USSR, on the threshold of 1984: Statement : resolution of the USSR Supreme Soviet "On the international situation and the foreign policy of the Soviet ... Towards economic and social progress
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Background
There has been much contention over his family background. According to the official biography, Andropov was born in stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai of Russia) on 15 June 1914. 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 mentioned her name) was a school teacher who died in 1931. 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.[8][9] Later researches 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.
Education
Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936.
Career
In 1940 Yuri began a new career in the Komsomol organization, working to organize youth in the territory just taken from Finland in the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940.
Yuri continued this work during the World War II, helping to coordinate guerrilla activities in areas controlled by the Finnish army. Following the war he was promoted to a post of Soviet administrator in the region.
He remained a minor official during the Stalin years. Though he served his Stalinist superiors loyally, he was not implicated in the secret police terror of that period. His training combined with his lack of involvement in Stalin's crimes made him a good recruit for promotion in the years following Stalin's death in 1953.
His advancement began when he entered the Soviet Diplomatic Service. After a short period of training in Moscow, he received in 1953 an appointment to the Soviet embassy in Hungary, a Soviet satellite country. The following year he was named ambassador to Hungary, a position he occupied until 1957. During that time he helped to remove from power the Hungarian Stalinist leader.
In late 1956 the Hungarians attempted to free themselves from Soviet control in a violent uprising, quickly repressed by Soviet troops. Andropov's activity in the repression is not known. He probably assisted in the restoration to power of those Hungarian Communists, led by Janos Kadar, loyal to the Soviet Union. Andropov performed his work well.
By the early 1986 Andropov had accumulated material from KGB investigations to prove widespread bribery and corruption within the Soviet bureaucracy. He appointed loyal party officials to high positions within the KGB and established his own reputation for efficiency and incorruptibility. His years of secret police leadership made him a major contender to become the next leader of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile he was able to eliminate public dissent within the Soviet Union. He used several methods of repression.
The KGB arrested dissenters for violating laws banning "anti-Soviet propaganda. " They were sentenced to years of hard labor in prison camps. Other were sent without trial to psychiatric hospitals for the criminally insane, where they were treated with mind-altering drugs. The most prominent dissenters, protected from harsh punishment by their international fame, had to accept permanent exile abroad.
By the end of the 1976 the KGB had virtually wiped out all groups defending human rights and individual liberties in the Soviet Union and had enforced public silence on Stalin's crimes. Andropov was rewarded for his success.
In 1973 he became a member of the ruling party committee, the Politburo. He was its youngest member at that time. In mid-1982, his colleagues on the committee designated him Brezhnev's successor, making him a member of the Secretariat and permitting him to resign his post as chairman of the secret police. Within two days of Brezhnev's death on November 10, 1982, he received the formal party appointment of general secretary.
Andropov had only a brief time to be leader of the Soviet Union. He began in those months to rejuvenate the party leadership and to implement new policies. He appointed to the Politburo younger Communist officials, including a young expert on agriculture named Mikhail Gorbachev. He launched a campaign against corruption, making use of the secret police to hunt out and punish culprits within the state and party apparatus. He tried to improve industrial production by introducing measures punishing absenteeism and rewarding productivity.
Finally, he launched a "peace offensive" intended to limit the introduction of new United States nuclear missiles in Europe. When in early September 1983 a Soviet fighter plane shot down a South Korean airliner flying over Soviet air space, he defended the hasty action of his frontier forces. The international protest over that incident seriously worsened Soviet relations with Western countries.
In late 1983 Andropov fell seriously ill. Suffering from an incurable kidney disease, he sought the agreement of his colleagues in the Politburo to the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor.
However, an older Politburo member, Konstantin Chernenko (whom Brezhnev had originally favored), was able to prevent this move and claimed the succession for himself.
Andropov died in February 1984.
Achievements
Andropov remained chairman of the KGB for 15 years, longer than any other secret police chief since Stalin's death. He owed his lengthy term of service to his success at the job. During those years the KGB became one of the most efficient secret police organizations in the world. He organized a public campaign to raise the prestige of the KGB among the Soviet population. He appears to have prevented KGB officers from abusing their power for the sake of personal profit, as other party and police officials were doing.
Following the 18-year rule of the late Leonid Brezhnev, Andropov served in the post for only 15 months, from November 1982 until his own death in February 1984. Earlier in his career, Andropov served as the Soviet ambassador to Hungary from 1954 to 1957, during which time he was involved in the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and then Chairman of the KGB from 1967 until 1982.
He was active in the Young Communist (Komsomol) League, organizing Soviet youth to assist the Communist Party.
In 1957 he returned to Moscow to take charge of relations between the Soviet Communist Party and other Communist countries, including the European satellites, the East Asian Communist states, and later Cuba. He held this post for 10 years, acquiring considerable experience in international relations during that time.
In 1967, his political responsibilities increased greatly. That year he was appointed chairman of the Soviet secret police (KGB, acronym for the Committee for State Security). He was chosen by the Soviet leaders in the Politburo for two major reasons. First, he was not a Stalinist; they could rely on him to maintain party control over the secret police.
Views
He was not a close supporter of Brezhnev and could be counted on not to let the KGB fall under the control of the new party leader. One of the principal tasks which confronted Andropov was the restoration of the prestige of the secret police, whose reputation had suffered severely in previous years when public denunciation of Stalin's crimes had revealed its terrible abuses of power in carrying out Stalin's terror. At the same time, he had to silence such Soviet "dissenters" as the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who were demanding further destalinization and publicly protesting violations of human rights in the Soviet Union. Their activities were reported and their writings published in the West.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
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. "
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. "
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. "
Connections
Yuri was first married to Nina Ivanovna; she was born not too far away 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.
