Yuri Andropov

• 1. Introduction

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  Yuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69, after spending barely 15 months as the leader of the Soviet Union. He entered the Kremlin as the first former head of the KGB ever to become General Secretary, and he left it in a coffin, mourned by nations from Cuba to Costa Rica and buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. His personal background was, at the time, a near-total mystery in the West: major newspapers printed profiles of him that were inconsistent, and in several cases fabricated. Who was this man, and what was he actually building inside the Soviet state? The answers reach back to a falsified birth certificate, a watchmaker's doorstep, and the lampposts of Budapest.

• 2. A Fabricated Origin

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  Andropov was born in Moscow, where his mother worked at a women's gymnasium from 1913 to 1917, yet the official biography placed his birth in Stanitsa Nagutskaya in the Stavropol region on the 15th of June 1914. His earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov, which he changed to Yuri Andropov several years later. His original birth certificate disappeared.

  The grandmother he relied on was not a Ryazan peasant relative at all. During a 1937 vetting for Communist Party membership, investigators found that the woman living with Andropov and supporting his claimed origins was in fact a nurse who had worked for the Fleckenstein family long before Andropov was born. The family's story was remarkable in its own right: Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, a Jewish watchmaker and Finnish citizen living in Moscow, had adopted Andropov's mother after she was abandoned on his doorstep. Karl was killed in 1915 during an anti-German pogrom in Moscow when he was mistaken for a German.

  Andropov gave different accounts of his father's fate, describing in one version a divorce and in another a death from illness. The man recorded as his father, Vladimir Andropov, was actually his stepfather, who died of typhus in 1919. His biological father is unknown; a date of 1916 appears in Andropov's 1932 resume. Andropov's mother came from a line of merchants, and a 1937 document reported that his father had served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. He joined the Communist Party in 1939.

• 3. Komsomol to the Kremlin

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  Andropov graduated from the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College in 1936 after working as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line. At 16 he was already a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, known as the Komsomol, working in the town of Mozdok in the North Ossetian ASSR.

  He rose quickly inside Komsomol structures, becoming First Secretary of the Yaroslavl Regional Committee of the YCL in 1938 and then First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol in the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic from 1940 to 1944. His official biography claimed he took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland during World War II, though modern researchers have found no trace of his supposed squad.

  After leaving Komsomol for Communist Party work in 1944, Andropov studied at the University of Petrozavodsk between 1946 and 1951. By 1947 he was elected Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, and in 1951 he was transferred to the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow, where he became first an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment. Those years of patient institutional climbing placed him precisely where he needed to be when the next crisis arrived.

• 4. The Butcher of Budapest

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  In July 1954, Andropov was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, arriving just two years before the country erupted in revolution. When the 1956 Hungarian Uprising began, he was the man who convinced Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary. He earned the name "The Butcher of Budapest" for his ruthless role in crushing the uprising. Hungarian leaders were arrested; Imre Nagy and others were executed.

  Historian Christopher Andrew described what Andropov witnessed from the windows of his own embassy: officers of the hated Hungarian security service, the Allamvedelmi Hatsag, being strung up from lampposts by the population. According to Andrew, "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." Andrew wrote that when other Communist regimes later seemed at risk, in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981, Andropov was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival.

  This conviction, which Andrew called a "Hungarian complex", shaped nearly every major decision Andropov made for the next three decades. He returned to Moscow in 1957 to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers' Parties in Socialist Countries, a position he held until 1967.

• 5. KGB Chairman

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  On the 3rd of July 1967, Andropov proposed establishing the KGB's Fifth Directorate to handle political opposition, and by the end of July it was operating, entering in its files cases on all Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He had been appointed head of the KGB on the 10th of May 1967 on Mikhail Suslov's recommendation. He was promoted to candidate member of the Politburo at the same time.

  His tenure as KGB chairman lasted fifteen years, making him the longest-serving chairman. Throughout that period, Andropov aimed at what he described as "the destruction of dissent in all its forms", insisting that "the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet state". He deployed mass arrests, involuntary commitments to psychiatric hospitals, and pressure on rights activists to emigrate. According to Yuri Felshtinsky and Boris Gulko, Andropov and Fifth Directorate head Filipp Bobkov originated the use of psychiatry for punitive purposes. His plan for a network of psychiatric hospitals to defend the Soviet order was submitted to the Central Committee on the 29th of April 1969.

  In 1970, Andropov authorized an operation to destroy the remains of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their children, buried in Magdeburg in 1946, out of concern the burial site would become a neo-Nazi shrine. The remains were burned and crushed; the ashes were thrown into the Biederitz River. He was promoted to full member of the Politburo in 1973.

  During the Prague Spring in 1968, Andropov was the main advocate of "extreme measures" against Czechoslovakia. Classified documents later released by Vasili Mitrokhin showed that the KGB manufactured a fear that Czechoslovakia was at risk of NATO aggression or a coup. When agent Oleg Kalugin reported from Washington that he had obtained documents proving neither the CIA nor any other agency was manipulating the Czechoslovak reform movement, his message was destroyed because it contradicted the conspiracy theory Andropov had fabricated.

  In 1977, Andropov persuaded Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered during the Russian Civil War, had become a site of monarchist pilgrimage. With Politburo approval, the house was demolished in September 1977, less than a year before the murders' 60th anniversary. The underground samizdat publication Chronicle of Current Events documented Andropov's repressive campaign throughout his time as KGB chairman until it was finally forced out of existence after its issue of the 30th of June 1982.

