ABSTRACT
Members of the Politburo garnered for meetings in the Kremlin on the third floor of an old building with high ceilings and high windows overlooking the Kremlin wall. The hitch that occurred at the Politburo meeting when Konstantin Chernenko proposed assigning management of the Central Committee Secretariat to Mikhail Gorbachev was an indication that new times were beginning after 'The Andropov Year'. The Leonid Brezhnev team of Politburo members had remained almost intact, and much began to revert to the old ways. The replacement of the cadres begun under Andropov slowed but did not stop under Chernenko. The inherent nature of cadre work made purging the Party's leading ranks of those who abused their official posts a priority, and led them to the director of the General Administration Department of the Central Committee, Konstantin Bogolyubov. The Politburo and the government took desperate measures to prevent a catastrophe and to keep the country's energy system from collapsing.
