Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov - Chairman of the KGB in 1967-82. and General Secretary of the CPSU from November 1982 until his death 15 months later. He was also the USSR Ambassador to Hungary from 1954 to 1957 and participated in the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. As Chairman of the KGB, he decided to send troops to Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring and fought against the dissident movement.
Andropov's death: in what year?
Yuri Vladimirovich died when he was 69 years old. The date of Andropov's death is 1984-09-02. The strong character and intelligence combined in him allowed him to leave a significant mark in the history of his country. However, he had a chance to lead the Soviet Union only a year before his death. Andropov by that time was already a sick 68-year-old man. He died and was unable to consolidate his power or begin to effectively govern the country.
After Brezhnev's death at the end of 1982, Andropov led the USSR for less than a year. Already in August 1983, he disappeared from sight and was incapacitated for several months. For a shortduring his time as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he promoted many of his proteges to the top and middle echelons of the party, a decisive step towards the bold reforms he envisioned.
But the death of Yuri Andropov did not allow the citizens of the USSR to find out what he was going to do next. It's an ironic end to a long 30-year career in which he was constantly at the center of important events.
Cause of death of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov
The announcement of the tragic death was played on radio and television throughout the next day starting at 2:30 pm. It was followed by a series of bulletins on the causes of Andropov's death and on the funeral arrangements.
Brezhnev's protege, 72-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, who worked as second secretary, headed the funeral commission. Foreign diplomats took this as a sign that after the death of Andropov, it was he who could become the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. And in this they were not mistaken.
The Soviet leadership announced that official mourning would last until the burial in Red Square.
The cause of Yuri Andropov's death was chronic kidney disease. She did not allow him to perform his state functions for 6 months until the tragic end. After Andropov's death, a number of vacancies became vacant. In addition to being a party leader, he was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council (equivalent to head of state) and chairman of the Defense Council, with powers overarmed forces.
According to the official statement, the cause of Andropov's death was a long illness: he suffered from nephritis, diabetes and hypertension, complicated by chronic kidney failure. The General Secretary of the CPSU died at 16:50 on Thursday.
According to the medical report, a year before Andropov's death, he began to be treated with an artificial kidney, but in January 1984 his condition worsened.
Mourning and funeral
Official statements did not state where he died. All that was mentioned was his hospitalization in a special clinic at Stalin's dacha in Kuntsevo, a southwestern suburb of Moscow. Stalin also died there in March 1953
The first sign of Yu. V. Andropov's death was the broadcast of mourning music on the radio. This went on for several hours until the announcement, which was read by the announcer Igor Kirillov. During the TV broadcast, a portrait of the Secretary-General with red and black mourning ribbons was shown on the screen.
Although 4 days of official mourning was declared after Andropov's death, television continued to show the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, where Soviet athletes were the main contenders for victory.
The funeral took place on Tuesday, February 14 at 12 noon. Andropov was buried behind the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin on Red Square near the Kremlin wall next to Brezhnev and other major figures, including Stalin.
KGB Chairman
Andropov's main post before he became General SecretaryCPSU, was the position of Chairman of the State Security Committee (KGB), which he held during a difficult period from 1967 to 1982. When he assumed this position, his colleagues in the leadership were concerned about the sudden emergence of a semi-organized protest movement among many of the country's intellectuals. Andropov's task was to eradicate the dissident movement. He did so with cold prudence and often ruthless efficiency.
Until his death, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, leading the repressions, created for himself the image of an intellectual. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 uprising, head of the KGB, and general secretary of the party, he combined a strict adherence to the Kremlin's hard line with an ingratiating manner of speaking. His glasses and, in later years, his stoop gave the impression of intelligence, which, however, his actions did not confirm.
Abroad, Andropov's rule is likely to be remembered as the time when the USSR suffered perhaps its greatest political defeat since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the NATO bloc began deploying new nuclear missiles in Europe. The failed propaganda campaign to prevent this was a continuation of the politics of the Brezhnev era, as were all major foreign policies under Andropov.
In the USSR, he was remembered as a man who tried to impose severe discipline on the people and get rid of corruption within the party elite. On both counts, he achieved only modestsuccess. He also launched a modest program of experimental economic change that freed business leaders in selected industries and regions from the constraints of central planning.
