Yuri Andropov

There has been much contention over his family background.[4] According to the official biography, Andropov was born in Stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai of Russia) on 15 June 1914.[5][6] His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was a railway worker of Don Cossack descent who died from typhus in 1919. His mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein, (none of the official sources mention her name) was a school teacher who died in 1931.[7][8] She was born in the Ryazan Governorate into a family of town dwellers and was abandoned on the doorstep of a Finnish citizen, a Jewish watchmaker, Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, who lived in Moscow; he and his wife, Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein, adopted and raised her.[9][10] Later research has shown that many details about Andropov's biography were largely falsified during his lifetime which has contributed to the confusion connected to his family history.

His earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov; he changed it to Yuri Andropov several years later.[11] While his original birth certificate disappeared, it was established that Andropov was in fact born in Moscow where his mother had been working in a women's gymnasium from 1913 until 1917.[9][11]

To make things more complicated, he named different dates of her death at various occasions: 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931.[8][9] The story of her adoption was also highly likely a mystification. In 1937 Andropov went through a check when he applied for Communist Party membership, and it turned out that "the sister of his native maternal grandmother" (he called her his aunt) who was living with him and who supported the legend of his Ryazan peasant origins was in fact his nurse who had been working at Fleckenstein's long before he was born.[8][9]

It was also reported that his mother belonged to merchantry. In fact Karl Fleckenstein was a rich jewel merchant, owner of a jewellers, and so was his wife who took over her husband's business after his accidental death in 1915 (he was confused for a German during the infamous anti-German pogrom in Moscow, although Andropov preferred to refer to it as anti-Jewish).[11][12] The whole family could've turned into lishentsy and stripped of basic rights if she hadn't abandoned the store after another pogrom in 1917, invented a proletarian background, and left Moscow for the Stavropol Governorate along with Andropov's mother.[8][9]

He gave different versions of his father's fate: in one case he divorced his mother soon after his birth, and in another he died of illness.[11] The "father" he referred to, Vladimir Andropov, was in fact his stepfather who lived and worked at Nagutskaya and died from typhus in 1919. The Fyodorov surname belonged to his second stepfather (since 1921) Viktor Fyodorov, a machinist's assistant turned school teacher. His real father remains unknown; he probably died in 1916 – a date written in Andropov's 1932 résumé.[9][11] During the 1937 check it was reported that his father served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. Andropov was thoroughly interviewed four times, yet he was so convincing that he managed to have all charges dropped. He joined the Communist Party in 1939.[8][9]

Komsomol membership card issued to Yuri Andropov in 1939.

Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936.[5] As a teenager he worked as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line.[10][7] At 16, Yuri Andropov, then a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (YCL, or Komsomol), was a worker in the town of Mozdok in the North Ossetian ASSR.[5]

He became full-time Secretary of the YCL organization of the Water Transport Technical School in Rybinsk in the Yaroslavl Region and was soon promoted to the post of organizer of the YCL Central Committee at the Volodarsky Shipyards in Rybinsk. In 1938, he was elected First Secretary of the Yaroslavl Regional Committee of the YCL, and was First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol in the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic from 1940 to 1944.[10]

According to the official biography, during World War II Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland, although modern researchers didn't manage to find any traces of his supposed partisan squad.[11] From 1944 onwards, he left Komsomol for Communist Party work. Between 1946 and 1951, he studied at the university of Petrozavodsk. In 1947, he was elected Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Karelo-Finnish SSR.[10][13]

In 1951 Andropov was transferred to CPSU Central Committee. He was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the Committee.[10]

In July 1954, he was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Hungary and held this position during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Andropov played a key role in crushing the Hungarian uprising. He convinced a reluctant Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary.[14] He is known as 'The Butcher of Budapest' for his ruthless suppression of the Hungarian uprising.[15] The Hungarian leaders were arrested and Imre Nagy and others executed.

After these events, Andropov suffered from a "Hungarian complex", according to historian Christopher Andrew: "He had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service [the Államvédelmi Hatóság or AVH] were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. When other Communist regimes later seemed at risk – in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981, he was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival".[14]

Andropov, Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, 1967

Party identity card of Yuri Andropov one month before becoming a full member of the Politburo in April 1973.

