Yuri
Sixth Paramount Leader of the Soviet Union and Fourth General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Following Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year leadership, Andropov served in the office from November 1982 to February 1984's death.
Earlier in his career, Andropov served as Soviet ambassador to Hungary from 1954 to 1957, during which time he was active in suppressing the Hungarian Uprise of 1956.
He was named KGB Chairman on May 10, 1967. In this post, he oversaw a huge crackdown on dissent through mass arrests and people's forced psychiatric commitment considered "socially unwanted." After a stroke in 1975 impaired Brezhnev's ability to manage, Andropov effectively dictated Soviet policymaking alongside Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Ministers Andrei Grechko (1967—1976) and Dmitry Ustinov (1976—1983) throughout the duration of Brezhnev's presidency.
Upon Brezhnev's death on November 10, 1982, Yuri Andropov succeeded him as Secretary-General and (by extension) Soviet Union leader.
During his short term, Andropov aimed to remove corruption and inefficiency within the Soviet system by probing long-term officials for party discipline infractions and criminalising workplace truancy.
The Cold War deepened, and he was at a loss to manage the Soviet economy's developing difficulties.
His great long-term impact brought to the fore a new generation of reformers as active as himself, including Yegor Ligachyov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and, most notably, Mikhail Gorbachev.
After developing kidney failure in February 1983, Andropov's health began to worsen fast. He died on February 9, 1984, after barely 15 months managing the country.
Early life
His family background has been controversial. According to the official biography, Andropov was born in Stanitsa Nagutskaya on 15 June 1914.
His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was Don Cossack's railway worker who died of typhus in 1919. His mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein (no official source mentions her name) was a teacher who died in 1931.
Born into a family of town dwellers in the Ryazan Governorate, she was abandoned at the doorway of a Finnish citizen, a Jewish watchmaker, Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, who resided in Moscow; he and his wife, Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein, adopted and nurtured her.
Later investigation showed that many parts of Andropov's biography were substantially faked during his lifetime, which contributed to the confusion associated with his family background.
His oldest reported name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov; years later he changed it to Yuri Andropov.
While his original birth certificate disappeared, it was found that Andropov was actually born in Moscow, where his mother worked in a women's gymnasium from 1913 to 1917.
To compound things, he named different dates of her death on separate occasions: 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931.
Her adoption narrative was also extremely likely a mystification. In 1937 Andropov went through a check when he applied for Communist Party membership, and it turned out that "his maternal grandmother's sister" (he called her his aunt) who lived with him and who supported the legend of his Ryazan peasant origins was in fact his nurse who had worked at Fleckenstein long before he was born.
It was also reported that his mother was merchant. In actuality, Karl Fleckenstein was a prosperous diamond trader, owner of a jeweller, and his wife took over the business of her husband after his untimely 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).
If she hadn't abandoned the business following another pogrom in 1917, forged a proletariat background, and left Moscow with Andropov's mother for the Stavropol Governorate, the entire family may have been lishentsy and stripped of basic rights.
He presented various accounts of his father's fate: in one case he divorced his mother soon after delivery, and in another he died of illness.
The "father" he referred to, Vladimir Andropov, was actually his stepfather who lived and worked in Nagutskaya and died of typhoid in 1919.
His second stepfather (from 1921) belonged to the Fyodorov surname, Viktor Fyodorov, a machine helper turned school teacher. His true father is unknown; he probably died in 1916, a date in Andropov's 1932 summary.
It was reported during the 1937 inspection that his father served as an Imperial Russian Army officer. Andropov was fully interviewed four times, yet so compelling he managed to withdraw all charges. He joined the 1939 Communist Party
Early career in the Communist Party
Andropov graduated from Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College in 1936. As a youth, he worked as a loader, telegraph clerk, and steamship line sailor.
At 16, Yuri Andropov, a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (YCL, or Komsomol), was a worker in Mozdok City, North Ossetian ASSR.
He became full-time secretary of the YCL organisation of the Water Transport Technical School in Rybinsk, Yaroslav region, and was shortly promoted to the job of YCL Central Committee organiser at the Volodarsky Shipyards in Rybinsk.
He was elected First Secretary of the YCL's Yaroslav Regional Committee in 1938 and was First Secretary of Komsomol's Central Committee in the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic from 1940 to 1944.
According to official history, Andropov participated in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland during World War II, although later researchers failed to find remnants of his purported partisan squad.
