page_title: Yuri Andropov
section_title: Early career in the Communist Party
hierarchical_section_title: Yuri Andropov / Early career in the Communist Party
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Андропов Юрий Владимирович, комсомольский билет
context_page_description: Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union 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. He was named Chairman of the KGB on 10 May 1967. In this position, he oversaw a massive crackdown on dissent carried out via mass arrests and the involuntary psychiatric commitment of people deemed "socially undesirable". After Brezhnev suffered a stroke in 1975, Andropov formed a troika alongside Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Andrei Grechko which dictated policy for the rest of Brezhnev’s rule.
  Upon Brezhnev's death on 10 November 1982, Yuri Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary and leader of the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936. As a teenager he worked as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line. 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.
  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.
  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. 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.
  In 1951 Andropov was transferred to CPSU Central Committee. He was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the Committee.
caption: Komsomol membership card issued to Yuri Andropov in 1939.
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