While such measures contributed to 4 percent economic growth in 1982, doubling the previous year's result under Brezhnev, they did not implement the recommendations of economists who advocated greater decentralization and the introduction of market mechanisms. Critics of Andropov argued that he sought to improve the functioning of the existing system, rather than introduce institutional changes.
Ordinary citizens remember him for cheap vodka, which was nicknamed "andropovka", which appeared on sale shortly after he came to power.
Short biography
From Andropov's early life, little is known for certain. He was born on 1914-15-06 near Stavropol in the family of a railway worker. At various times between 1930 and 1932, he worked as a telegraph operator, an apprentice projectionist and a sailor, and at some point graduated from the Rybinsk River College.
By the mid-1930s, Andropov began to engage in political activities, starting as a Komsomol organizer at a shipyard. By 1938, he worked as the first secretary of the Yaroslavl regional committee of the Komsomol, and in 1939, at the age of 25, he joined the Communist Party.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Andropov was a rising party functionary in Karelia, on Finland's eastern border. He spent 11years between 1940 and 1951, promoted by Otto Kuusinen, the highest party leader of the Karelian-Finnish SSR, formed after the capture of part of Finland in 1940, and became a member of the republican Central Committee and Supreme Soviet.
In 1951, Kuusinen, who became a member of the Presidium, brought Andropov to Moscow, where he headed the political department serving the Central Committee. It was his first position at the center of Soviet power, where he was in front of the people who would later become Khrushchev's inner circle.
Role in the suppression of the Hungarian uprising
In 1954, Andropov was sent to Hungary as an adviser to the Soviet embassy in Budapest. He became an ambassador at an unusually young age, when he was 42 years old. Then the first serious test suddenly fell on his lot. In the autumn of 1956, a sudden anti-communist uprising brought former premier Imre Nagy to power in Budapest. The new coalition government declared Hungary neutral and non-communist and announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.
Faced with this crisis, Ambassador Andropov led the Soviet Union's strenuous and clandestine efforts to install the regime of Janos Kadar, who was still the leader of Hungary. Kadar called on the USSR to send troops. The army and tanks, suppressing the determined resistance of the Hungarians, took control of Budapest during bloody battles.
Nagy sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. After assurances from Soviet emissaries led by Andropov, he left with guarantees of personal safety. But hiscaptured, taken to Romania, and then returned to Hungary, where he was tried for treason and executed.
Career advancement
In March 1957, Andropov was transferred to Moscow. As a warning to partners in the military-political bloc, he was appointed head of the department for relations with the communist parties. In this role, he traveled frequently throughout Eastern Europe and took part in the negotiations, which, however, could not prevent the Sino-Soviet split. And in 1968, after joining the KGB, Andropov supported Brezhnev during the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries.
Despite being promoted by Khrushchev, Western Sovietologists believed that his true patron was Mikhail Suslov, who for almost 30 years after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was the conservative ideologue of the Kremlin. Suslov is believed to have been behind Khrushchev's removal from power in the fall of 1964.
Relations with Brezhnev
When the General Secretary of the CPSU spoke out in May 1967 against Khrushchev's henchman who headed the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, he chose Andropov as the new head of the secret police. This step was important in strengthening the power of the General Secretary.
Six years later, Brezhnev completed this process. In April 1973, the head of the KGB, Andropov, along with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Marshal Andrei Grechko, received the right to vote in the ruling Politburo. For the first time since the Stalin era, the head of the secret service became a full member of the Politburo, and for the first time sinceKhrushchev came to power, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense received full rights as members of this narrow circle. A few years later, when Grechko died, his successor, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov, received the status of a full member of the Politburo. Thus, Brezhnev formed a triumvirate, which ruled even after his departure.
Andropov maintained close, if not warm, ties with Leonid Ilyich. For many years, the head of the KGB and his wife lived in an apartment above Brezhnev at 24 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. And on the floor below lived the Minister of Internal Affairs, Nikolai Shchelokov, who was in charge of the police. With such a large gathering of dignitaries, the large building was heavily guarded.
