8. Arms race Characteristics of the stage In the second half of the 40s, there was a break in the allied relations of the USSR with England and the USA. The Allies saw in the USSR, which defeated Hitler and was engaged in the socialist reorganization of the countries of the East and Europe, a huge threat to

Stagnant stability in the USSR ended with the death of Leonid Brezhnev. This happened on November 10, 1982: at that time, the Secretary General was already 75 years old. He was replaced by the all-powerful chairman of the KGB. But he managed to stay in the role of general secretary for a little over a year: in early February 1984, he died at the age of 69. Konstantin became the next general secretary. He ruled the country even less, since he died on March 10, 1985. Chernenko managed to live 73 years and became the last in a series of Soviet figures buried near the Kremlin wall.

This era went down in history under the name "carriage race" or "five-year-old luxury funeral."

The fact is that during this period, not only three general secretaries in a row died at a rather advanced age, but also a number of members of the Politburo who claimed leadership of the Soviet Union and the party. The oldest of the participants in the "competitions" was Arvid Pelshe, who died at the age of 84. His closest pursuer was the "gray eminence" of the Kremlin, who at the time of his death was 79 years old.

Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed organizer of Chernenko's funeral. At that time he was only 54 years old. Among his colleagues in the Politburo and the Central Committee of the CPSU, he was considered one of the youngest. On the whole, the situation in power was in many ways reminiscent of the current presidium, at a meeting of which one sometimes becomes afraid for its participants.

In the early eighties, Gorbachev was sympathized with the most powerful people in the country - Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Suslov and. In addition, Gorbachev spoke with.

After the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev, who was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, was one of the main candidates for general secretaries. His main antagonist was considered the first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee.

The meeting began at two o'clock in the afternoon the day after Chernenko's death—March 11. The first to speak was Mr. No, USSR Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. However, this time he changed his habit of saying "no" and proposed Gorbachev's candidacy for the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Since the most authoritative member of the Politburo who remained alive supported Gorbachev's candidacy, so did his opponents, who realized that everything had been decided without them.

Mikhail Gorbachev made a fuss and immediately held a plenum. Its participants began to gather during the meeting of the Politburo.

The plenum unanimously supported Gorbachev's candidacy, and he delivered a speech in which he told in what direction he planned to develop the country. In particular, Gorbachev mentioned the need to "accelerate the socio-economic development of the country and improve all aspects of society."

On March 13, the newly minted Secretary General led the funeral of his predecessor. And already in May of the same year, Gorbachev said: “Apparently, comrades, we all need to reorganize. Everyone." Thus began perestroika, which became the beginning of the end for the USSR.

Reports of death appear literally every month. They are invariably refuted by the hero himself, whom ill-wishers with enviable regularity try to bury.

"Five Years of Lush Funeral" in the memoirs of a negligent journalism student
and in the jokes of the time

So, there were five of them - the main gerontes of the era of Soviet stagnation, who decided the fate of their country and the world in the midst of " cold war» During their lifetime and in the first days after their death, they received incredible honors. I list them, if I may say so, in descending order - Mikhail Suslov, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Dmitry Ustinov, Konstantin Chernenko. Five Gold Stars of the Hero of the Soviet Union and nine Hammer and Sickle medals of Heroes of Socialist Labor accounted for five, the rest of the regalia of the USSR, fraternal socialist and developing countries were not at all recalculable. Five cities renamed to perpetuate the memory. Of all, only the deceased was the first Suslov not to be honored with a mention on the geographical map of the country. But in honor of the latter - Chernenko, two small villages were immediately named with the letter "sha", apparently because it follows the "h" in the Russian alphabet - Sharypovo in the Krasnoyarsk Territory and Sholdaneshty in Moldova. Tatars, for example, were very amused by the fact that the city of Naberezhnye Chelny was baptized in honor of the browed general secretary. In fact, they believe, there was no renaming, just some extra letters were removed from the previous name. But the residents of Izhevsk were actively indignant that their beloved capital of Soviet Udmurtia had become Ustinov for three years. In Rybinsk, in turn, people were no strangers to this practice. In the 20th century, this ancient Volga city of the Yaroslavl region had already visited Shcherbakov once (there was such a middle-class Soviet party leader), and after 1984 for some time took the name of the omnipotent KGB chairman Andropov, who replaced Brezhnev as general secretary. As for factories, steamships, collective farms and state farms, which acquired the sonorous names of outstanding party and Soviet leaders, faithful successors to the work of Lenin, they also could not be counted.