From 1944 he quit Komsomol for Communist Party service. Between 1946 and 1951, studied at Petrozavodsk University. In 1947, he was chosen Second Secretary of Karelo-Finnish SSR's Central Committee.
Andropov was transferred to CPSU Central Committee in 1951. He was made an inspector, then a committee subdepartment head.
Suppression of the Hungarian Uprising
He was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Hungary in July 1954 and retained this position during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Andropov was instrumental in defeating the Hungarian revolt. He convinced a hesitant Nikita Khrushchev to need military involvement.
He's called 'Budapest's Butcher' for his savage repression of the Hungarian rebellion. Hungarian leaders arrested and executed Imre Nagy and others.
Andropov suffered after these occurrences "According to historian Christopher Andrew, Hungarian Complex":
"He had watched in horror from his embassy windows as officers of the hated Hungarian security service [Allamvédelmi Hatóság or AVH] were hung from lamp poles.
For the rest of his life, Andropov remained tormented by the rapidity with which an allegedly all-powerful one-party communist regime had begun crumble.
When other communist governments afterwards appeared at risk - in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981, he was certain that only armed forces could assure their survival, as in Budapest in 1956 ".
Chairmanship of the KGB and Politburo career
In 1957, Andropov returned from Budapest to Moscow to lead the Communist and Workers' Party Liaison Department in Socialist Countries, a position he held until 1967.
In 1961, he was elected full member of the CPSU Central Committee and moved to CPSU Central Committee Secretariat in 1962.
He was freed of his duties in the Central Committee apparatus in 1967 and named head of the KGB on Mikhail Suslov's request, while promoting a candidate for the Politburo.
In 1970, out of worry that Joseph and Magda Goebbels' burial location together with their 6 children would become a shrine for neo-Nazis, Andropov authorised an operation to remove the remains interred in Magdeburg in 1946.
The remnants were fully burned and pulverised, throwing ashes into the neighbouring Elbe's Biederitz River, a tributary.
Although there is no evidence that the Russians ever located Adolf Hitler's body, it is assumed that Hitler and Eva Braun were among the remains since 10 or 11 corpses were exhumed.
Andropov received greater authority in 1973 as a full member of the Politburo.
Crushing the Prague Spring
During the 1968 Prague Spring events, Andropov was the major advocate for "extreme measures" against Czechoslovakia. According to Vasili Mitrokhin's confidential materials, "he KGB drummed up the fear that Czechoslovakia might fall victim to NATO invasion or coup."
Oleg Kalugin claimed from Washington that he had access to "totally reliable documentation indicating that neither the CIA nor any other agency manipulated the Czechoslovak reform movement."
His communication was destroyed since it contradicted Andropov's conspiracy hypothesis. Andropov authorised many active steps, collectively known as PROGRESS, against Czechoslovak reformers.
Suppression of dissidents
See also: Soviet psychiatry political abuse
Throughout his tenure, Andropov sought "to destroy opposition in all its forms" and claimed that "the struggle for human rights was part of a vast imperialist effort to undermine the foundation of the Soviet state."
To this purpose, he initiated a campaign to destroy any resistance in the USSR using a mixture of mass arrests, involuntary psychiatric hospital commitments, and pressure to depart from the Soviet Union.
Throughout his period as KGB head, these measures were painstakingly documented by the underground Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat journal that, with its last published issue, was finally forced out of existence.
On 3 July 1967, he proposed the establishment of the KGB's Fifth Directorate to deal with the political opposition.
At the end of July, the directorate was founded and all Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn entered the files.
In 1968, Andropov as KGB Chairman issued his order "On the Tasks of State Security Agencies in Combating the Adversary's Ideological Sabotage," advocating for fighting against dissidents and their imperialist patrons.
Role in the invasion of Afghanistan
In March 1979, Andropov and the Politburo initially opposed their later military intervention in Afghanistan.
Among their concerns was that the world world would blame the USSR for its "aggression" and derail the planned SALT II meeting with President Carter.
However, his conclusion: "we cannot lose Afghanistan under any circumstances," prompted him and the Politburo to attack Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The invasion led to the lengthy Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) and 66 countries boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow, a concern for Andropov since spring 1979.
Some suggested the Soviet-Afghan War also played a major influence in the Soviet Union's dissolution.
After Brezhnev's assassination attempt in January 1969, Andropov conducted the interrogation of arrested gunman Viktor Ivanovich Ilyin.
