Question: When did Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union?

Yuri Andropov




Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (/ænˈdroʊpɔːf,-pɒf/;[1] Russian:Ю́рий Влади́мирович Андро́пов, tr.Júrij Vladímirovič Andrópov,IPA:[ˈjʉrʲɪj vlɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ ɐnˈdropəf]; 15June[O.S. 2 June]1914– 9 February 1984)[2] was a Soviet politician and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Following the 18-year rule of Leonid Brezhnev, Andropov served in the post from November 1982 until his 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. Under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, he was named Chairman of the KGB on May 10, 1967. In this position,  he oversaw a massive crackdown on dissent that was carried out via mass arrests and the wholesale application of involuntary commitments to those deemed "socially undesirable". As Brezhnev's health declined during the latter years of his leadership, Andropov formed a troika alongside Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov that ultimately came to dominate Soviet policymaking.
Upon Brezhnev's death on November 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary and (by extension) leader of the Soviet Union. During his tenure, Andropov sought to eliminate corruption and inefficiency within the Soviet system by investigating longtime officials for violations of party discipline and criminalizing truancy in the workplace. However, upon suffering total renal failure in February 1983, Andropov's health began to deteriorate rapidly. On February 9, 1984, he died after leading the country for only 15 months.
Early life
There has been much contention over his family background.[3] According to the official biography, Andropov was born in stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai of Russia) on 15 June 1914.[4][5] 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.[6][7] 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.
His earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov; he changed it to Yuri Andropov only several years later.[10] 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 since 1913 throughout 1914 and until 1917.[8][10]
To make things more complicated, he named different dates of her death at various occasions: 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931.[7][8] The story of her adoption was also highly likely a mystification. In 1937 Andropov went through a check when applied for the 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 serving at Fleckensteins long before he was born.[7][8]
It was also reported that his mother belonged to merchantry. In fact Karl Fleckenstein was a rich jewel merchant, owner of a jewellery store, 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).[10][11] The whole family could've turned into lishentsy stripped of basic rights if she hadn't abandoned the store after another pogrom in 1917, invented herself a proletarian background and left Moscow for the Stavropol Governorate along with Andropov's mother.[7][8]
He gave different versions of his father's fate: in one case he divorced his mother soon after his birth, in another — died of illness.[10] 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 assistant turned a school teacher. His real father remains unknown; he probably died in 1916 — a date written in Andropov's 1932 resume.[8][10] 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 drop all charges and joined the Communist Party in 1939.[7][8]
Early career in the Communist Party

Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936.[4] As a teenager he worked as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line.[9][6] 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.[4]
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.[9]
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.[10] 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.[9][12]
In 1951 Andropov was transferred to CPSU Central Committee. He was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the Committee.[9]
Suppression of the Hungarian Uprising
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.[13] He is known as 'The Butcher of Budapest' for his ruthless suppression of the Hungarian uprising.[14] 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 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".[13]
Chairmanship of the KGB and Politburo career

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.
Crushing the Prague Spring
During the events of the Prague Spring in 1968, Andropov was the main advocate for "extreme measures" being taken against Czechoslovakia. According to classified information released by Vasili Mitrokhin, "[t]he KGB whipped up the fear that Czechoslovakia could fall victim to NATO aggression or to a coup".[13] At this time, agent Oleg Kalugin reported from Washington that he gained access to "absolutely reliable documents proving that neither the CIA nor any other agency was manipulating the Czechoslovak reform movement".[13] However his message was destroyed because it contradicted the conspiracy theory fabricated by Andropov.[13] Andropov ordered a number of active measures, collectively known as operation PROGRESS, against Czechoslovak reformers.
Suppression of dissidents
 Throughout his career, Andropov aimed to achieve "the destruction of dissent in all its forms" and insisted that "the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet state".[13] Towards this end, he launched a campaign to eliminate all opposition in the USSR through a  mixture of mass arrests, involuntary commitments to psychiatric hospitals, and pressuring on rights activists to emigrate from the Soviet Union.These measures were meticulously documented throughout his time as KGB chairman by the underground Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat publication which was itself finally forced out of  existence with its last published issue, dated 30 June 1982.[15]
On 3 July 1967, he made a proposal to establish the KGB's Fifth Directorate for dealing with the political opposition[16]:29 (ideological counterintelligence).[17]:177 At the end of July, the directorate was established and entered in its files cases of all Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.[16] In 1968, Andropov as the KGB Chairman issued his order "On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary", calling for struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters.[13]
After the assassination attempt against Brezhnev in January 1969, Andropov led the interrogation of the captured gunman, Viktor Ivanovich Ilyin.[18][19] Ilyin was pronounced insane and sent to Kazan Psychiatric Hospital.[20] Later, on 29 April 1969, he submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union an elaborated plan for creating a network of psychiatric hospitals to defend the "Soviet Government and socialist order" from dissidents.[17]:177 In January 1970 Andropov submitted an alarming account to his fellow Politburo members of the widespread threat of the mentally ill to stability and the security of the regime.[21] The proposal by Andropov to use psychiatry for struggle against dissidents was implemented.[22]:42 Andropov was in charge of the widespread deployment of psychiatric repression since he was the head of the KGB.[23]:187–188 According to Yuri Felshtinsky and Boris Gulko, the originators of the idea to use psychiatry for punitive purposes were the head of the KGB (Andropov) and the head of the Fifth Directorate, Philipp Bobkov.[24]
The repression of dissidents[25][26] included plans to maim the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected in 1961. There are some who believe that Andropov was behind the deaths of Fyodor Kulakov and Pyotr Masherov, the two youngest members of the Soviet leadership.[27] A declassified document revealed that Andropov as KGB director gave the order to prevent unauthorized gatherings mourning the death of John Lennon.[28]
Role in the invasion of Afghanistan
Andropov opposed the decision to intervene militarily in Afghanistan on 24 December 1979.[29] Among his concerns was that the international community would blame the USSR for this action.[30] The invasion led to the extended Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) and a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow by 66 countries, something of concern to Andropov since spring 1979.[31]
Role in the non-invasion of Poland
On 10 December 1981, in the face of Poland's Solidarity movement, Andropov, along with Mikhail Suslov and Wojciech Jaruzelski,[32] persuaded Brezhnev that it would be counterproductive for the Soviet Union to invade Poland by repeating Prague 1968.[33] This effectively marked the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine.[34]
Promotion of Gorbachev
From 1980 to 1982, while still chairman of the KGB, Andropov opposed plans to occupy Poland after the emergence of the Solidarity movement and promoted reform-minded party cadres including Mikhail Gorbachev.[6] 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.
Leader of the Soviet Union