In 1957, Andropov returned to Moscow from Budapest in order to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers' Parties in Socialist Countries, a position he held until 1967. In 1961, he was elected full member of the CPSU Central Committee and was promoted to the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee in 1962. In 1967, he was relieved of his work in the Central Committee apparatus and appointed head of the KGB on recommendation of Mikhail Suslov, at the same time promoted a Candidate Member of the Politburo. He gained additional powers in 1973, when he was promoted to full member of the Politburo.

Role in the non-invasion of Poland

General Wojciech Jaruzelski meeting Andropov during the 1980 crisis

On 10 December 1981, in the face of Poland's Solidarity movement, Andropov, along with Mikhail Suslov and Wojciech Jaruzelski,[37] persuaded Brezhnev that it would be counterproductive for the Soviet Union to invade Poland by repeating Prague 1968.[38] This effectively marked the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine.[39]

The pacification of Poland was thus left to Jaruzelski, Kiszczak and their Polish forces.

Andropov (seated second from right in the front row) presides over the USSR's 60th Anniversary shortly after succeeding Brezhnev as its leader.

Two days after Leonid Brezhnev's death, on 12 November 1982, Andropov was elected General Secretary of the CPSU, the first former head of the KGB to become General Secretary. His appointment was received in the West with apprehension, in view of his roles in the KGB and in Hungary. At the time his personal background was a mystery in the West, with major newspapers printing detailed profiles of him that were inconsistent and in several cases fabricated.[40]

Andropov divided responsibilities in the Politburo with his chief deputy Konstantin Chernenko. Andropov took control of organizing the work of the Politburo, supervising national defense, supervising the main issues of domestic and foreign policy and foreign trade, and making leadership assignments in the top ranks of the Party and the government. Chernenko handled espionage, KGB, the Interior Ministry, party organs, ideology, and organizational matters, as well as propaganda, culture, science, and higher education. He was also given charge of the Central Committee. It was far too much for Chernenko to handle, and the other Politburo members were not given major assignments.[41]

Foreign policy

Protest against the nuclear arms race between the U.S./NATO and the Soviet Union, The Hague, Netherlands, 1983

Andropov faced a series of foreign policy crises: the hopeless situation of the Soviet army in Afghanistan, threatened revolt in Poland, growing animosity with China, the polarization threat of war in the Middle East, and the civil strife in Ethiopia and South Africa. The most critical threat was the "Second Cold War" launched by American President Ronald Reagan and a specific attack on rolling back what he denounced as the "Evil Empire". Reagan was using American economic power, and Soviet economic weakness, to escalate massive spending on the Cold War, emphasizing high technology that Moscow lacked.[48] The main response was raising the military budget to 70 percent of the national budget, and supplying billions of dollars worth of military aid to Syria, Iraq, Libya, South Yemen, the PLO, Cuba, and North Korea. That included tanks and armored troop carriers, hundreds of fighter planes, as well as anti-aircraft systems, artillery systems, and all sorts of high tech equipment for which the USSR was the main supplier for its allies. Andropov's main goal was to avoid an open war.[49][50][51]

In foreign policy, the conflict in Afghanistan continued even though Andropov, who now felt the invasion was a mistake, half-heartedly explored options for a negotiated withdrawal. Andropov's rule was also marked by deterioration of relations with the United States. During a much-publicized "walk in the woods" with Soviet dignitary Yuli Kvitsinsky, American diplomat Paul Nitze suggested a compromise for reducing nuclear missiles in Europe on both sides that was ultimately ignored by the Politburo.[52] Kvitsinsky would later write that, despite his own efforts, the Soviet leadership was not interested in compromise, instead calculating that peace movements in the West would force the Americans to capitulate.[53] On 8 March 1983, during Andropov's reign as General Secretary, U.S. President Ronald Reagan famously labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire". The same month, on 23 March, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan claimed this research program into ballistic missile defence would be "consistent with our obligations under the ABM Treaty". However, Andropov was dismissive of this claim, and said that "It is time they [Washington] stopped ... search[ing] for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war. ... Engaging in this is not just irresponsible. It is insane".[54]

In August 1983, Andropov made an announcement that the country was stopping all work on space-based weapons. One of his most notable acts during his short time as leader of the Soviet Union was in response to a letter from a 10-year-old American child from Maine named Samantha Smith, inviting her to the Soviet Union. She came, but he was too ill to meet with her, thus revealing his grave condition to the world. Meanwhile, Soviet–U.S. arms control talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe were suspended by the Soviet Union in November 1983 and by the end of the year, the Soviets had broken off all arms control negotiations.[55]

A photograph of Korean Air Lines HL7442, the airliner shot down by Soviet aircraft after drifting into prohibited airspace during the KAL 007 Flight.