Ilyin was mad and transferred to Kazan Psychiatric Hospital. He submitted an elaborate plan to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 29 April 1969 to create a network of psychiatric facilities to defend the "Soviet government and socialist order" from dissenters.
177 In January 1970, Andropov gave his fellow Politburo members an unsettling account of the pervasive threat of the mentally ill to stability and regime security.
Andropov's suggestion to employ psychiatry against dissidents was realised. :42 Andropov was in charge of massive psychiatric repression deployment because he was the KGB's head. :187–188 According to Yuri Felshtinsky and Boris Gulko, the originators of the notion were the chief of the KGB (Andropov) and the chief of the Fifth Directorate, Filipp Bobkov.
Dissident repression included attempts to mutilate the 1961 defected dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Some believe Andropov was behind the deaths of Fyodor Kulakov and Pyotr Masherov, the Soviet leadership's two youngest members.
A released document reveals that Andropov, as KGB director, was ordered to prevent unauthorised gatherings grieving John Lennon's death.
In 1977, Andropov convinced Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House, where communist revolutionaries murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family, had become a pilgrimage place for hidden monarchists.
With the agreement of the Politburo, the home, deemed not "sufficient historical significance," was demolished in September 1977, less than a year before the 60th anniversary of the murders.
Andropov was particularly determined to suppress any hint of Zionism to remove himself from his Jewish roots, says Yaakov Kedmi. Andropov was personally responsible for arresting and persecuting Soviet Jewish activist Natan Sharansky.
Promotion of Gorbachev
From 1980 to 1982, while still chairman of the KGB, Andropov opposed plans to occupy Poland after the Solidarity movement emerged and championed reform-minded party leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev.
Andropov was KGB's longest serving chairman and did not retire as KGB's head until May 1982, when he was again elevated to the Secretariat to succeed Mikhail Suslov as the secretary responsible for intellectual matters.
Leader of the Soviet Union
Two days following the death of Leonid Brezhnev, on 12 November 1982, Andropov was elected CPSU General Secretary, the first former KGB General Secretary. His appointment was apprehended in the West, given his history in the KGB and Hungary.
At the time, his personal background was a mystery in the West, with major media producing lengthy profiles that were inconsistent and manufactured in numerous cases.
Andropov divided the Politburo with his chief deputy, Konstantin Chernenko. Andropov gained control of arranging the Politburo's work, overseeing national security, overseeing key home and international policy and international trade concerns, and determining leadership assignments in the upper ranks of the Party and government. Chernenko handled spying, KGB, Ministry of Interior, party organs, ideology, and organisational issues, as well as propaganda, culture, science, and higher education.
He was also assigned Central Committee charge. Chernenko's handling was far too much, and significant duties were not entrusted to the other Politburo members.
Domestic policy
Economy
At home, Andropov tried to strengthen the U.S.S.R. economy by enhancing the productivity of his staff. He pushed down on the lack of discipline of Soviet labourers by decreeing the arrest of absentee personnel and late penalties.
The facts about economic stagnation and barriers to scientific advancement were first made public and subject to discussion.
In addition, the KGB Chairman-turned-Gensek offered selected industries greater autonomy from state regulations, allowing manufacturing managers to keep control over more of their earnings.
Such initiatives resulted in a 4% increase in industrial output and boosted investment in emerging technologies like robotics.
Despite such reforms, Andropov refused to accept any adjustments that would dispense with Joseph Stalin's command economy.
In his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev recounted that when Andropov was leader, Gorbachev and Gosplan chairman Nikolai Ryzhkov urged him to obtain true budget information. "You ask too much," Andropov replied. "Your budget is outside limits.
Anti-corruption campaign
Unlike Brezhnev's policy of avoiding confrontations and dismissals, he began fighting violations of party, state, and labour discipline, which resulted to large changes in personnel during an anti-corruption drive against many of Brezhnev's allies.
Andropov removed 18 ministers and 37 first secretary of obkoms, kraikoms and Central Committees of Communist Parties of Soviet Republics within 15 months in office, and criminal investigations against high-level party and state leaders began.
Biographers including Solovyov and Klepikova (1983) and Zhores Medvedev (1983) discussed the complex possibilities underlying the anti-corruption campaigning motivations in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s: while it is true that Andropov fought corruption for moral, ethical, ascetic, and ideological reasons, it is also true that it was an effective way to do so.
