990–2004 showed that 21 percent of adult male deaths due to cardiovascular disease involved lethal or near-lethal levels of ethanol in the blood. Smoking accounted for a staggering 26 percent of all male deaths in Russia in 2001. Suicides among men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015. In other words, Case and Deaton’s deaths of despair are a kind of pale imitation of the Russian version 20 to 40 years ago.

The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing?

Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.

In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.

The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”

In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”

As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.

(…)

To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”

Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.

A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.

(…)

We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.

Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.

I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting.

Are we the Soviets? Look around you.”

[mariacallous]

In the mid-1980s, although its dissolution was nearly at hand, few were predicting the complete demise of the Soviet Union. But when it came to the politics of leadership succession, a country that had been widely feared or respected for decades had already begun making a mockery of itself.

By the late 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev, the once-vigorous man who had shunted aside Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 to lead the country, had been reduced to a shell of his former self by years of heavy smoking, hard drinking, and emphysema. He visibly huffed and puffed as he walked with a shuffling gait, and he occasionally slurred his words or displayed obvious memory lapses.

After Brezhnev, things in Moscow only got worse. He was succeeded by the former intelligence chief, Yuri Andropov, who was regarded in almost equal measure as a reformist thinker and as a corrupt and sternly authoritarian figure. No one knows which of these traits might have prevailed over time, because time was the one thing Andropov did not have. He died at age 69, his power lasting only 15 months, during the last year of which he suffered total kidney failure.

Andropov was followed by the scarcely-remembered Konstantin Chernenko, another heavy smoker afflicted with emphysema and heart problems. His rule only lasted for 13 months. The historian John Lewis Gaddis said of the ephemeral Chernenko that he was “an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not.” Chernenko’s death in office paved the way in 1985, finally, for the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev.

But by then it was the Soviet system itself that was running out of time.

Existential crises linked to the vagaries of succession politics are typically thought to be the province of authoritarian systems that lack regular and transparent rules for the passing of power from one leader to the next. But for the past three years, it is precisely this specter that has hung over the world’s oldest electoral democracy, the United States.

This has never been clearer than in the past two weeks. First, the mental competence of President Joe Biden, 81, was called into question in a report by Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed to look into the president’s improper handling of classified documents, and then by new flights of disturbing rhetoric by former President Donald Trump, 77, raised renewed profound questions—or should have—about his own fitness for presidential office. Describing a real or imagined conversation about NATO dues with a European leader, Trump related: “I said: ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ … ‘No, I would not protect you, in fact I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever they want. You gotta pay.’”

There is a dismaying amount of confusion in the parallels and comparisons that many commentators have drawn between these two men, the current president and his immediate predecessor, each the prohibitive favorite at this point to head his party’s ticket in the coming election. This proceeds from the unavoidable impression that some things must be broken in the United States for its two main political parties to have simultaneously offered up two such flawed candidates.

There is a world of difference in the ways in which they are flawed, though. The anxieties and discontent aroused by Biden’s performance, whether it is his frequent public memory lapses and misstatements or his shuffling gait and other signs of frailty, are perfectly normal. It is far from ideal for the United States to be led by someone with such traits, but there is nothing about the Biden presidency that conceivably threatens the future of the U.S. republic.

Like his politics or not, for this is not a partisan argument, Biden has presided over a smoothly functioning government that with few exceptions has executed its policies in competent and predictable ways. Other than the outlier factor of Biden’s age, history will likely regard his tenure as fitting firmly within the conventional bounds of U.S. politics. Even Biden’s potential death in office, which would be unsurprising given that, if reelected, he would be 82 years old on Inauguration Day, would yield a routine and proper succession by an elected vice president whom the American people would be free to throw out on the regular timetable should they choose to do so.

The case of Trump, though, couldn’t be more different. Whether one calls it an insurrection or not, the former president’s attempts to rally support for him to stay in power on January 6, 2021, or arm-twist lawmakers and his vice president to bend electoral rules for the same purpose were threats to the integrity of the U.S. political system. And they were not the only ones he has created, either. It is, of course, Trump’s right to defend himself against the many charges he faces in numerous courts of law, but one of his arguments should be seen as uniquely menacing—namely, that a president should be free from prosecution for any criminal behavior committed while in office.