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.[35]
Domestic policy
Economy
At home, Andropov attempted to improve the nation's economy by increasing its workforce's efficiency. He cracked down on Soviet laborers' lack of discipline by decreeing the arrest of absentee employees and penalties for tardiness.[36] For the first time, the facts about economic stagnation and obstacles to scientific progress were made available to the public and open to criticism.[37] Furthermore, the KGB Chairman-turned-Gensek gave select industries greater autonomy from state regulations[38] and enabled factory managers to retain control over more of their profits.[39] Such policies resulted in a 4% rise in industrial output and increased investment in new technologies such as robotics.[40]
Despite such reforms, Andropov refused to consider any changes that sought to dispense with the command economy introduced under Joseph Stalin. In his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev recalled that when Andropov was the leader, Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, the chairman of Gosplan, asked him for access to real budget figures. "You are asking too much," Andropov responded. "The budget is off limits to you."[41]
Anti-corruption campaign
In contrast to Brezhnev's policy of avoiding conflicts and dismissals, he began to fight violations of party, state and labour discipline, which led to significant personnel changes during an anti-corruption campaign against many of Brezhnev's cronies.[6] During 15 months in office, Andropov dismissed 18 ministers and 37 first secretaries of obkoms, kraikoms and Central Committees of Communist Parties of Soviet Republics, and criminal cases against high level party and state officials were started.
Foreign policy

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.[42] 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.[43] 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 defense 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".[44]
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. 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.[45]
Cold War tensions were exacerbated by Soviet fighters downing a civilian jet liner, Korean Air Flight KAL-007, which carried 269 passengers and crew, including a congressman from Georgia, Larry McDonald. KAL 007 had strayed over the Soviet Union on 1 September 1983 on its way from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, South Korea. Andropov was advised by his Defence Minister Dmitriy Ustinov and by the head of the KGB Viktor Chebrikov to keep secret the fact that the Soviet Union held in its possession the sought-after black box from KAL 007.
Death and funeral

In February 1983, Andropov suffered total renal 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.[46] 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.
Personal life

Andropov lived at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the same building in which Suslov and Brezhnev also lived. He 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. 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.
Legacy
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".[47] 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."[47] 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.[48]
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",[47] 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."[47] 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.[49] However, these were unproven rumours. It is also questionable whether Andropov spoke any English at all.[50] 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.
Attitudes to Andropov
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."[51] Putin has praised Andropov's "honesty and uprightness."[52] 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."[53] 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.[54] According to Roy Medvedev, the year that Andropov spent in power was memorable for increasing repression against dissidents.[54] 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.[55] 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.[56][57] 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.[58] 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.[59]
According to Natalya Gorbanevskaya, now for some reason, we usually say that after Andropov's coming to power dissident movement went into decline, as if it itself went into decline.[60] The movement did not go into decline but was strangled.[60] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, repression was most severe, a lot of people were picked up for a second time, and when you are taken away for a second time, then your term is longer, and the camp regime is not strict but specific, and when Andropov became General Secretary, he introduced an Article under which for violations of camp regime you could be put into not only to a punishment cell but received an additional term up to three years, that is a person for his two or three remarks could be sent not home but to another camp to criminals.[60] And in those years there were a lot of deaths in camps not from hunger-strikes, but just from a disease, lack of medical care, etc.[60]
Honours and awards
Soviet Awards



































Hero of Socialist Labor, 1974[9]Order of Lenin, four times[9]Order of the October Revolution[9]Order of the Red Banner, 1944[9]Order of the Red Banner of Labour, three times (incl. 1944)[9]Medal "Partisan of the Patriotic War", 1st classMedal "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 BulgariaOrder of Georgi Dimitrov (Bulgaria)Order of the Flag of the Republic of HungaryOrder of Sukhbaatar (Mongolia)Order of the Red Banner (Mongolia)Jubilee Medal "50 Years Anniversary of the Mongolian Revolution"
Speeches and works













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Further reading



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Primary sources
Johanna Granville, trans., ,
 (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington, D.C.), Spring 1995, pp.22–23, 29–34.



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