This period, which immediately preceded Gorbachev's perestroika, was called by the people for the sake of laughter, the five-year period of magnificent funerals. At the same time, a new sport was introduced into use, to which the NOC of the USSR (just kidding!) proposed to immediately grant Olympic status, since our great and powerful country could not be equal in it - “carriage racing”. Strictly speaking, if members of the Politburo died one person a year, then they would be just enough for a whole five-year period without emergency work and storming. But in the Soviet tradition of organizing labor and production, it was customary to take on increased socialist obligations and always exceed the plan. So, we kept within three years and a month and a half.

For me personally, this whole mess began somehow mystically. In the autumn of 1981, we, three-year students of the Faculty of Journalism of the Kishinev State University, participated in the battle for the harvest in the village of Seseni, Calarasi region. In the men's room of the local labor and recreation camp, single beds were installed, and our young men were forced to sleep two by two under one government blanket, which looked very ridiculous and not entirely decent from the outside. And only I alone, as the most well-fed, was given a separate bed. It was located in a cozy niche, and above it hung a stand with handsome physiognomies of members and candidate members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The photographs of the party leaders were not nailed to the rails, each was only fixed with two carnations. And then one fine night, they, loosened, began to fall one by one on top of me.

In those days, the faculty newspaper Gaudeamus, which was a receptacle for all kinds of agitation and propaganda nonsense, dimensionless, like an oriflamme that could be stretched to its full length over the widest esplanade in the world, in particular, wrote that at that time, as many our boys are friends with the girls, and the girls, in turn, with the boys, and every evening they visit the collective farm stacks scattered throughout the district, the Komsomol member Tkhorov sleeps with members of the Politburo. Since the cult slogan of those years “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” appeared above the masterpiece of the party and Soviet press, the teaching staff and student activists decided to subject this assumption to the most severe censorship and mercilessly black out. It was assumed that one person could not sleep at once with all the members and candidates leading the CPSU and the USSR in the breaks between party congresses.

Although it was the truth. At first, in pitch darkness, I tried to hang the "fallen" leaders in their places, but then, realizing the futility of my efforts to cope with this continuous "starfall", I began to simply put them at the head. Sometimes in the mornings, to the right of the pillow, a pile of ten or twelve portraits of the highest party nomenclature was formed. Over time, I trained to such an extent that I could unmistakably, by the duration of the characteristic whistle emitted by flying plywood, to which the faces of the Kremlin celestials were lovingly glued, determine which of them crashed on me this time ... Suslov ... Brezhnev ... Andropov ... Ustinov ... Chernenko ... Rashidov Sharaf Rashidovich ... Pelshe Arvid Yanovich ... The last two, by the way, also passed away during the “five-year (or rather, three-year-plus) magnificent funeral,” but I chose the most significant of them for my memoirs.

Approximately in the order in which they fell at night, they then died. The public reaction to their departure was mixed.

Comrade Susly

Mikhail Andreevich Suslov - the permanent "gray eminence" of the Brezhnev era, an ascetic to the marrow of his bones, was indifferent to luxury, regalia and other trinkets. But he was very fond of hanging those on dear Leonid Ilyich. For these ceremonies were invariably accompanied by stormy caresses, which the party comrades loved to indulge in so much. And the hickey, which the main ideologist of the country delivered to the Secretary General during the awarding of the third Golden Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union and the seventh Order of Lenin in 1978, is generally recognized as a textbook, and, according to rumors, captured in the photo, is stored in the exposition of the world museum of kisses.

They say that Brezhnev was acutely worried about the death of his beloved "kisser". He felt that he was left without support. Suslov was very influential person in the CPSU since the time of Stalin, and when Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964, all the "conspirators" led by Leonid Ilyich ran to him half-bent and did not take any action until he gave the green light to the removal of Nikita Sergeevich from power . Suslov once distinguished himself by leading regional party structures in the Rostov region, then in the Ordzhonikidzevsky (now Stavropol) region and, finally, in Lithuania, where he uncompromisingly fought against manifestations of "bourgeois nationalism." In Moldova, he was practically unknown, in my opinion, he had never even been here, so his death did not cause any special feelings among the locals.