The U.S. Supreme Court must now decide whether to consider the former president’s argument. A legal victory by Trump in this case, however unlikely, would spell the end of republican-style rule in the country by placing presidents above the law.

Trump has also positively invoked the word dictator in describing himself, unreassuringly justifying this by saying this aspiration would only apply to his first day back in office.

He has backed the state of Texas in refusing to comply with a federal court order asserting Washington’s control over the country’s borders, reportedly pledging to encourage other states to send their national guards to Texas to bolster its defiance of the United States’ federalist order. He is reportedly considering naming his daughter-in-law as head of the Republican Party, no crime to be sure, but a personalizing corruption of the political system in line with his other authoritarian instincts. And most recently, as the quote above shows, he has casually threatened members of the NATO alliance that if they don’t meet an agreed benchmark for defense spending, he would not only tolerate a Russian attack on them, but also encourage it.

Even taken individually, many of these positions or actions pose existential threats to the United States that are far more threatening that any concerns raised by Biden’s age. It is the NATO comment, though, that brings us back directly to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

That country’s decay was brought on by the failure of its elites at renewal and reform. The ossification of its system was symbolized, if not exactly brought on, by the advanced age or poor health of its leaders in the pivotal moments of the 1980s. Economic growth in the Soviet Union was the envy of the world in the 1950s, and one might argue that, in fact, it was in the following decade that the country’s political system became too hidebound and corrupt to continue thriving.

Trump’s NATO rhetoric—and, should he become elected, his anti-alliance politics,—are even more damaging. They strike at the heart of U.S. success and prosperity in the world. If pursued, they would deliver a devastating blow to both the country and the global order, an own-goal with few historical parallels.

As filtered through Trump’s mind, alliances are like mob protection rackets in which the payments must keep flowing upward or back to the boss to keep him happy. Otherwise, he will allow bad things to happen, and the victims will have deserved their fate. Biden presents none of these risks.

There seems to be no recognition that the United States has been the premier beneficiary of its great alliances. Its former enemy Japan, for example, helped the United States in crucial, if indirect ways, in resisting North Korea’s takeover of the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s, and South Korea and Japan similarly helped Washington during the Vietnam War. Taken together, they and other allies in Asia are what allow the United States to maintain a favorable order and counterweight to China in the world’s most economically dynamic region.

NATO, likewise, has been similarly indispensable to U.S. power and preeminence in the North Atlantic. For decades, it has kept the peace in Europe and prevented renewed bids by Russia for imperial expansion. The accession of Sweden and Finland to the alliance that is now underway is not a sign of Washington being taken for a ride, as Trump might imagine, but rather a reaffirmation of U.S. power and vitality in the world. Enormous prosperity has flowed from this peace, as much to the United States as to the Europeans themselves.

Ukraine has been the one major exception in the post-Soviet era, and just as Trump seems to have no idea why the United States should help protect NATO members, he seems equally clueless about why allowing Ukraine to crumble before Moscow’s aggression should matter on the far side of the Atlantic.

I write this as someone who has spent a career freely criticizing Western imperialism, including the United States’ own. But if you want to overturn long-standing constitutional arrangements or the architecture of grand alliances, as Trump seems so inclined to do, you should have a coherent plan for alternatives. In a democracy, that should mean an exhaustive discussion and adherence to legal processes and informed choices at the ballot box. From Trump and many of his most ardent supporters, one hears no hint of anything beyond grievance and will to power. Matters of democracy fall by the wayside. All that remains is to follow the great leader.

Trump is a man who personalizes everything and seems to operate on impulses, whims, and grudges. If he is given a second chance to follow and execute them, in another decade or two, historians may be writing the kinds of books one can find today about the Soviet Union in the 1980s, all asking some version of the question: How did things go so completely off the rails?

The big difference, it seems, is that if this befalls the United States, it would be the result of an election in which voters choose a dangerous and incompetent leader—and one who is, moreover, nearly as old as Biden—and not a matter of elite mismanagement of an undemocratic succession. He would be enabled by members of his own party who have repeatedly shown little inclination to stand up to him on matters of constitutional or democratic principle.

Under such a grim scenario, it would not just be the conductor driving the train into the abyss, but also half the passengers, the station master, and the switch operators all contributing to the derailment.

