Yuri Andropov

Yuri Andropov first married Nina Ivanovna, whom he possibly knew from his early years. The couple had two children; a daughter named Evgenia Y. Andropova, born in 1936 and a son named Vladimir Y. Andropov, born in 1940. Vladimir died in 1975 under mysterious circumstances. The couple divorced sometime in 1940s.

Andropov married his second wife, Tatyana Filipovna, sometime in 1940s. They had met during the Second World War on the Karelian Front where she was Komsomol secretary. They had two children; a son named Igor Y. Andropov, born in 1941 and a daughter named Irina, born in 1946.

In February 1983, Andropov suffered total renal failure. In August, he was shifted to Central Clinical Hospital in western Moscow, where he lived until his death on 9 February 1984. At the time, he was sixty-nine years old.

Yuri Andropov was born on 15 June 1914 in Nagutskaya, a rail road station in Stavropol Region of Russian Empire. It is now a part of the North Caucasian Federal District of Russian Federation.

His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was a railway official from a noble Don Cossack family. His mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein, the daughter of a Moscow watchmaker, was of Finnish-German descent.

Yuri Andropov was his parents’ only child. His father died from typhus when he was still very young. Thereafter, his mother moved with him to the town of Mozdok, where she remarried. However, some other sources say that his parents were divorced.

Yuri’s mother died in 1927, when he was only thirteen years old. Thereafter, he was raised by his stepfather Viktor Aleksandrovich Fedorov, who sent him to work at the age of fourteen. Concurrently, he also continued his education.

Andropov spent his teenage years working as a loader, a telegraph operator, film projectionist and a sailor for the Volga steamship line. In 1930, while still in Mozdok, he became a member of All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (YCL), popularly known as Komsomol.

Sometime in early 1930s, he entered Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College to study water transport engineering. Concurrently, he continued to be active in politics, eventually becoming a full-time secretary of Komsomol’s unit at the college.

In 1936, Andropov graduated from Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College as water transport engineer. Thereafter, he joined the Volodarsky Shipyards in Rybinsk and was promoted to the post of Organizer of the Komsomol Central Committee at the shipyard, a job he must have undertaken with utmost efficiency.

He worked at the Volodarsky Shipyards for a brief period; but long enough for his efficiency to be noticed by his superiors. In 1938, he was elected First Secretary of the Yaroslavl Regional Committee of the Komsomol. In the following year, he joined the Communist Party.

In 1940, he was made the First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol in the newly created Karelo-Finnish Autonomous Republic, a position he held till 1944. During this period, he also led a group of partisan guerillas in areas controlled by Finish Army.

In 1944, Andropov became more active in the Communist Party and was entrusted with the task of organizing the youth in the Karelo-Finnish region. Eventually, he was promoted to a post of Soviet administrator in the same region.

In 1946, he enrolled at the University of Petrozavodsk, studying philology until 1951, concurrently working for the Communist Party. Meanwhile in 1947, he was elected Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Karelo-Finnish SSR.

Turning point of his life occurred when in 1951, he was transferred to Moscow, where he was assigned to the CPSU Central Committee, considered a training ground for promising young officers. Here he was first appointed an inspector and eventually headed a sub-department of the Central Committee.