Abstract
When Yuri Andropov became the new Soviet leader, what seemed earlier to be totally impossible and even fantastic took place in reality. The former chief of the KGB, the top cop of the most dreadful secret police in the world, became the number one personage in the Soviet Union. With his election to this post, the Soviet Union and the world entered a radically new stage.
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Chapter Ten: Yuri Andropov: a Recent Leader of Russia
Before and A fter Stalin, A Personal Account of Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1960s, by Aino Kuusinen, Michael Joseph, London, 1972, p. 130; Harrison E. Salisbury, ‘Study of Yuri Andropov’, International Herald Tribune, Nov. 17, 1982.
Time, Nov. 22, 1982, p. 21; Joseph Kraft, ‘Letter from Moscow’, The New Yorker, Jan. 31, 1983, p. 106; International Herald Tribune, Nov. 12, 1982.
International Herald Tribune, Nov. 13–14, 1982. In Pravda his high (University level) education is mentioned, which cannot be based on the fact that he attended the Petrozavodsk University, from which he did not graduate.
According to Roy Medvedev, interviewed by Joseph Kraft, the job of Ambassador in Hungary was, for Andropov, an exile for his disobedience to Malenkov. See The New Yorker, 31 Jan. 1983, p. 104.
Harrison E. Salisbury, ibid.
KGB, The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, by John Baron, Reader’s Digest Press, New York, 1974, p. 72.
Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, Memoirs, Macmillan, New York, 1974, p. 217.
Zdenek Mlynar, ‘Kholodom veet ot Kremlia’, Time and We, 1982, 69, p. 231. In Mlynar’s words, Brezhnev said that the Soviet Union would keep the East European countries in its bloc, if necessary, even at the price of serious war.
Grigory Svirsky, A History of Post-War Soviet Writing, trans, and ed. by Robert Dessaix and Michael Ulman, Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1981, p. 235.
Time, Nov. 22, 1982, p. 21.
Amy W. Knight, The Powers of the Soviet KGB’, Survey, Summer 1980, Vol. 25 (112), No. 3, p. 141.
Andropov was very sensitive about the image of the KGB, and his friend, Georgy Arbatov works on this line without fatigue. In his ‘chatting’ with Joseph Kraft he says very nice words: “A main reason is that he (Andropov) made the KGB different from what it had been. Under him, its reputation improved. It no longer fitted the stereotype of an instrument of terror. Its reputation is better than that of the C.I. A. or the F.B.I. Still, it is not a welfare organization”, The New Yorker, Jan. 31, 1983, p. 109.
Walter Lacqueur, ‘What We Know About the Soviet Union’, Commentary. Feb. 1983, p. 16.
Seweryn Bialer, ‘Reagan and Russia’, Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1983, p. 265.
Joseph Kraft, op. cit., p. 109.
Andrei Sakharov, O strane i mire, Khronika Press, New York, 1976, p. 20.
Confirmed by Roy Medvedev in Joseph Kraft, op. cit., p. 105.
Recently V. Krasin wrote about this in his book Sud, Chalidze Publications, New York, 1983.
Vladimir Kuzichkin, ‘Crime, Corruption Rampant in Russia’, Sunday Telegraph, reprinted, The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Feb. 2, 1982.
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© 1985 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Glazov, Y. (1985). Yuri Andropov: A Recent Leader of Russia. In: The Russian Mind Since Stalin’s Death. A Pallas Paperback, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5341-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5341-3_10
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