[blingblong55]

How about you forget that I live in your walls and I forget you had your friend write Ronald Reagan x Konstantin Chernenko? 🫧

It’s a deal pookie wookie 🤝

[septictankie]

When Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko died, a hastily called meeting of the CPSU Politburo voted five against electing Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor. Coincidentally (?) three opponents of Gorbachev in the Politburo, among whom was Grigori Romanov, were out of town and not present at this all-important meeting and were not notified to come immediately.

Grigori Romanov once was a powerful figure at the highest level of the Soviet State. As a young man during the 1940s, he had fought the Nazi invaders in the defense of Leningrad. A committed Communist, he later rose through the Party ranks to become the head of the Soviet Union’s second-largest city, Leningrad, for 25 years.

In 1983 he was summoned to Moscow by the then president Yuri Andropov and became a member of the CPSU Politburo. When Andropov died in 1984, Konstantin Chernenko took over. But he too was not healthy and passed away the following year. Grigori Romanov was considered one of the two possible successors to Chernenko; the other one was Vladimir Shcherbitsky. "No one seriously considered Gorbachev," says Romanov.

On the day that Chernenko died (March 10, 1985–19.20 hrs) Romanov was in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife. They had been given a trip to the sanatorium and could only fly back to Moscow on the following day. Two other Politburo members were also at that time out of town; Dinmuhammed Kunaev was in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan and Shcherbitsky was in the United States. If these three members (the usual size of the Politburo is about 14 full members) had been present at the meeting, as they could have been the following day – Gorbachev would never had been elected, says Romanov. "By the time we arrived in Moscow, the very next day, he’d already done it without waiting for us as Politburo rules demanded. That fast! That was it… He’d already cut the deal in secret with all of them. And you think that the timing of Chernenko’s death, I mean, was all accidental? (bid).

The fact that Gorbachev was not even seriously considered as the successor to Chernenko, appears to be supported by an article in 1992 in the New York Transfer News Service, which wrote the following about Gorbachev’s performance:

"When Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU, he had done little to distinguish himself with his comrades in the Central Committee or later in the Politburo. The highest-ranking job he held was that of a Central Committee secretary in charge of agriculture. He had earlier studied at the Stavropol Agricultural Institute where he obtained a degree in agriculture, to which he later added a degree in law. Thus, he was a lawyer and an agricultural official directly responsible from the Central Committee to the Politburo. His performance until then was, if anything, lackluster. Indeed, his last years in that post were characterized by agricultural failures attributed by the Soviet press to poor weather (!) They certainly did not add to his stature. Nothing he had done could recommend putting him on a pedestal above all the others."

Furthermore, an article in "Time Europe" of January 4, 1988, confirms that Romanov was the chief candidate for the top job.

But Gorbachev and his cabal appeared to have outmaneuvered his rivals. He succeeded because Chernenko died at a moment that his main rivals were out of town, either by pure luck or timing or "in a planned manner", as Romanov seems to suggest by his question – "Was the real timing of Chernenko’s death accidental?" There is no doubt that Chernenko was a sick man which he spent much of his last few months in hospital and that his death was not unexpected. The Soviet news agency TASS later released the text of his medical bulletin, which stated the following "following the manifestations of liver and pulmonary-cardiac insufficiency, Mr. Chernenko’s heart had stopped." But doctors do have a good deal control over the timing of a person’s death. Romanov could be right that the timing was not altogether "accidental".

Tom Paine, writing in the "Cold War Series: Ten Years After" said about Gorbachev: " In order to trump his Politburo rivals, Gorbachev did every wild thing that he could think of, the better to be able to brand them all, quite inaccurately, as reactionaries, as Stalinists. In the process he ruined the Soviet economy, encouraged the nationalities to rise up against his enemies, and inadvertently broke up the Soviet bloc in the attempt to remove Communist leaders who sided with his perceived enemies in Russia. Finally he started the process of breaking up the Soviet Union itself, in April of 1991, by initiating talks on a new Union Treaty. This was done in order to head off an attempt by the loyal members of Central Committee of the CPSU to remove him from power."

