Chernenko

The former Soviet Union was famous for neglecting to mention when its leaders are sick or dead — think Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, secretly sick and soon deceased one after the other in the 1980s.

Russian lawmaker Alexander Khinshtein identified the assailant as Vyacheslav Chernenko, a 35-year-old resident of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.

Brezhnev died in 1982, and relations withered under successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, who were in ill health and died after less than 15 months in office.

The dour torpor that set in during the late ‘70s lifted when Gorbachev was chosen Communist Party leader after Chernenko’s death. Personable, a relative youngster at 54 and accompanied by his fashionable wife, Raisa, Gorbachev brought a strongly human touch to a grim and opaque government, sparking enthusiasm dubbed “Gorbymania” in the West.

In a war in which not only the young but the middle-aged go off to fight, Yuriy Chernenko — killed on the eastern front two days before what would have been his 54th birthday — was mourned by classmates in Lviv, who remembered their kindergarten days together nearly half a century earlier.