Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (15 June [O.S. 2 June] 1914 – 9 February 1984) was a Soviet politician who served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from late 1982 until his death in 1984. He previously served as the chairman of the KGB from 1967 until 1982.
Earlier in his career, Andropov served as the Soviet ambassador to Hungary from 1954 to 1957. During this period, he took part in the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Later, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, he was appointed chairman of the KGB on 10 May 1967. As Brezhnev's health deteriorated from the mid-1970s onward, Andropov began to increasingly dictate Soviet policy alongside Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov.
Upon Brezhnev's death on 10 November 1982, Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary and, by extension, as the leader of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, he sought to implement reforms to eliminate corruption and economic inefficiency in the country by criminalizing truancy in the workplace and investigating longtime officials for violations of party discipline. Under Andropov's leadership, the Cold War intensified while the regime struggled to handle the growing crisis in the Soviet economy. His major long‑term impact was bringing to the fore a new generation of young reformers as energetic as himself, including Yegor Ligachyov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and, most importantly, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Upon suffering kidney failure in February 1983, Andropov's health began to deteriorate rapidly. He died aged 69 on 9 February 1984, having led the country for only about 15 months.
There has been much contention over Andropov's family background. According to the official biography, Andropov was born in Stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai, Russia) on 15 June 1914. His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was a railway worker of Don Cossack descent who died of typhus in 1919. His mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein (none of the official sources mention 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 Jewish watchmaker and Finnish citizen Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, who lived in Moscow. He and his wife, Eudoxia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein, adopted and raised her.
Andropov's earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov which he changed to Yuri Andropov several years later. His original birth certificate disappeared, but it has been established that Andropov was born in Moscow, where his mother worked at a women's gymnasium from 1913 to 1917.
On various occasions, Andropov gave different death dates for his mother: 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931. The story of her adoption was also likely a mystification. In 1937, Andropov was vetted when he applied for Communist Party membership, and it turned out that "the sister of his native maternal grandmother" (whom he called 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 working for Fleckenstein long before Andropov was born.
It was also reported that Andropov's mother came from a line of merchants. Karl Fleckenstein was the rich proprietor of a jewellery business which was run by his wife after his death in 1915 when he was mistaken for a German during the infamous anti-German pogrom in Moscow and killed, although Andropov characterized the pogrom as anti-Jewish. The whole family could have been turned into lishentsy and stripped of basic rights had she not abandoned the store after another pogrom in 1917, invented a proletarian background, and left Moscow for the Stavropol Governorate along with Andropov's mother.
Andropov gave different versions of his father's fate: in one, he divorced his mother soon after his birth; in another he died of illness. The "father" in question, Vladimir Andropov, was in fact his stepfather, who lived and worked in Nagutskaya and died of typhus in 1919. The Fyodorov surname belonged to his second stepfather, Viktor Fyodorov, a machinist's assistant turned schoolteacher. Andropov's biological father is unknown; he probably died in 1916, a date in Andropov's 1932 résumé. During the 1937 vetting, it was reported that his father served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. Andropov joined the Communist Party in 1939.
Early career in the Communist Party
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, then a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (YCL, or Komsomol), Andropov was a worker in the town of Mozdok in the North Ossetian ASSR.
Andropov became full-time secretary of the YCL of the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical School and was soon promoted to 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 his official biography, during World War II Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland although modern researchers have found no trace of his supposed squad. From 1944 onward, 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 the CPSU Central Committee. He was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the committee.
Suppression of the Hungarian Uprising
In July 1954, Andropov was appointed Ambassador to Hungary. He held this position during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Andropov played a key role in crushing the uprising. He convinced Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary. Andropov is known as "The Butcher of Budapest" for his ruthless suppression of the uprising. 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 [the Államvédelmi Hatóság (AVH)] 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".
Chairmanship of the KGB and Politburo career