But his name during his lifetime still led everyone to awe. A journalist who incorrectly reflected any event with his participation could lose his job overnight. An example of this happened in our faculty. One student was asked to print each of twenty-five classmates a set of questions for an exam in the theory and practice of the party-Soviet press, promising a plus point upon passing. The old, broken-down "Erika" pierced no more than three sheets inserted into it and "sandwiched" with carbon paper. Work, it is worth recognizing, was titanic. When the work was completed, the professor who ordered it began to scrupulously check the text for errors. One of the tickets contained a question about the "historical decisions" of the next ideological plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU with reference to Suslov's speech. The meticulous bookworm could not believe his eyes when he read the “report of Comrade Suslogo M.A. He declined the distorted name of the "gray eminence" in his mind, and in the nominative case he got "comrade. Susly. In all sets, the mistake was erased with an eraser and the letters were typed correctly. And the unlucky student, when he reminded the teacher of the agreed “plus point”, on the contrary, lowered the mark, warning that for such a typo in relation to such an important and significant person, one can generally fly out of the university.

Suslov died on January 25, 1982, in November he was supposed to be 80. On the third day after this unfortunate incident, the mortal remains of the main ideologist of the CPSU in a coffin upholstered in red cambric were piled on an old gun carriage and taken to the Kremlin wall. An unprecedented race has begun. It was decided to bury him in the Granite line hidden in the shade of the Lenin Mausoleum with the establishment of a bust, reopening it more than twenty years after the last burial. Then, in 1961, in it secretly, under the cover of night, they buried the mummified Stalin, the leader of the world proletariat, taken out of the tomb.

Leonid Ilyich Former

And again, some mysticism intervenes. Since the morning of November 10, 1982, we, a group of negligent students, have been skipping classes, having a drink on the occasion of the birthday of a classmate in a hot place known throughout Chisinau, popularly nicknamed “wigwams” for its characteristic Indian stylization, which is located opposite the “Subscription Editions” store. Speech suddenly turns to eternity.

Someone asks: mon chers, and what, suppose, will happen if, just look, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev dies tomorrow. In response, it was immediately said, as cut off: the third world war. But in the course of the discussion that has arisen, it turns out that more than the global Armageddon, the participants in the feast are worried about whether they will sell alcohol. Everyone agrees that if the “five-star” general secretary leaves, the country will most likely declare a long mourning, during which they will have to tie for a long time. And he, I say gloomily, as a person who knows the basics of world politics and history at an acceptable amateurish level, can last a month and a half that way. For greater persuasiveness, I appeal to the fact four years ago, when the leader of friendly Algeria Huari Boumedden died. On such a sad occasion, we were constantly informed about this by Soviet television, our Arab brothers grieved, I remember, for forty days. At the same time, everyone was sure that when this happens, a messenger will surely burst into the student audience, throw back his head tragically, put his right hand to his forehead in a picturesque way, shout out the mournful news and cry. And at first we will freeze, as during the famous Gogol silent scene, and then we will all burst into tears too. If we knew then that at the time of our conversation, the 75-year-old Brezhnev was already “that”, then, perhaps, that it would all be so.

But the next day, everything turned out quite differently. I, dressed in a washed-out army field uniform, which, despite being overweight, hangs like a sack on me, serve at the military department. I am an orderly (I write with pride), deftly wielding a broom, sweeping leaves on a small parade ground, nestled in the backyard of the university law school building. Too many of them were swept by the wind under the bottom of the old, half-rotten armored personnel carriers standing right there. You have to bend down and dig. I didn’t even notice how the officer on duty, Major Medvedev, joined me, unfastened the codpiece of his dress breeches with a graceful movement of his hand, and began to relieve himself right on the wheel of the armored car, kicking his legs with pleasure, which is experienced mainly by people who are suddenly suddenly impatient, but they are long were forced to endure.