• 6. Fifteen Months in Power

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  Two days after Leonid Brezhnev's death on the 10th of November 1982, Andropov was elected General Secretary on the 12th of November 1982. He was the first former head of the KGB to reach that position. His appointment was met with apprehension in the West given his history.

  At home, Andropov attempted to repair the Soviet economy by targeting workforce discipline: absentee employees could be arrested, and penalties were introduced for tardiness. Select industries gained greater autonomy from state regulations, and factory managers were allowed to retain more of their profits. A 4% rise in industrial output followed, along with increased investment in new technologies such as robotics. He also dismissed 18 ministers and 37 first secretaries of regional and republic party committees during his anti-corruption campaign. Criminal cases were opened against high-level officials; several members of Brezhnev's circle, according to one account, shot, gassed, or otherwise killed themselves out of fear of the investigations.

  In foreign policy, Andropov faced a cascade of crises. He had come to believe the Afghanistan invasion was a mistake and half-heartedly explored a negotiated withdrawal, but the war continued. On the 8th of March 1983, President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire". On the 23rd of March he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. Andropov responded by saying, "It is time they stopped... searching for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war.... Engaging in this is not just irresponsible. It is insane."

  On the 1st of September 1983, Soviet fighters shot down Korean Air Flight KAL-007, which carried 269 passengers and crew on its route from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, South Korea, after it strayed over Soviet territory. Andropov kept secret that the Soviet Union had recovered the aircraft's black box, which proved the pilot had made a typographical error in the automatic pilot data. The Soviet air defense system, unprepared to deal with a civilian airliner, followed orders without question. Soviet media described the shootdown as a brave response to a Western provocation.

  One of the most publicized episodes of Andropov's tenure was his response to a letter from Samantha Smith, a 10-year-old American girl. He invited her to visit the Soviet Union, and she came, but he was by then too ill to meet her, inadvertently revealing his grave condition to the world. By November 1983, the Soviet Union had suspended all arms control negotiations. In August 1983, Andropov had announced that the USSR would stop all work on space-based weapons; by the end of the year the entire negotiating framework had collapsed.

• 7. Death and What Followed

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  Andropov suffered total kidney failure in February 1983. By August 1983 he had entered Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital, where he would spend the remainder of his life. In late January 1984 his blood toxicity caused periods of unconsciousness. He died at 16:50 on the 9th of February 1984. The post-mortem report listed interstitial nephritis, nephrosclerosis, residual hypertension, diabetes, and chronic kidney deficiency.

  His state funeral in Red Square drew U.S. Vice President George H. W. Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Italian President Sandro Pertini, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Cuban President Fidel Castro, and Irish President Patrick Hillery, among many others. Syria declared seven days of mourning; Cuba and the USSR itself declared four. Andropov was buried in one of the 12 tombs between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin Wall.

  Andropov had wanted Mikhail Gorbachev to succeed him and went so far as to insert a paragraph to that effect into a report for a Central Committee plenum that did not convene until after his death. He was ignored. Konstantin Chernenko succeeded him, already terminally ill, and died in office in March 1985 after 13 months. Chernenko was then succeeded by Gorbachev, who implemented the perestroika and glasnost reforms. On the 26th of December 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Vladislav Zubok later wrote that the idea of renovating the Soviet Union originated not with Gorbachev but with his mentor Andropov, who had favored "controlled, conservative reforms".

• 8. A Contested Legacy

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  Author David Remnick, who covered the Soviet Union for a major American newspaper in the 1980s, called Andropov "profoundly corrupt, a beast". Russian historian Nikita Petrov said he "was a typical Soviet jailer who violated human rights" and described it as a shame for the USSR that a persecutor of the intelligentsia became the country's leader.

  Alexander Yakovlev, later the ideologist of perestroika under Gorbachev, offered a different kind of condemnation: "In a way I always thought Andropov was the most dangerous of all of them, simply because he was smarter than the rest." Andropov himself had recalled Yakovlev back to Moscow in 1983 after a ten-year exile as ambassador to Canada, an exile imposed for Yakovlev's attack on Russian chauvinism.

  Political scientist Georgy Arbatov held Andropov responsible for deportations, political arrests, the abuse of psychiatry, and the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, herself a dissident whose name appeared in the KGB's case files, stated that after Andropov came to power the dissident movement went into decline not on its own but because it was strangled. In those years, she noted, violations of camp rules could result in a punishment cell and an additional sentence of up to three years.

  Many in the West and among party circles nonetheless regarded Andropov as a reformer compared to the stagnation of Brezhnev's later years. Historian Moshe Lewin described him as a politician free of the habitual arrogance of Soviet leaders, one who was willing to seek dialogue with social democrats in Western countries. Those who knew him personally, including Roy Medvedev and Vladimir Kryuchkov, remembered his politeness, intelligence, and an exceptionally sharp memory; according to Aleksandr Chuchyalin, Andropov read around 600 pages a day while working at the Kremlin and remembered everything he read. Vladimir Putin, in a message at an exhibition dedicated to Andropov, called him "a man of talent with great abilities" and praised his "honesty and uprightness". Whether Andropov might have reformed the USSR without dissolving it, as a possible "Russian Deng Xiaoping", remains the central unanswered question of his legacy.