Yuri Andropov
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| Yuri Andropov Ю́рий Влади́мирович Андро́пов |
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| In office November 12, 1982 – February 9, 1984 |
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| Preceded by | Leonid Brezhnev |
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| Succeeded by | Konstantin Chernenko |
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| Born | June 15, 1914 Stavropol, Russia |
| Died | February 9, 1984 Moscow, Russia |
| Political party | Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
| Spouse | Tatyana Andropova |
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (Russian: Ю́рий Влади́мирович Андро́пов; June 15, 1914 [O.S. June 2] – February 9, 1984) was a Soviet politician and General Secretary of the CPSU from November 12, 1982 until his death just sixteen months later.
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[edit] Early life
Andropov was the son of a railway official and was probably born in Nagutskoye, Stavropol Guberniya, Imperial Russia. He was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College before he joined Komsomol in 1930. He became a member of the CPSU in 1939 and was first secretary of the Komsomol in the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic from 1940 to 1944. During World War II, Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities. After the War, he moved to Moscow in 1951 and joined the party secretariat. In 1954, he became the Soviet Ambassador to Hungary. Andropov was one of those responsible for the Soviet decision to invade Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. His wife was named Tatyana.
[edit] Rise to power
Andropov returned to Moscow to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers' Parties in Socialist Countries (1957-1967). 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 and subsequently brought into the Politburo as a candidate member. In 1973, Andropov was promoted to full member of the Politburo. He 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 Suslov as secretary responsible for ideological affairs.
Two days after Brezhnev's death, on (November 12, 1982), Andropov was elected General Secretary of the CPSU being 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.
[edit] Andropov in office
During his rule, Andropov made attempts to improve the economy and reduce corruption. He was also remembered for his struggle for enhancement of work discipline, carried out by a typically Soviet administrative approach and harshness vaguely reminiscent of Stalin's rule.
In foreign policy, he achieved little — the war continued in Afghanistan. Andropov's rule was also marked by the deterioration of relations with the United States. While he launched a series of proposals that included a reduction of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and a summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, these proposals fell on the deaf ears of the Reagan, Mitterrand and Thatcher administrations. Cold War tensions were exacerbated by the downing by Soviet fighters of a civilian jet liner, Korean Air Flight KAL-007, that had strayed over the USSR on September 1, 1983, and the U.S. deployment of Pershing missiles to face Soviet weapons in Europe. Soviet-U.S. arms control talks on intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe were suspended by the Soviet Union in November 1983.
One of his most famous acts during his short time as leader of the Soviet Union was responding to a letter from an American child named Samantha Smith and inviting her to the Soviet Union, which resulted in Smith becoming a well-known peace activist.
[edit] Andropov's legacy
Andropov died of kidney failure on February 9, 1984, after several months of failing health, and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko. He is buried in Moscow, in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
Andropov's legacy remains the subject of much debate within Russia and elsewhere, both amongst scholars and in the popular media. He remains the constant focus of television documentaries and popular non-fiction, particularly around important anniversaries.
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 humane reformer, especially in comparison to the stagnation and corruption during the later years of his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev. He was certainly generally regarded as inclined to more gradual and constructive reform than was Gorbachev; the bulk of the speculation centres around whether Andropov would have reformed the USSR in a manner which did not result in its eventual dissolution. What is hard to deny is that had Andropov not supported the relatively-junior Gorbachev and groomed him as his successor, he may well never have become General Secretary.
The short time he spent as leader, much of it in a state of extreme frailty, leaves debaters few concrete indications as to the nature of any hypothetical extended rule. As with the shortened rule of Lenin, speculators are left much room to advocate favourite theories and to develop the minor cult of personality which has formed around him.[1]
[edit] Controversy
Since the time he was elected General Secretary of the CPSU, there has been speculation and controversy about his past. [2] Declassified files of Andropov showed that he "adapted" his biography to the demands of the Bolshevik times – he made himself a son of an Ossetian proletarian, while he was actually from a rich bourgeois family, probably with Jewish roots.[citation needed]. At the beginning Andropov, according to the files, was not accurate while inventing his family's "proletarian" past. He was questioned at least four times in the 1930s because of the discrepancies in several forms he filled.
Each time he managed to evade commissions that checked his background. The final version of his biography stated that he was the son of a railway official and was probably born in Nagutskoye, Stavropol Guberniya, Imperial Russia. But as the archives suggested, Andropov was born into a wealthy Jewish family – Flekenstein in Moscow.[citation needed] His family, which allegedly arrived in Russia from Finland, may have suffered from persecution during "pogroms" in 1910s. One theory speculated that Andropov (whose first name may originally have been Grigory), was born only a few hundred metres from the Lubyanka – the Soviet secret police headquarters in Moscow. [citation needed]
[edit] References
- ^ Ilya Milstein (2006). Yury Andropov. A poet of the era of dinosaurs. New Times. Retrieved on September 26, 2006.
- ^ Edward Jay Epstein (1983). The Andropov Hoax. New Republic. Retrieved on February 7, 1983.
[edit] Further reading
- Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin, Vladimir & Klepikova, Elena Solovyov, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1983, 302 pages, ISBN 0-02-612290-1
- The Andropov File: The Life and Ideas of Yuri V. Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Martin Ebon, McGraw-Hill Companies, 1983, 284 pages, ISBN 0-07-018861-0
| Preceded by Leonid Brezhnev |
General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party 1982–1984 |
Succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko |
| Preceded by Vladimir Semichastny |
Chairman of KGB 1967–1982 |
Succeeded by Vitaly Vasilyevich Fyodorchuk |