Massive bad publicity worldwide came when Soviet fighters shot down a civilian jet liner, Korean Air Flight KAL-007, which carried 269 passengers and crew. It had strayed over the Soviet Union on 1 September 1983 on its scheduled route from Anchorage, Alaska, US to Seoul, South Korea. Andropov kept secret the fact that the Soviet Union held in its possession the black box from KAL 007 which proved the pilot had made a typographical error when entering data in the automatic pilot. Soviet air defence system was unprepared to deal with a civilian airliner, and the shooting down was a matter of following orders without question.[56] Instead of admitting an accident, Soviet media proclaimed a brave decision to meet a Western provocation. Together with the low credibility created by the poor explanation in 1986 of the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the episode demonstrated an inability to deal with public relations crises; the propaganda system was only useful for individuals and states that were aligned with the Soviet Union. Both crises were escalated by technological and organizational failures, compounded by human error.[57]

President Ronald Reagan signing condolence book on death of Andropov at the Soviet Embassy

In February 1983, Andropov suffered total kidney failure. In August 1983, he entered the Central Clinical Hospital in western Moscow on a permanent basis, where he would spend the remainder of his life.

In late January 1984, Andropov's health deteriorated sharply and due to growing toxicity in his blood, he had periods of falling consciousness. He died on 9 February 1984 at 16:50 in his hospital room at age 69.[58] Few of the top Soviet leaders, not even all the Politburo members, learned of his death on that day. According to the Soviet post mortem medical report, Andropov suffered from several medical conditions: interstitial nephritis, nephrosclerosis, residual hypertension and diabetes, which were worsened by chronic kidney deficiency.

A four-day period of nationwide mourning was announced. Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who seemed to mirror Andropov's tenure. Chernenko had already been afflicted with severe health problems when he ascended to the USSR's top spot, and served an even shorter time in office (13 months). Like Andropov, Chernenko spent much of his time hospitalized, and also died in office, in March 1985.

Andropov lived at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the same building in which Suslov and Brezhnev also lived.[59] He was first married to Nina Ivanovna; she was born not far from the local farm in which Andropov was born. In 1983, she was diagnosed with cancer and underwent a successful operation. He met his second wife, Tatyana Filipovna, during World War II on the Karelian Front when she was Komsomol secretary. She had suffered a nervous breakdown during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Andropov's chief guard informed Tatyana about the death of her husband. She was too grief-stricken to join in the procession and during the funeral her relatives helped her to walk. Before the lid could be closed on Andropov's coffin, she bent to kiss him. She touched his hair and then kissed him again. In 1985, a respectful 75-minute film was broadcast in which Tatyana (not even seen in public until Andropov's funeral) reads love poems written by her husband. Tatyana became ill and died in November 1991.

Grave of Andropov at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow.

Andropov's legacy remains the subject of much debate in Russia and elsewhere, both among scholars and in the popular media. He remains the focus of television documentaries and popular non-fiction, particularly around important anniversaries. As KGB head, Andropov was ruthless against dissent, and author David Remnick, who covered the Soviet Union for the Washington Post in the 1980s, called Andropov "profoundly corrupt, a beast".[60] Alexander Yakovlev, later an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and the ideologist of perestroika, said: "In a way I always thought Andropov was the most dangerous of all of them, simply because he was smarter than the rest."[60] However, it was Andropov himself who recalled Yakovlev back to high office in Moscow in 1983 after a ten-year exile as ambassador to Canada after attacking Russian chauvinism. Yakovlev was also a close colleague of Andropov associate KGB General Yevgeny Primakov, later Prime Minister of Russia. Andropov began to follow a trend of replacing elderly officials with considerably younger replacements.

