Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov - Chairman of the KGB in 1967â82 and the 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 1956 Hungarian Revolution. As the KGB Chairman, 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. Andropovâs death date is 02/09/1984. The strong character and intellect, combined in him, allowed him to leave a significant mark in the history of his country. However, the chance to head the Soviet Union appeared only a year before his death. Andropov by that time was already a sick 68-year-old man. He died and could not strengthen his power or begin to effectively manage the country.
After Brezhnevâs death in late 1982, Andropov led the USSR for less than a year. Already in August 1983, he disappeared from sight and was incapacitated for several months. In the short time during which he was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he led many of his proteges to the highest and middle echelons of the party, which was a decisive step towards the bold reforms that he proposed to implement.
But the death of Yuri Andropov did not allow the citizens of the USSR to find out what he was going to do next. This is the ironic end of a long 30-year career, during which he was constantly in the center of important events.
The cause of death of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov
The announcement of the tragic death was read on radio and television the next day starting at 14:30. This was followed by a series of ballots on the causes of Andropov's death and on the procedure for holding the funeral.
Brezhnev's protege, 72-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, who worked as the second secretary, headed the funeral commission. Foreign diplomats took this as a sign that after Andropovâs death, he could become the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee. And in this they were not mistaken.
The Soviet leadership said that official mourning would last until burial on Red Square.
The cause of death of Yuri Andropov was a chronic kidney disease. She did not allow him to fulfill his state functions for 6 months before the tragic end. After the death of Andropov, a number of vacancies were vacated. In addition to being a party leader, he was the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council (equivalent to the head of state) and the chairman of the Defense Council, with authority over the armed forces.
According to an official statement, the cause of Andropovâs death was a long illness: he suffered from nephritis, diabetes and hypertension, complicated by chronic kidney failure. The CPSU General Secretary died at 16:50 on Thursday.
According to the medical report, a year before his death, Andropov began to be treated with an artificial kidney, but in January 1984 his condition worsened.
Mourning and funeral
Official statements did not report where he died. It was only mentioned that he was hospitalized in a special clinic located at Stalin's dacha in Kuntsevo, a southwestern suburb of Moscow. Stalin died there in March 1953.
The first sign of the death of Yu. V. Andropov was a radio broadcast of mourning music. This lasted several hours before the announcement, which was read by the announcer Igor Kirillov. During the broadcast, a portrait of the Secretary-General was shown on screen with red and black mourning ribbons.
Although 4-day official mourning was declared after Andropovâs death, television continued to broadcast the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, where Soviet athletes were the main contenders for the 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 Chair
The main post of Andropov before he became the Secretary General of the CPSU was the position of Chairman of the State Security Committee (KGB), which he held during the difficult period from 1967 to 1982. When he assumed this position, his colleagues in the leadership were concerned about the sudden appearance of a semi-organized protest movement among many intellectuals of the country. Andropovâs task was to root out the dissident movement. He did this with cold prudence and often ruthless effectiveness.
Until his death, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, managing repressions, created for himself the image of an intellectual. As the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 uprising, the head of the KGB and the party's general secretary, he combined his stern commitment to the Kremlinâs tough line with an insinuating manner of speaking. His glasses and in subsequent years his stoop created an impression of intelligence, which, however, his actions did not confirm.
Abroad, Andropovâs rule is likely to be remembered as the time when the USSR suffered perhaps the greatest political defeat after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the NATO bloc began to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe. The unsuccessful propaganda campaign aimed at preventing this was a continuation of the policy of the Brezhnev era, as well as all the main directions of foreign policy 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 modest success. In addition, a modest program of experimental economic changes began under him, in accordance with which the heads of enterprises in certain industries and regions were given freedom from the restrictions of central planning.
Although such measures contributed to 4 percent economic growth in 1982, which doubled last yearâs result under Brezhnev, they did not provide for the implementation of the recommendations of economists who advocated greater decentralization and the introduction of market mechanisms. Andropovâs critics claimed that he sought to improve the performance of the existing system, rather than introduce institutional changes.
Ordinary citizens, he was remembered for cheap vodka, which was nicknamed the "andropovka", which appeared on sale shortly after he came to power.
short biography
Of the early life of Andropov, little is known for certain. He was born on 06/15/1914 near Stavropol in the family of a railwayman. At various times between 1930 and 1932, he worked as a telegraph operator, apprentice to the projection engineer and a sailor, and at some point he graduated from the Rybinsk River College.
By the mid-30s, Andropov began to engage in political activities, starting with the post of Komsomol at the shipyard. By 1938, he worked as 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 an ascending party functionary in Karelia, located on the eastern border of Finland. He spent 11 years there 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 Council.
In 1951, Kuusinen, who became a member of the Presidium, brought Andropov to Moscow, where he headed the political department serving the Central Committee. This was his first position in the center of Soviet power, where he was in front of people who later became Khrushchevâs inner circle.
The role in suppressing 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 fall of 1956, a sudden anti-communist uprising brought former Prime Minister 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 tense and secret attempts of the Soviet Union to establish 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 decisive resistance of the Hungarians, took control of Budapest during the bloody battles.
Nagy sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. After the assurances of the Soviet emissaries, led by Andropov, he left him with guarantees of personal security. But he was captured, taken to Romania, and then returned to Hungary, where he was tried for treason and executed.