Without interrupting the process, the officer admonished me:

- What are you doing, cadet, sweeping the leaves so badly? Look how many of them you have under armored personnel carriers. Well, get in there.

I, not yet bound by the strict requirements of the military oath, could not follow stupid orders, so I answered the senior in rank calmly and boorishly:

- I was going to, it was, to do it, but now that you, Comrade Major, went to them in a small way, I won’t even think about it.

- Well, okay, - Medvedev said conciliatoryly, - don't drive like that, fighter. We are not allowed to quarrel with each other. The country must unite in a single camp. Our Leonid Ilyich is no more.

And then again, by some mystical coincidence, the abyss of heaven opened up, and snow, which is rare at this time of the year in Moldova, was sprinkled in large flakes.

- How is it not? I asked.

- So no. Passed away yesterday. from myocardial infarction.

Here is the solemnity of the moment. No, of course, as a messenger of trouble, I immediately ran to my brothers-in-arms, free from guard duty. They were nearby, in the courtyard, just at that moment they were removing the butt plate from a Vladimirov tank heavy machine gun, abbreviated as KPVT. Under the guidance of an experienced mentor, Major Chukhlov, a massive steel “bar”, which, if it suddenly springs up and hits somewhere in the wall, then the entire dilapidated building of the law faculty will collapse, has already been released from grips, a lanky officer, to whom it was aimed at just that place ... well , in general, people of average height will have to go to the very navel, take it to the body, but at the same time, an elastic projectile helps him to hold at least a dozen more hands.

Major Chukhlov himself recalled what he experienced immediately after my appearance at the dismantling of this incident a week later:

“You see, I’m holding on to this fucking recoil pad with the last of my strength, and then this fat cretin with a broom in his hands comes running and screams heart-rendingly: dudes, Brezhnev is dead!”

Naturally, all the rest, who also had not yet sworn allegiance to the Motherland, immediately released this metal fool on a spring, surrounding me and in a friendly way asking me to repeat what I had just told them, and only one major, sealed by this very oath to the Fatherland, continued to remain at his post. His face was twisted into a grimace of unbearable anguish.

“Idiots, I’m being castrated right now!” he screeched.

But the confusion in the ranks of classmates continued, and for another five minutes they did not pay any attention to the groans and groans of the course officer. And only when Chukhlov was about to, in the manner of Baron Munchausen on a cannonball, fly out with this most ill-fated recoil pad in the direction of the very wall, which would surely have collapsed at the cost of the life of the brave major, my friends came to their senses and saved him from a terrible fate.

It is worth noting that the news of the death of the browed general secretary plunged Soviet society only into a short-term shock, when, out of the suddenness of what they heard, trains began to derail, cars collided, steam heating pipes began to rip off with tenfold energy and break through the main collectors of city sewers. And then everything settled down. Almost all of the Soviet people were sent on an unplanned three-day (for the period of declared mourning) vacation, so that, therefore, they would not do something out of grief. Only the strategic forces of the missile troops, border guards, police and journalists remained on combat duty. The latter had to fill the pages of their newspapers over the next few days with official TASS reports and reports from the mourning events that swept the vast country. But the main thing that we feared so much did not happen. They left vodka for the people. The authorities considered that it was possible to grieve like that.

In the evening, in the hostel, a funeral service was mournfully and sadly celebrated for the deceased. Fifteen people were crammed into a small room with just three beds. On a table full of booze, bread and sauerkraut, there was a small TV, the screen of which, if desired, can be covered with a child's palm. Police squads walked along the corridors, reinforced by professors and activists of the faculty of journalism, who vigilantly monitored that all guitars were sheathed. Drink, I repeat, it was possible, and as much as you like. Having come in to check if we were having fun at such a mournful hour for the Motherland, the teacher of fingerprinting, accompanied by a hefty sergeant, drew attention to the fact that we had two unsheathed guitars.

- Do you play guitars here? she asked sternly. - For playing the guitar - expulsion from the university.

The informal leader of the company, beyond all measure, the cynical Gosha, who was expelled a little earlier, so he was no longer afraid of anything, turned his face to her. Cabbage algae hung on a lush mustache, and tears, huge as peas, flowed down her cheeks.

