Three Leaders, Three Funerals: Gerontocracy in Crisis

Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, aged 75, after years of visible physical decline. His successor Yuri Andropov, already suffering from kidney failure at the time of his appointment, died fifteen months later in February 1984. His successor Konstantin Chernenko, 72 and severely ill with emphysema, lasted thirteen months before dying in March 1985. The pattern of the Politburo repeatedly promoting elderly, ailing insiders rather than a younger generation became a global symbol of Soviet institutional paralysis, satirised even within the USSR.