Placing Capitalism at the Service of Socialism: Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko's Unpublished "Notes on America"

Abstract

Placing Capitalism at the Service of SocialismKonstantin Ustinovich Chernenko's Unpublished "Notes on America" Donald J. Raleigh (bio) On 8 April 1974, the New York Times reported that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping of China "arrived in New York yesterday for the United Nations General Assembly's special session on raw materials and development."1 The Times made no mention that 62-year-old Konstantin Chernenko (1911–85), head of the all-important yet understudied Obshchii otdel (General Department) of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), had traveled with Gromyko. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had charged "Kostia"—his close associate, comrade-in-arms, and friend—with making his first transatlantic flight and only trip to America to familiarize himself with automated data processing systems utilized by the US government, American banks and corporations, and the United Nations (UN) and to consider whether the Soviet Union might adopt some of these technological practices to facilitate the management of paperwork in the party and state apparatuses of the USSR. "And on Sunday, 7 April, at 10 AM we departed on an IL-62 for the U.S.A.," wrote Chernenko. "I flew to America for the first time and, needless to say, this left its mark on all of my later impressions [emphasis mine]. [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution Little did Chernenko know in boarding his Aeroflot flight to America that he would find what he was looking for as well as many surprises. Source: "Proekt 'Chernenko,' chast´ 26: Poezdka v Ameriku," LiveJournal, 13 May 2021, https://yapet.livejournal.com/559412.html. The slightest new experience while in transit and while there was intense and unforgettable."2 The General Department could certainly benefit from employing state-of-the-art technologies. Responsible for managing and documenting the activities of the CC apparatus, the department had undergone various name changes since its founding in 1920. Called the "secret" department for much of the prewar period and the "special sector" afterward, it was renamed the General Department following Stalin's death but continued to serve as the linchpin of the link between political power and the control of secret information in the USSR. As Larissa Zakharova observed, Kremlin leaders historically "sought to strengthen systemic trust in bureaucracy and in technology through the enforcement of rules and the search for new technologies."3 Toward that goal, in late 1953, the department revised its instructions for handling classified materials. Central Committee staff members [End Page 94] now could receive documents only after they passed through the department, which oversaw the CC's paperwork, including all KGB materials.4 The department maintained party personnel files. It prepared materials for Politburo meetings, organized party congresses and plenums, and circulated proposals to CC members. It processed citizen complaints to the government. The head of the department and his deputy attended Politburo and Secretariat meetings. When Brezhnev died in 1982, the department was the largest of the CC departments, employing 232 specialists.5 The trip itself went publicly unnoticed, and none of the published works on Chernenko mention it.6 While researching a biography of L. I. Brezhnev, however, in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii) I came across partially declassified fond 83 comprising Chernenko's personal papers, including "The Notes of K. U. Chernenko on His Trip to the USA to Familiarize Himself with the Application of Organizational Technology in Government Institutions of the USA."7 The only other person to have examined Chernenko's notes [End Page 95] as of June 2019, the historian L. V. Maksimenkov, published a short essay about them in the popular journal Ogonek.8 The piece culls some vivid quotes from the materials but makes little effort to contextualize or to analyze the notes and their silences. They need both. Examining them from the perspective of the Soviet Union's obsession over the control of information and within the changing dynamic of détente, I seek in this article to answer several questions. How did Chernenko react to the America he saw and why? What practical impact did the trip...