– What are you talking about? How can you play guitars when there is such grief in the country?

Everyone knows how he, a quite artistic person, plunged into such a state of mourning. According to the Stanislavsky system. Just at that time, a visit to the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions by representatives of the Orthodox clergy and other confessions was shown on TV. At this moment, apparently, Gosha with a mustache in cabbage imagined that it was not the eyebrow-shaped general secretary reclining in a cambric coffin surrounded by hundreds of satin cushions with regalia, but he himself, an exile from the faculty of journalism for drunkenness and apolitical statements and actions, and the then primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Pimen Izvekov overshadows him with the last sign of the cross. After that, a mean man's tear flowed down his unshaven cheek.

But my grandmother, who came across me on the way home after a three-day vigil in the hostel, wept, as it seemed to me, quite sincerely. She devoutly crossed herself and lamented that, they say, everyone ate white bread, and what will happen next, only God knows. At that time I could not even imagine how prophetic the predictions were made by this monstrous, shriveled like a frozen apple, Cassandra, and that, in any case, for many people of her age, well-fed times would really end soon.

Then the country, apparently, was in such a hurry to say goodbye to the stagnant Brezhnev times that the coffin with the general secretary was not only lowered into the grave behind the Mausoleum, but they let him go, who could not resist in the frail senile hands of his comrades-in-arms and associates. And in this, too, many saw an alarming sign. At first they thought that the embalmed body of the second Ilyich would be placed next to the mummy of the first in his gloomy tomb. However, the place on the podium, where Stalin's sarcophagus once stood, remained vacant. After some time, another bust was installed in the Granite rank of the Kremlin necropolis - with eyebrows. A few days later, Brezhnev was forgotten. The country had a new "faithful successor to Lenin's cause" Yuri Andropov, who almost immediately offered her a tough path of renewal. However, this was only the initial stage of the "five-year plan for a magnificent funeral."

Rabbits are not only valuable fur

During the heyday of stagnation - this unique stage of the total manifestation of insanity at the highest state level, Moldova was considered one of the centers of rabbit breeding in the USSR. The famous reprise about rabbits, which are “not only valuable fur”, performed by Vladimir Moiseenko and Vladimir Danilts, and even earlier, which formed the basis of a short film in the satirical newsreel “Wick” with Alexander Pankratov-Cherny and Borislav Brondukov, was in fact an ordinary working moment , recorded on the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company of the Moldavian SSR. They interviewed a noble rabbit breeder, who told the interlocutor about valuable fur, and about three or four kilograms of dietary "meat, easily digestible by the body." From twenty attempts, grandfather could not pronounce the word “assimilable” correctly, so the already famous “assimilable” had to be put on the air. The story, according to the comparative theory of "wandering plots", has spread far beyond the borders of Moldova, and is now assiduously exploited by artists of the light genre.

In the winter of 1984, as part of the so-called “creative day”, I had to visit the editorial office of the Youth of Moldavia once a week and take journalistic assignments from the local masters. As I remember now, on February 7 I was sent to the Republican Conference of Rabbit Breeders, where many speakers just explained to me, and at the same time to the heads of relevant ministries and departments, that rabbits are not only valuable fur.

After many hours of suggestion, I really wanted to write something sort of, epoch-making, so that everyone in the editorial office would gasp. For three days I sat at my desk at home, not straightening up, drank thirty cups of strong coffee (since then I have not drunk it) and used up at least two kilograms of writing paper. Having printed only a couple of lines, I sharply pulled the sheet out of the carriage, crumpled it and threw it angrily on the floor. I categorically did not like what came out of my brains, which were worn out from unbearable student hardships and from under my fingers. There was a crisis of the genre.

And finally, the muse visited me. At five minutes to three in the afternoon on the 10th, I forced 180 inspirational lines from my "de Luxe" about the unprecedented flourishing of rabbit breeding in Moldavia. Fascinated by the creative process, I did not even notice that classical music was playing in the radio station all day. But then the exact time signal sounded - 15 hours. And a mournful voice informed me that the day before, the heart of yet another “faithful successor to the cause of Lenin,” Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, had stopped beating. Then I clearly realized that my rabbits had died, like those gentle eared creatures of the famous literary rabbit breeder - the unlucky character of Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilf and Petrov's father Fyodor Vostrikov after they had cracked themselves in the garbage heap with rotten cabbage. No one will publish my heartfelt article in the next ten days, and then it will become outdated, become no fresher than this very rotten cabbage and fly into the trash.