According to his former subordinate Securitate general Ion Mihai Pacepa,

In the West, if Andropov is remembered at all, it is for his brutal suppression of political dissidence at home and for his role in planning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. By contrast, the leaders of the former Warsaw Pact intelligence community, when I was one of them, looked up to Andropov as the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist party in governing the Soviet Union, and who was the godfather of Russia's new era of deception operations aimed at improving the badly damaged image of Soviet rulers in the West.[61]

Despite Andropov's hard-line stance in Hungary and the numerous banishments and intrigues for which he was responsible during his long tenure as head of the KGB, he has become widely regarded by many commentators as a reformer, especially in comparison with the stagnation and corruption during the later years of his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev. Andropov, "a throwback to a tradition of Leninist asceticism",[60] was appalled by the corruption during Brezhnev's regime, and ordered investigations and arrests of the most flagrant abusers. The investigations were so frightening that several members of Brezhnev's circle "shot, gassed or otherwise did away with themselves."[60] He was certainly generally regarded as inclined to more gradual and constructive reform than was Gorbachev; most of the speculation centres around whether Andropov would have reformed the USSR in a manner which did not result in its eventual dissolution.

The Western media favored Andropov because of his supposed passion for Western music and scotch.[62] However, these were unproven rumours. The short time he spent as leader, much of it in a state of extreme ill health, leaves debaters few concrete indications as to the nature of any hypothetical extended rule. The 2002 Tom Clancy novel Red Rabbit focuses heavily on Andropov during his tenure of KGB chief, when his health is slightly better. It mirrors his secrecy in that British and American intelligence know little about him, not even able to confirm he was a married man. The novel also depicts Andropov as being a fan of Marlboros and starka vodka, almost never available to ordinary Soviet citizens.

In a message read out at the opening of a new exhibition dedicated to Andropov, Vladimir Putin called him "a man of talent with great abilities."[63] Putin has praised Andropov's "honesty and uprightness."[64] According to Russian historian Nikita Petrov, "He was a typical Soviet jailer who violated human rights. Andropov headed the organisation which persecuted the most remarkable people of our country."[65] From Petrov's point, it was a shame for the country that the persecutor of intelligentsia, the persecutor of freedom of thought, a man of whom as an oppressor of freedom legends were composed, became leader of the country.[66] According to Roy Medvedev, the year that Andropov spent in power was memorable for increasing repression against dissidents.[66] During most of his KGB career, Andropov crushed dissident movements, isolated people in psychiatric hospitals, sent them to prison and deported them from the Soviet Union.[67] According to political scientist Georgy Arbatov, Andropov bears responsibility for many injustices in the 1970s and early 1980s: for deportations, for political arrests, for persecuting dissidents, for the abuse of psychiatry, for notorious cases such as the persecution of academician Andrei Sakharov.[68][69] According to Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman, it was Andropov who approved the numerous trials of human rights activists such as Andrei Amalrik, Vladimir Bukovsky, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Alexander Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Anatoly Shcharansky, and others.[70] According to Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov, Andropov was a paradigmatic Homo Sovieticus and personally conducted disinformation campaigns against his main opponents and dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.[71]

According to Natalya Gorbanevskaya, after Andropov's coming to power the dissident movement went into decline – not of its own but because it was strangled.[72] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, repression was most severe, many people were picked up for a second time, and sentenced to longer terms. The camp regime was not strict but specific, and when Andropov became General Secretary, he introduced an Article under which violations of camp regime resulted in a punishment cell and an additional term up to three years. A person for his two or three remarks could be sent not home but to another camp with [non-political] criminals.[72] And in those years there were a lot of deaths in camps not from hunger-strikes, but just from disease and lack of medical care.[72]

Various people who closely knew Andropov, including Vladimir Medvedev, Aleksandr Chuchyalin, Vladimir Kryuchkov[73] and Roy Medvedev, remembered him for his politeness, calmness, unselfishness, patience, intelligence and exceptionally sharp memory.[74] According to Chuchyalin, while working at Kremlin Andropov would read ca. 600 pages per day and remember everything he had read.[75] Andropov read English literature and could communicate in Finnish, English and German.[76]

Soviet Awards

	Hero of Socialist Labor, 1974[10]
	Order of Lenin, four times[10]
	Order of the October Revolution[10]
	Order of the Red Banner, 1944[10]
	Order of the Red Banner of Labour, three times (incl. 1944)[10]
	Medal "Partisan of the Patriotic War", 1st class
	Medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
	Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
	Jubilee Medal "Thirty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
	Jubilee Medal "60 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
	Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin"