Not surprisingly, Romanov does not have a good word to say about Gorbachev. " He will pay for his sins! I can’t stand the sight of his pig’s mug. He’s a traitor A traitor to the Motherland! He’s sniveling about how no one here thanks him, about how ungrateful Russians are to him. To hell with Gorbachev! He started this disaster. He was a catastrophe, an ignorant peasant who had no right to come into the big city…"

And so writes Andrew Meier in "Black Earth":

"Now, in advanced retirement, far from his rarefied life among the Party, Romanov echoed the lament of many a common man in Russia. In the years after the Soviet collapse, he had found company. Romanov has no power now, but he took solace in the knowledge that millions of Russians share his views. His principle conviction – things were much better before – has become the motto of his generation."

Source: https://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc0403/veteran.htm

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.13 (after 1940)

1945 – World War II: The siege of Budapest concludes with the unconditional surrender of German and Hungarian forces to the Red Army. 1945 – World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment. 1951 – Korean War: Battle of Chipyong-ni, which represented the "high-water mark" of the Chinese incursion into South Korea, commences. 1954 – Frank Selvy becomes the only NCAA Division I basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game. 1955 – Israel obtains four of the seven Dead Sea Scrolls. 1955 – Twenty-nine people are killed when Sabena Flight 503 crashes into Monte Terminillo near Rieti, Italy. 1960 – With the success of a nuclear test codenamed "Gerboise Bleue", France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons. 1960 – Black college students stage the first of the Nashville sit-ins at three lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. 1961 – An allegedly 500,000-year-old rock is discovered near Olancha, California, US, that appears to anachronistically encase a spark plug. 1967 – American researchers discover the Madrid Codices by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Library of Spain. 1975 – Fire at One World Trade Center (North Tower) of the World Trade Center in New York. 1978 – Hilton bombing: A bomb explodes in a refuse truck outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia, killing two refuse collectors and a policeman. 1979 – An intense windstorm strikes western Washington and sinks a 0.5-mile (0.80 km) long section of the Hood Canal Bridge. 1981 – A series of sewer explosions destroys more than two miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky. 1983 – A cinema fire in Turin, Italy, kills 64 people. 1984 – Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1990 – German reunification: An agreement is reached on a two-stage plan to reunite Germany. 1991 – Gulf War: Two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroy the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. Allied forces said the bunker was being used as a military communications outpost, but over 400 Iraqi civilians inside were killed. 1996 – The Nepalese Civil War is initiated in the Kingdom of Nepal by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre). 2001 – An earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter magnitude scale hits El Salvador, killing at least 944. 2004 – The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe's largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star "Lucy" after The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". 2007 – Taiwan opposition leader Ma Ying-jeou resigns as the chairman of the Kuomintang party after being indicted on charges of embezzlement during his tenure as the mayor of Taipei; Ma also announces his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election. 2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations. 2010 – A bomb explodes in the city of Pune, Maharashtra, India, killing 17 and injuring 60 more. 2011 – For the first time in more than 100 years the Umatilla, an American Indian tribe, are able to hunt and harvest a bison just outside Yellowstone National Park, restoring a centuries-old tradition guaranteed by a treaty signed in 1855. 2012 – The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted the first launch of the European Vega rocket from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. 2017 – Kim Jong-nam, brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, is assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. 2021 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is acquitted in his second impeachment trial. 2021 – A major winter storm causes blackouts and kills at least 82 people in Texas and northern Mexico.

[worldwithoutmiracles]

in 1981, Soviet Russia was led by Leonid Brezhnev, who died at 75 in 1982. Yuri Andropov succeeded him, then died in 1984 at 69. then there was Konstantin Chernenko, who died in 1985 at 73. in 1981, the average age of the Politburo was 69. Soviet Russia at this time was considered a gerontocracy - a nation run entirely by the old.

"During the final decades of the USSR, its corrupt, aging leaders embraced policies that derailed the Soviet economy as they continued to live in opulence. They refused to embrace large-scale changes and helped set the next generation up for failure."

in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, he was the oldest man who had ever been elected at 69 years old. in 2016, Donald Trump was elected at age 70. Joe Biden was then elected at age 78 and became the first person to turn 80 while serving as president. in 2024, Donald Trump was reelected at age 78. Barack Obama, born in 1961, is the only president the US has ever had that was born after 1945.

since Reagan, incumbent reelection rates in the House of Representatives have been around 85-98%. in the Senate, reelection rates are 75-96%. there are no age limits on these roles, and they are effectively lifetime appointments. the median age of the House is 58 years old. the median age of the Senate is 65 years old. the median age in America is 39.

more

[marishistoricalyappery]

In October 1984, the National Union of Mineworkers was in dire financial straits; the union’s assets had been confiscated and its bank account frozen. Consequently, Arthur Scargill, the Union’s leader, sought money from the USSR. Soviet documents show that Scargill had discussed at length ways in which the money could reach the N.U.M without being compromised or blocked by the British government.