I was riding in a trolley bus to the editorial office in a depressed mood and with a feeling of deep creative dissatisfaction, large flakes of snow fell outside the window, reminding me of the day when Brezhnev's death was announced. And in Molodezhka they were already mourning with might and main, and they did it cheerfully and naturally. All week long, only the ATEM agency, the republican division of TASS, will work for journalists from other publications, informing the general public about how she herself is grieving these days. At least ten people were seated in the literary department, where two tables could barely fit, a whole battery of wine bottles was put up, colleagues showed great grief, cutting themselves into cards and dice. Before joining the mourning events, I called one of my acquaintances and in conversation, remembering Major Medvedev, uttered his famous phrase:

- The country must unite in a single camp.

Suddenly, everyone in the office shushed me:

- You are crazy?! To say such things on the editorial phone?! Forgot what country you live in?! Decided to thunder into the “office of deep drilling” (an alternative decoding of the KGB abbreviation) for his words?!

And after, when I hung up the phone, they behaved more condescendingly.

- Well, Thorov, you came last, so throw your bones on the chair, spill the wine and swords of the bones on the table.

“What cynical people we are after all!” – I thought then. And much later, when the "scoop" collapsed, I was not particularly surprised, because I understood perfectly well that a country where they say one thing, do another, and think the third could not last long.

Yuri Andropov died before four months of his 70th birthday, from acute honorary insufficiency combined with gout, ruling the country for exactly one year and three months. For a significant part of this time, he had to carry out the general leadership of the country straight from intensive care, which did not inspire much optimism. The development alternative proposed by the former chairman of the KGB of the USSR, which calls for an end to the “three-dimensional” essence of Soviet existence, was initially accepted with enthusiasm by the overwhelming majority of the Soviet people, but when people began to be seized in the middle of the day in cinemas, hairdressers, parks and mercilessly dismissed absenteeism, this ardor noticeably faded. In the jokes of that time, people congratulated everyone on the new year 1938, which was the peak of Stalin's repressions, swapping the last two digits in the figure of 1983, which marked Andropov's struggle for labor discipline.

I can justifiably consider myself a victim of "Andropov's repressions". In that same year, the Areopagus of the Komsomol organization of the State University, which included now fully formed democrats, Orthodox Christians and bourgeois nationalists, expelled me from this powerful organization for poor performance ... in physical education. A silly coach-teacher, now he seems to be working as a human rights activist, apparently he wanted to make me, a 120-pound eccentric at that time, a world champion in athletics, and forced, in exchange for a credit, to wind kilometers around the former Republican Stadium (now it lies in ruins in the manner of the Roman Colosseum, like a bitter memory of the failed long-distance runner Alexander Thorov). And I had only once in my life before this race, and not a stayer, but a sprinter, and I succeeded when I rushed headlong with a broom in my hands to inform my comrades about the death of Brezhnev. A few more of these sports exercises, and I, probably completely exhausted, would have taken part in the race with the heroes of my memories, but only without a gun carriage. Nobody would give it to me.

Despite the obvious excesses, Andropov's short stay in power today in the post-Soviet space is assessed mostly positively. Unlike Suslov, whose activities as the main ideologist of the CPSU are condemned, Brezhnev, who began to sympathize only in recent years, or Chernenko, who is always despised by everyone, a steadily respectful attitude has formed towards him. His works are recognized as deeply scientific and today they are published a lot. Four volumes of lyrical poetry came out from under the pen of Yuri Vladimirovich. The International American-Russian Security Academy established an order in his honor. He had an indirect relation to Moldova. His son Vladimir, who had a criminal past and died of alcoholism at the age of 35, is buried in Tiraspol. The almighty chairman of the KGB sympathized with his unfortunate offspring from his first marriage, helped him financially, but did not maintain personal contacts, not wanting to set an example for many ordinary communists, who were often punished along party lines for the poor upbringing of their children and the antisocial acts committed by those.