Career
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 often traveled throughout Eastern Europe and took part in negotiations, which, however, could not prevent the Sino-Soviet split. And in 1968, after moving to the KGB, Andropov supported Brezhnev during the invasion of the Warsaw Pact countries into Czechoslovakia.
Despite the fact that he was promoted by Khrushchev, Western Soviet scholars believed that his true patron was Mikhail Suslov, who for almost 30 years after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was the conservative ideologist of the Kremlin. Suslov is believed to have been behind Khrushchevâs removal from the leadership of the country in the fall of 1964.
Relations with Brezhnev
When the Secretary General of the CPSU in May 1967 spoke out against the Khrushchevite protege 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 Secretary General.
Six years later, Brezhnev completed this process. In April 1973, the head of the KGB, Andropov, together with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko and the Minister of Defense Marshal Andrei Grechko received the right to vote in the ruling Politburo. For the first time since the Stalin era, the head of the special services became a full member of the Politburo, and for the first time since Khrushchev came to power, the ministers of foreign affairs and defense received full rights of 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, who ruled 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 on 24. Kutuzovsky Prospekt. And on the floor below, there was Interior Minister Nikolai Shchelokov, who led the police. With such a large concentration of dignitaries, the large building was carefully guarded.
On weekdays, Brezhnev could be seen in the front passenger seat of his shiny black limo rushing to the Kremlin and back. But Andropov remained an elusive figure. He was rarely seen entering or leaving the KGB headquarters located in the Lubyanka prison on Dzerzhinsky Square. Leading intelligence and secret police, Andropov had little contact with representatives of the West. The only place where foreigners could see him in person was the Supreme Council, held several times a year. Foreign correspondents peered through binoculars from the press gallery on the second floor of the conference room to find out about the relationship of a handful of elders who ruled the country.
Andropov until the death of Brezhnev was sitting in the top row of the leadership next to Ustinov and Gromyko. Against the backdrop of the hard, closed looks of other figures, this trio struck with lively personal conversations. Particular warmth was felt between Ustinov and Andropov, since they were the most powerful part of the Soviet hierarchy.
The fight against dissidents
Colleagues were grateful to Andropov for his ability to carry out repressions, which the regime considered necessary to carry out in a quiet regime, avoiding criticism in the country or sharp protests from abroad. The relatively soft leadership of Andropovâs security system occurred at a time when the Kremlin was pursuing a policy of detente and rapprochement with the West.
For example, before he came to power, Soviet writers Julius Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were imprisoned in 1966 for sending their works abroad for publication. Large-scale protests in the West and the unprecedented opposition of Soviet writers and intellectuals have become a burden for the head of the KGB Semichastny.
Faced with similar unrepentant writer activists in the 1970s, the KGB Andropova pursued a policy of expelling dissidents to the West. This softened the repressive image of the Kremlin, effectively eliminating those who disagree with the cultural scene.
The most famous exile of this era was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but there were dozens of people like him. The continuing impoverishment of Soviet culture is the price that the USSR security service under Andropov was ready to pay in order to keep the population obedient.
Rise to power
Climbing Andropov was quick. When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, he was a member of the small âquick reaction groupâ that led the military operation. In May 1982, after the death of his patron Suslov, Andropov was appointed to his place in the Central Committee Secretariat, and after 2 days he resigned from the post of head of the KGB. Many regarded this as a reduction in his rights.
In the last 6 months of Leonid Illichâs life, Western experts observed a behind-the-scenes struggle for power in the immediate circle of the Secretary General. But after the death of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko did not fight for long. In the Kremlin, under the guise of an army, the Central Committee quickly approved his appointment to the post of Secretary General of the Communist Party. The official statement said that Chernenko proposed Andropov, and that the vote was unanimous. Western analysts concluded that the support of Gromyko and Ustinov was decisive.
Seven months later, on June 16, 1983, he headed the Presidium of the Supreme Council. But, despite this consolidation of power, the date of Andropovâs death was approaching. Foreign guests after rare meetings with him reported that he was physically weak, although intellectually was completely healthy.
Signs of illness
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who went to Moscow in early July, described Andropov after their meeting as a very serious person with brilliant intellectual abilities. According to him, this was evidenced by the way he presents his arguments. He knew all the details of the subject under discussion.
The final meeting with Andropovâs death with Western visitors took place on August 18, when he received a 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, calculating person. It was felt that he did not want war.
When a Korean Airlines plane was shot down over Sakhalin Island on September 1, he was said to be on vacation, and the subsequent series of Soviet statements about the crisis were made by military and diplomats.
In November, he missed two important ceremonial events dedicated to the anniversary of the October Revolution, and on December 26 his speech at the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, calling for better economic planning and labor productivity, was read out in his absence.
After the death of Andropov, two of his children remained. Son Igor, a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, worked in Soviet delegations at conferences on European security in Madrid and Stockholm. His daughter Irina worked in the editorial office of a Moscow magazine. His wife Tatyana died a few years earlier than he.
Cult of Andropov
Vladimir Putin initiated a small cult of the man who led the KGB in Soviet history for the longest time. As the head of the FSB, he laid flowers at Andropovâs grave and erected a plaque on the Lubyanka. Later, becoming president, he ordered to install another memorial plaque on the house where the deceased lived, and to erect a monument to him in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
But Putin wanted to restore more than his memory â he wanted to resurrect the way of thinking of the old KGB leader, who was not a democrat, but was just trying to modernize the Soviet system.