Yuri Andropov
Yuri Andropov led the Soviet Union for fifteen months from November 1982 and had run the KGB for the fifteen years before that. Born in 1914 in Stavropol province, he worked as a telegraph operator and Volga boatman, took a technical education, and rose through the Komsomol in Karelia, organising partisans behind Finnish lines during the war. He was ambassador to Hungary in 1956, and the experience was decisive. He watched the Hungarian revolution from the embassy, saw secret policemen hanged from lampposts outside, urged Moscow to intervene, and helped lure Imre Nagy out of asylum to his execution. Colleagues afterwards spoke of a Hungarian complex — a conviction that any concession would end in collapse. He headed the department managing the socialist bloc, and in 1967 was made chairman of the KGB, holding it until 1982. He rebuilt its prestige, and directed the suppression of dissent with a change of method: fewer camps, more forced psychiatric confinement, expulsions and internal exile. Solzhenitsyn was deported and Sakharov banished to Gorky. He supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and pressed for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He succeeded Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 as the best-informed man in the country, aware that the economy was failing. His programme was discipline rather than reform: police raided shops and cinemas to catch workers absent from their jobs, and a large anti-corruption purge removed hundreds of officials. He also promoted Mikhail Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov. The Korean airliner was shot down in September 1983 during his tenure. His kidneys failed within months of taking office, and he died in February 1984.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 1984 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: general_secretary