And the majestic busts with mustaches, beards, eyebrows and bald heads in the Granite Rank behind the Lenin Mausoleum, meanwhile, began to multiply, like the rabbits of Father Fyodor Vostrikov during the rabbit rut.

Time to make jokes

As soon as Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko, who worked for some time in Moldova as the head of the department of agitation and propaganda of the local Central Committee and during this time graduated from the Chisinau Pedagogical Institute externally and with triples, replaced Andropov in the highest posts, everyone immediately began to expect that he was about to will die. The new General Secretary and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council really looked unimportant. Speaking with lengthy and devoid of the slightest oratorical brilliance, he spoke even worse than Brezhnev, constantly suffocated, apparently from asthma.

It was a time of unprecedented surge in the genre of political anecdote. For a year and almost a month of the Kucher's stay at the helm of the country, a tale about him was created for more than the entire 18-year Brezhnev era about the dear and beloved Leonid Ilyich. What is the reporting meeting in one all-Union research institute worth, which, due to the reshuffling of Andropov-Chernenko, was forced to stop work on an artificial kidney and start on artificial intelligence. And the famous request of Odessans of Jewish origin, who asked in connection with his sudden death to rename the “pearl by the sea” to Constantinople. Having received a refusal, motivated by the fact that on the opposite bank in the Bosphorus there is already a large city with such a historical name, the resourceful residents of the world capital of humor did not become discouraged about this and suggested: “Then rename us to Ust-Constantinople.” Or the emergence of a new branch of the Moscow metro with an ordinal listing of stations - Brezhnevskaya, Razvalyuhinskaya, Andropovskaya, Disciplinary, Chernenkovskaya. At the last, the electric locomotive driver necessarily announced: “Transition to the Brezhnevsko-Razvalyuhinskaya line.”

In a word, everyone was waiting for the death of Chernenko, reflecting its onset a priori in oral folk art, and at first it was not even Ustinovich who died at all, but Ustinov Dmitry Fedorovich, Marshal and Minister of Defense, when Stalin was still People's Commissar of Arms of the USSR. Remember the joke about Brezhnev that he is going to have an operation to expand his chest, since there is nowhere to hang gold stars. So, at about the same time, there was another story that Ustinov would be inserted into the spine with a titanium pin. The fact is that by weight there were much more awards on it than on Leonid Ilyich. Only one order of Lenin - 11 pieces against Brezhnev's eight (I would like to ask rhetorically, why does one person need 11 orders of Lenin at once?). The uniform of the Minister of Defense was a heavy chain mail made of platinum and gold. So, so that his back would not inadvertently break in two during some solemn ceremony, such a preventive decision was made.
Dmitry Ustinov, who had absolutely nothing to do with Moldova, died from an “unbearable burden” on December 20, 1984 at the age of 76, and became the last prominent figure in the history of the Soviet Union, whose urn with ashes was caulked into the Kremlin wall.

Everyone is dying and dying...

Chernenko died two and a half months later, on March 10, 1985. By that time, I was no longer just a student, but a person with a status. I received a call to work in ATEM (Moldovan information Agency under the Council of Ministers of the MSSR). I, as a person who was then distinguished by special diligence, did not appear for an hour at pre-diploma practice, having spent twenty days in farewell to youth. And on the twenty-first, the future boss tracked me down by phone and in an authoritative voice ordered me to come to the massacre, promising that it would depend on our conversation whether they would take me to work in a respected government agency or send me to three years of labor service at the place of the first distribution - in the village the hero of Taraclia, where an irrigation main canal had just been dug, which was supposed to bring the life-giving moisture of the Danube to the arid Budzhak steppe.

I was ready to humbly bow my head, repent and immediately get to work, but the trouble was that on that very day I received a call from my student friends who had arrived the day before from Moscow, also future journalists Yura Soltys and Edik Zakharov, now, unfortunately, deceased, and I went to impudently ask his boss for leave for the student assembly on the above-mentioned occasion, swearing to be sure to appear at the service the next day.

