In 1985, Konstantin Chernenko died of heart failure at the age of 73; his top deputy, Grigory Romanov, succeeded him as CPSU Secretary General.

The Death of ChernenkoChernenko's death came just three days after he was admitted to a Moscow hospital for stroke. In Romanov's first televised address as Soviet head of state, the new CPSU leader pledged to crush the PLM rebellion by the end of the year-- a pledge that he would prove unable to keep with the Red Army's already precarious morale continuing to further decline and NATO intelligence agencies funneling new weapons to the rebel forces.

On the very day Romanov was appointed Secretary General, in fact, the former chief of staff for the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany(GSFG) committed suicide.

A new installment in the Necessary Evil threadAlso on this day in 1985, Cuba and France opened negotiations for an economic assistance pact meant to fill the gap in foreign aid to Havana left by nearly five straight years' cuts in Soviet financial support to the Castro government. These negotiations would mark the beginning of a ten-year-long shift in Cuban economic policy which would see Havana relax some of the laws banning private enterprise that Fidel Castro had instituted after overthrowing Fulgencio Batista in 1959.