• Honorary Member of the KGB, 1973

Foreign Awards

	Order of the Sun of Liberty (Afghanistan)
	Hero of the People's Republic of Bulgaria
	Order of Georgi Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
	Order of the Flag of the Republic of Hungary
	Order of Sukhbaatar (Mongolia)
	Order of the Red Banner (Mongolia)
	Jubilee Medal "50 Years Anniversary of the Mongolian Revolution"

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• Коммунистическая убежденность – великая сила строителей нового мира [Communist firm belief is a great power of builders of new world] (in Russian). Moscow: Издательство политической литературы. 1977.
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• "Text of Andropov's speech at Brezhnev's funeral". The New York Times. 16 November 1982.
• Speeches and writings. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press. 1983. ISBN 978-0080312873.
• Selected speeches and articles. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1984. ASIN B003UHCKTO.
• Speeches, articles, interviews. A Selection. South Asia Books. 1984. ISBN 978-0836411652.
• Учение Карла Маркса и некоторые вопросы социалистического строительства в СССР [The teaching of Karl Marx and some issues of socialist building in the USSR] (in Russian). Moscow: Издательство политической литературы. 1983.
• Ленинизм – неисчерпаемый источник революционной энергии и творчества масс. Избранные речи и статьи [Leninism is an inexhaustible source of revolutionary energy and creativity of masses. Selected speeches and articles] (in Russian). Moscow: Издательство политической литературы. 1984.
• Andropov, Y.V. (1995). "The birth of samizdat". Index on Censorship. 24 (3): 62–63. doi:10.1080/03064229508535948.

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Biography of Yuri Andropov" (PDF). Soviet Life (323): 1B. 1983. Retrieved 19 August 2013.

• Beichman, Arnold; Bernstam, Mikhail (1983). Andropov, New Challenge to the West. Stein and Day. ISBN 978-0812829211. OCLC 9464732.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Bialer, Seweryn (3 February 1983). "The Andropov succession". The New York Review of Books.
• Ebon, Martin (1983). The Andropov file: the life and ideas of Yuri V. Andropov, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0070188617.
• Epstein, Edward (7 February 1983). "The Andropov hoax". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 25 February 2002.
• Glazov, Yuri (1985). "Yuri Andropov: a recent leader of Russia". The Russian mind since Stalin's death. D. Reidel Publishing Company. pp. 180–221. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-5341-3_10. ISBN 978-9027718280.
• Goodman, Elliot (Summer 1984). "The Brezhnev-Andropov legacy: implications for the future". Survey. 28 (2): 34–69.
• Granville, Johanna (2004). The first domino: international decision making during the Hungarian crisis of 1956. Texas A & M University Press. ISBN 978-1585442980.
• Gribanov, Alexander; Kowell, Masha (2009). "Samizdat according to Andropov". Poetics Today. 30 (1): 89–106. doi:10.1215/03335372-2008-004.
• Herman, Victor (September 1983). "In Stalin's footsteps: Yuri Andropov: rise of a dictator". Imprimis.
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• Ostrovsky Alexander. Кто поставил Горбачёва? (2010). («Who brought Gorbachev to power?») – М.: „Алгоритм-Эксмо“. ISBN 978-5-699-40627-2 («Проект «Распад СССР: Тайные пружины власти» – М. «Алгоритм», 2016. Переиздание книги «Кто поставил Горбачёва?») ("Project" Collapse of the USSR: Secret Springs of Power ". Reissue of the book «Who brought Gorbachev to power?» – М.: «Алгоритм», 2016.)
• "П.Л. Капица и Ю.В. Андропов об инакомыслии" [P.L. Kapitsa and Yu.V. Andropov about dissent]. Kommunist (in Russian) (7). 1991.
• Sayle, Timothy (August 2009). "Andropov's Hungarian complex: Andropov and the lessons of history". Cold War History. 9 (3): 427–439. doi:10.1080/14682740902764528.
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• Ticktin, Hillel. "Andropov: Disintegration and discipline: The disintegration of the USSR under the banner of discipline. Andropov and his inheritance." Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 16.1 (1988): 111–122.
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Yuri Andropov.

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