Vladimir Nikolayevich Novosadyuk was a kind man. At least then. After listening to my request, he almost immediately decided that such a valuable specimen as I should not be exiled to Taraclia, otherwise he would get drunk there with grief and, just look, drown in an irrigation canal. So the chief winked at me slyly and said:

- But you guessed right about your assembly shish!

And he told me an anecdote that became a hit of the thirteen-month Chernenkov rule, in relation to the reality that arose on that day.

“Don’t laugh, Thorov. Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko died today.

My physiognomy depicted flour. The astute head of the socio-political, military and sports information department noticed this and softened.

- Well, okay, - he said, - go to your barbecue, or where you soaped yourself, but so that at three o'clock, like a bayonet and like a piece of glass, be at a mourning meeting at a furniture factory (I don’t remember the Soviet serial number, but now this the company is called "ICAM" - ed.). Then you will return not back to the barbecue, but to the editorial office, and write a short report.

At five minutes to three, like a hurricane, I burst into the checkpoint of an advanced enterprise, and with horror for myself I learned that the rally had been held an hour earlier. What shall I explain to Comrade Novosadyuk, who has placed such high confidence in me? The only thing left to do was to grab the head.

“Don’t kill yourself like that,” the watchman reassured me. - Go up to the third floor in such and such an office. There sits a trade union activist who opened the rally. She will give you her speech.

When I went upstairs and opened the massive door of the trade union committee, I was dumbfounded for a minute. A hefty samovar was puffing on the table, and next to it sat a woman, like a merchant's wife, who had just stepped off the canvases of Makovsky and Kustodiev, and drank tea from a deep saucer.

Coming to my senses, I suddenly remembered Zhvanetsky for some reason.

“What a shame,” I told her.

“Yes, inescapable grief,” she agreed with me, and at that very moment she collected the remnants of tea in a saucer with her fleshy lips, making a gurgling-champing sound.

- Why did you hold the rally an hour earlier? I asked.

- How! the activist suddenly perked up. - How long can these rallies be held? Every year we spend, and they all die and die!

I had to agree with her reasoning. Having learned what I needed, the "merchant's wife", signaling me with another characteristic sound that accompanies a delicious tea party, handed over an old, yellowed, brittle piece of paper from repeated use. I unwrapped it and seemed to choke on her own tea. On it was printed: “Sorrow fills our souls. After a severe and prolonged illness, the heart of the faithful successor of Lenin's work stopped beating ... (further on half a page is a boring listing of the positions and regalia of the deceased) ... dear and dearly beloved Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. Crossed out with a pen, written with a pen "Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov" on top. Crossed out in pencil, above written in pencil "Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko".

Noticing that I was coughing, she suddenly started up and snatched the sheet from my hands.

- What did I give you? We have reprinted everything. We already have no place left, and they are all dying and dying! - and handed me a new white piece of paper, not yet completely soiled, still retaining the ink of a fresh typewritten tape.

Returning to the editorial office, I sat down at the typewriter and effortlessly, like a real journalist, typed my first article after gaining the official status of an ATEM journalist, which began simply and heartfeltly: “Sorrow overwhelms our souls. After a severe and prolonged illness, the heart stopped beating ... ”It was an ode in journalism to the death of Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko.

And then I also wrote about future teachers who were awarded the Chernenko scholarship. They were established at once by two denominations of 100 rubles each for the best of the best students, despite the fact that the KSPI graduate from the beginning of the 50s of the last century was an inveterate three-year student and did not shine with special talents. With one of them, by the way, I still maintain good relations. He is an excellent artist and designer.

The "merchant" from the furniture factory made a mistake. No one else died, except for the USSR itself, and she no longer needed the reprinted leaflet with the mourning speech. The pleiad of Geronts was replaced by Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, who announced perestroika, acceleration, state acceptance, the fight against drunkenness and alcoholism, new thinking, and as a result of all these combinations applied in a complex, the seemingly monolith collapsed Soviet Union. And the last Soviet general secretary turned out to be a strong Stavropol combine operator. He is still in good health today, having outlived Brezhnev, and Andropov, and Chernenko, and Ustinov. And now he is within easy reach of the Suslov milestone of 79 years. To keep him healthy no matter what.

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