On weekdays, Brezhnev could be seen in the front passenger seat of his shiny black limousine, racing to and from the Kremlin. But Andropov remained an elusive figure. He was rarely seen entering and leaving the KGB headquarters located in the Lubyanka prison on Dzerzhinsky Square. As head of intelligence and the secret police, Andropov had little contact with representatives of the West. The only place where foreigners could see him personally were the meetings of the Supreme Council, which took place several times a year. Foreign correspondents peered through binoculars from the press gallery on the second floor of the meeting room for a long time to learn about the relationship of a handful of elders who ruled the country.
Andropov before Brezhnev's death was sitting in the top row of the leadership next to Ustinov and Gromyko. Against the backdrop of the hard closed views of other figures, this trio struck with lively personal conversations. There was a special warmthbetween Ustinov and Andropov as they were the most powerful part of the Soviet hierarchy.
Fighting dissidents
Colleagues were grateful to Andropov for his ability to carry out the repression that the regime considered necessary to carry out in a calm manner, avoiding criticism at home or sharp protests from abroad. Andropov's relatively benign leadership of the security system came at a time when the Kremlin was pursuing a policy of détente and rapprochement with the West.
For example, before he came to power, Soviet writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were imprisoned in 1966 for sending their works abroad for publication. Large-scale protests in the West and unprecedented opposition from Soviet writers and intellectuals have become a burden on the head of the KGB Semichastny.
Faced with similar unrepentant writer activists in the 1970s, Andropov's KGB pursued a policy of expelling dissidents to the West. This softened the repressive image of the Kremlin, which effectively eliminated dissenters from the cultural scene.
The most famous exile of this era was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but there were dozens like him. The continued impoverishment of Soviet culture is the price that the Soviet security service under Andropov was willing to pay to keep the population obedient.
Rise to power
Andropov's ascent was fast. When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, he was a member of a small "rapid response group" that led the militaryoperation. In May 1982, after the death of his patron Suslov, Andropov was appointed to his place in the Secretariat of the Central Committee, and 2 days later he resigned from the post of head of the KGB. Many regarded this as a demotion.
In the last 6 months of Leonid Illich's life, Western experts observed a behind-the-scenes struggle for power in the inner circle of the Secretary General. But after Brezhnev's death, Andropov and Chernenko did not fight for long. In the Kremlin, under the cover of the army, the Central Committee quickly approved his appointment to the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party. The official statement said that Andropov's candidacy was proposed by Chernenko, and that the vote was unanimous. Western analysts came to the conclusion that the support of Gromyko and Ustinov was decisive.
Seven months later, 1983-16-06, he headed the Presidium of the Supreme Council. But despite this consolidation of power, the date of Andropov's death was approaching. Foreign guests after rare meetings with him reported that he was physically weak, although he was intellectually perfectly he althy.
Signs of illness
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who traveled to Moscow in early July, described Andropov after their meeting as a very serious man with brilliant intellectual abilities. According to him, this was evidenced by the way he presented his arguments. He knew every detail of the subject under discussion.
The final meeting with Western visitors before Andropov's death took place on August 18, when he receiveda delegation of 9 US Democratic Senators. One of them noted that the right hand of the Soviet leader was trembling a little. But the senators were impressed by Andropov. According to them, he was a tough, prudent person. It was felt that he did not want war.
When a Korean Airways plane was shot down over Sakhalin Island on September 1, it was said to be on vacation, and a subsequent series of Soviet statements about the crisis were made by the military and diplomats.
In November, he missed two important celebrations marking the anniversary of the October Revolution, and on December 26, his speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, calling for better economic planning and labor productivity, was read in his absence.
After Andropov's death, two of his children remained. Son Igor, a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, worked in the Soviet delegations at the conferences on European security in Madrid and Stockholm. His daughter Irina worked in the editorial office of a Moscow magazine. His wife Tatyana predeceased him several years.
Cult of Andropov
Vladimir Putin initiated a small cult of the longest-serving KGB leader in Soviet history. As head of the FSB, he laid flowers at Andropov's grave and erected a memorial plaque for him on the Lubyanka. Later, when he became president, he ordered another memorial plaque to be erected on the house where the deceased lived and a monument to him in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
But Putin wanted to restore more than the memory of him - he wanted to resurrect the mindset of the old leaderThe KGB, which was not a democrat, but only tried to modernize the Soviet system.