Soviet miners donated more than $1m from their wages. However, as positive relations between Gorbachev, who was lined up to be Konstantin Chernenko’s successor, and Thatcher blossomed, it was inadmissible for Gorbachev to permit the donation at the risk of compromising good diplomatic relations.

There was some resistance in efforts to prevent the donation, as the Soviet trade unions were independent and thus acted independently of the Soviet government. However, Thatcher insisted that the USSR was interfering with British matters. Gorbachev claimed ignorance even though he, according to Soviet documents, was one of three top Soviet officials at the Kremlin to sign the papers authorising the donation.

Thatcher succeeded in her application of pressure upon the USSR. The N.U.M received no donation. Gorbachev, instead, prioritised efforts to bring the USSR out of its antiquated state and in doing so wished to maintain good relations with Thatcher.

[ntu24nato]

[INTERNAL REPORT] Further Cause for Concern

With the conclusion of the 1984 Soviet Union Legislative Election, unsurprisingly, Konstantin Chernenko was elected as the Secretary-General of the USSR under the CPSU. One of his first priorities was reported to be a 3-day long bilateral summit with China behind closed doors, and we have only received this information due to reports of a government-owned private jet flown straight to Beijing just last week. Moreover, we have further received information about the details about their talks, and it was found that a total of 3 Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) have been signed, with the most concerning one being a major trade deal with China in the agriculture sector. Although possibly just an innocuous economic deal, we have reason to believe that the growing USSR-China ties will further bring and entrench communist ideals in Asia. More sinisterly, we expect there to be an increasingly polarised foreign policy over the next few years, and this issue calls for increasing concern on the NATO end. Godspeed.

[liberty1776]

For Americans such as myself who came of age during the 1970s or early 1980s, the Soviet Union always carried the whiff of a decaying ideological empire, ruled by a decrepit political leadership class that had long since lost the trust of its own people. Such was my opinion at the time, and nothing I have learned since then has changed it. Three Soviet leaders ruled during that era—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all elderly and infirm, with the reigns of the last two being so brief that our own President Ronald Reagan once quipped that they died too … Continue reading →

[dweemeister]

August 30, 2022

By Marilyn Berger

(The New York Times) — Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.

At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.

For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not.

It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.

[blingblong55]

You seem like the kind of person who watched the two tribes music video and tried to find Ronald Reagan x Konstantin Chernenko fics 🫧

HE’S IN THE GODDAMN WALLS!!!!!!! Why do you know me so well???

*cough* I did…I did and I don’t regret it 😚✌️

[historysisco]

On This Day in History March 11, 1985: In a move that would prove decidedly important to the fate of the world during late 20th century, Mikhail Gorbachev was picked to be the final General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev replaced his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko who died on March 10, 1985.

In the six years that Gorbachev spent as the leader of the Soviet Union, he was able to bring about changes not only internally but also externally which led to bringing about the end of the Cold War. His actions during this time earned him the Nobel Peace Prize which was given to him on October 15, 1990.

Gorbachev was elected as Russia’s first President in 1991 but his term was short lived. A coup by Russian hardliners in August of 1991 spelled the end of Gorbachev and his resignation on December 25, 1991 was more of an formality with the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 21, 1991 between Russia and a number of the breakaway republics former part of the Soviet Union.

Even today Gorbachev continues to promote peace and goodwill in the form of his Gorbachev Foundation which was founded in 1992.

For Further Reading:

Mikhail Gorbachev: The man who lost an empire from BBC News dated 13 December 2016

Mikhail Gorbachev from the Nobel Peace Prize website

The Gorbachev Foundation website

Mikhail Gorbachev: I should have abandoned the Communist party earlier by Johnathan Steele from the Guardian dated  16 August 2011