62 Facts About Yuri Andropov

1.

Yuri Andropov was named chairman of the KGB on 10 May 1967.

2.

Yuri Andropov died on 9 February 1984, having led the country for about 15 months.

3.

Yuri Andropov's father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was a railway worker of Don Cossack descent who died of typhus in 1919.

4.

Yuri Andropov's mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein, was a school teacher who died in 1931.

5.

Yuri Andropov 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.

6.

Yuri Andropov's original birth certificate disappeared, but it has been established that Andropov was born in Moscow, where his mother worked at a women's gymnasium from 1913 to 1917.

7.

On various occasions, Yuri Andropov gave different death dates for his mother: 1927,1929,1930 and 1931.

8.

In 1937, Yuri Andropov was vetted when he applied for Communist Party membership, and it turned out that "the sister of his native maternal grandmother", who was living with him and who supported the legend of his Ryazan peasant origins, was in fact his nurse, who had been working for Fleckenstein long before Yuri Andropov was born.

9.

Yuri Andropov gave different versions of his father's fate: in one, he divorced his mother soon after his birth; in another he died of illness.

10.

The "father" in question, Vladimir Yuri Andropov, was in fact his stepfather, who lived and worked in Nagutskaya and died of typhus in 1919.

11.

Yuri Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936.

12.

At 16, then a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, Yuri Andropov was a worker in the town of Mozdok in the North Ossetian ASSR.

13.

Yuri Andropov became full-time secretary of the YCL of the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical School and was promoted to organizer of the YCL Central Committee at the Volodarsky Shipyards in Rybinsk.

14.

In 1951, Yuri Andropov was transferred to the CPSU Central Committee.

15.

Yuri Andropov was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the committee.

16.

Yuri Andropov held this position during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

17.

Yuri Andropov convinced Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary.

18.

Yuri Andropov is known as "The Butcher of Budapest" for his ruthless suppression of the uprising.

19.

Yuri 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.

20.

In 1957, Yuri 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.

21.

In 1970, out of concern that the burial place of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their children would become a shrine to neo-Nazis, Yuri Andropov authorized an operation to destroy the remains that were buried in Magdeburg in 1946.

22.

Yuri Andropov gained additional powers in 1973 when he was promoted to full member of the Politburo.

23.

Yuri Andropov's message was destroyed because it contradicted the conspiracy theory Andropov had fabricated.

24.

Yuri Andropov ordered a number of active measures, collectively known as operation PROGRESS, against Czechoslovak reformers during the Normalization period.

25.

On 3 July 1967, Yuri Andropov proposed to establish the KGB's Fifth Directorate to deal with the political opposition.

26.

On 29 April 1969, Yuri Andropov submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union an elaborate plan to create a network of psychiatric hospitals to defend the "Soviet Government and socialist order" from dissidents.

27.

In January 1970, Yuri Andropov submitted an account to his fellow Politburo members of the widespread threat of the mentally ill to the regime's stability and security.

28.

Some believe that Yuri Andropov was behind the deaths of Fyodor Kulakov and Pyotr Masherov, the two youngest members of the Soviet leadership.

29.

In 1977, Yuri Andropov convinced Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War, had become a site of pilgrimage for covert monarchists.

30.

Yuri Andropov was personally responsible for orchestrating the arrest and persecution of Soviet Jewish activist Natan Sharansky.

31.

Yuri Andropov changed his mind after the assassination of Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin's seizure of power.

32.

Yuri Andropov became convinced that the CIA had recruited Amin to create a pro-Western expansionist "New Great Ottoman Empire" that would attempt to dominate Soviet Central Asia.

33.

From 1980 to 1982, while still chair of the KGB, Yuri Andropov opposed plans to occupy Poland after the emergence of the Solidarity movement and promoted reform-minded party cadres, including Mikhail Gorbachev.

34.

Yuri Andropov was the longest-serving KGB chairman and did not resign as head of the KGB until May 1982, when he was again promoted to the Secretariat to succeed Mikhail Suslov as secretary responsible for ideological affairs.

35.

Two days after Brezhnev's death, on 12 November 1982, Yuri Andropov was elected general secretary of the CPSU, the first former head of the KGB to become general secretary.

36.

Yuri Andropov's appointment was received in the West with apprehension in view of his roles in the KGB and in Hungary.

37.

Yuri Andropov divided responsibilities in the Politburo with his chief deputy, Konstantin Chernenko.

38.

Yuri 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.

39.

At home, Yuri Andropov attempted to improve the USSR's economy by increasing its workforce's efficiency.

40.

Yuri Andropov cracked down on Soviet laborers' lack of discipline by decreeing the arrest of absentee employees and penalties for tardiness.

41.

Furthermore, Yuri Andropov gave select industries greater autonomy from state regulations and enabled factory managers to retain control over more of their profits.

42.

In contrast to Brezhnev's policy of avoiding conflicts and dismissals, Yuri Andropov began to fight violations of party, state and labor discipline, which led to significant personnel changes during an anti-corruption campaign against many of Brezhnev's cronies.

43.

Biographers including Solovyov and Klepikova and Zhores Medvedev have discussed the complex possibilities underlying the motivations of anti-corruption campaigning in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early 1980s: it is true that Yuri Andropov fought corruption for moral, ethical, ascetic, and ideological reasons, but it was an effective way for party members from the police and security organizations to defeat competitors for power at the party's senior levels.

44.

In foreign policy, the conflict in Afghanistan continued even though Yuri Andropov, who now felt the invasion was a mistake, half-heartedly explored options for a negotiated withdrawal.

45.

Yuri Andropov's rule was marked by deterioration of relations with the United States.

46.

Yuri Andropov came, but he was too ill to meet with her, thus revealing his grave condition to the world.

47.

Yuri Andropov kept secret that the Soviet Union held in its possession the black box from KAL 007 that proved the pilot had made a typographical error when entering data in the automatic pilot.

48.

In late January 1984, Yuri Andropov's health deteriorated sharply and due to growing toxicity in his blood, he had periods of falling into unconsciousness.

49.

Yuri Andropov died on 9 February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69.

50.

Yuri Andropov was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the 12 tombs between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall.

51.

Yuri Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who seemed to mirror Yuri Andropov's tenure.

52.

Yuri Andropov lived at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the same building in which Suslov and Brezhnev lived.

53.

Yuri Andropov married Nina Ivanovna, who was born not far from the farm where Andropov was born, and divorced her in 1941.

54.

Yuri Andropov suffered a nervous breakdown during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and was not seen in public until Andropov's funeral.

55.

Yuri Andropov was too grief-stricken to join the procession and during the funeral her relatives helped her walk.

56.

Yuri Andropov's legacy remains the subject of much debate in Russia and elsewhere among scholars and in the popular media.

57.

Yuri Andropov remains the focus of television documentaries and popular nonfiction, particularly at important anniversaries.

58.

Yuri Andropov began to follow a trend of replacing elderly officials with considerably younger ones.

59.

Yuri Andropov headed the organisation which persecuted the most remarkable people of our country.

60.

The camp regime was not strict but specific, and when Yuri 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.

61.

Various people who knew Yuri Andropov well, including Vladimir Medvedev, Aleksandr Chuchyalin, Vladimir Kryuchkov and Roy Medvedev, remembered him for his politeness, calmness, unselfishness, patience, intelligence and exceptionally sharp memory.

62.

Yuri Andropov read English literature and could communicate in Finnish, English and German.