Andropov himself and his protégés, especially Eduard Shevardnadze, could thus expand their own authority through the same efforts that promised to be better for the country in terms of justice, economic performance and even defence readiness (which depended on economic performance).
Thus there was an inevitable amount of "what's better for the country to line with what's best for my personal authority." This equation cannot measure the exact balance of self-interest vs altruistic generosity and patriotism.
Part of the complexity is that in the Brezhnev era, a lot of corruption was implicitly tolerated and omnipresent (although officially denied), and many police and security organisations themselves participated in it to varying degrees, but only those organisations had access to the power to measure and monitor its details.
In such an environment, anti-corruption campaigning is inherently a path by which police and security people have the potential or opportunity to appear white-hat heroes cleaning up the malfeasance of black-hat villains and 'coincidentally' increasing their own power, whereas there may be an underlying reality of one set of gray-hat antiheroes defeating another set of gray-hat antiheroes. This complicated dynamic is perpetual; anti-corruption campaigns of the 21st century are as prone to its possibilities as those of the 20th century.
Foreign policy
Andropov confronted a series of foreign-policy crises: the disastrous state of the Soviet army in Afghanistan, threatening insurrection in Poland, growing antagonism with China, the Middle East conflict threat of polarisation, and civil conflict in Ethiopia and South Africa.
The most serious threat was American President Ronald Reagan's "Second Cold War" and a focused focus on rolling back what he called the "Evil Empire.
" Reagan used American economic might and Soviet economic inferiority to intensify large expenditure on the Cold War, emphasising Moscow's lack of high-tech.
The main answer was to raise the military budget to 70% of the national budget and provide billions of dollars of military aid to Syria, Iraq, Libya, South Yemen, PLO, Cuba, and North Korea.
This comprised tanks and armoured troop carriers, hundreds of fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft systems, artillery systems, and other sorts of high-tech weaponry for which the USSR was the principal provider to its allies. Andropov's principal aim was to prevent open war.
In foreign policy, the Afghan War persisted even though Andropov, who now felt the invasion was a mistake, half-heartedly investigated options for peaceful disengagement.
Andropov's rule was also marked by deteriorating US relations. During a much-publicized "walk in the woods" with Soviet dignitary Yuli Kvitsinsky, American ambassador Paul Nitze urged a compromise on both sides in Europe that was eventually dismissed by the Politburo.
Kvitsinsky would subsequently argue that, despite his personal efforts, the Soviet leadership was not interested in compromise, but calculated that Western peace movements would compel the Americans to submit.
On 8 March 1983, during Andropov's time as General Secretary, U.S. President Ronald Reagan branded the Soviet Union as a "evil empire." On March 23, same month, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Reagan asserted that this ballistic missile defence research programme would "consist with our ABM Treaty requirements." Andropov, however, dismissed this assertion, saying "It's time [Washington] quit searching for the best ways to unleash nuclear Armageddon. This is not just irresponsible. It's crazy ".
In August 1983, Andropov announced the country was ending all space-based weapons work. One of his most remarkable gestures during his short time as Soviet Union leader was in answer to a letter from Maine's 10-year-old American child, Samantha Smith, inviting her to the Soviet Union. But he was too ill to meet her, thus revealing his severe condition to the public. Meanwhile, talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe were postponed by the Soviet Union in November 1983 and by the end of the year the Soviets had broken off all arms control negotiations.
A snapshot of Korean Air Lines HL7442, the airliner shot down by Soviet planes after straying into banned airspace during the KAL 007 flight.
Soviet fighters shot down a commercial jet liner, Korean Air Flight KAL-007, which carried 269 passengers and crew. On 1 September 1983, it wandered through the Soviet Union on its scheduled route from Anchorage, Alaska, USA to Seoul, South Korea.
Andropov kept secret that the Soviet Union had the KAL 007 black box in its possession, which proved the pilot had made a typographic error when entering data in the automatic pilot. Soviet air defence system was unprepared to deal with a civilian airliner, and shooting down was a matter of unquestionably executing orders.
Instead of recognising a mishap, Soviet media lauded a courageous resolve to face Western provocation. Together with the low credibility produced by the inadequate 1986 explanation of Chernobyl's nuclear reactor meltdown, the experience showed an inability to deal with public relations crises; the propaganda apparatus was only effective to persons and states allied with the Soviet Union. Both crises were exacerbated by technology and organisational failings.
