Who Was Yuri Andropov?

Ideologue, Policeman, Apparatchik

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park) and author of "The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, 

and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century"

We should not be surprised that, in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s Russia, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov –born a hundred years ago, on June 15, 1914– enjoys an ever-growing mini-cult following, shaped and upheld from the very top. For Putin and the mafia surrounding him – all characters coming from the middle-level structures of the KGB– Yuri Andropov represents the strength of a system which, they believe, was not meant to collapse. In Andropov, they admire the virility, vitality, stamina, robustness of the system that collapsed in December 1991. Worshiping Andropov, they lionize their own youth.

The triumphalist fantasies of the Soviet years continue to haunt the Kremlin’s imagination. Resorting to the myth of Andropov is in fact an attempt at legitimization by way of history. Obviously, what we are dealing with is a history forged, doctored, counterfeited. In short, a history rigged, distorted, and mystified.

According to this secret police worldview, Andropov’s reforms – carefully supervised by their initiators in the party and security apparatus – were unlikely to lead to a massive breakdown of the ideocratic party-state institutional structure. Andropov was a bureaucrat hardened during the Stalinist purges following WWII. He was a true believer in the USSR’s mission as a “bastion of world socialism.” Like so many other apparatchiks, he had adored Stalin. He had been the protégé of Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, the most dogmatic of the official ideologues. Andropov’s election in November 1982 as General Secretary of the CC of the CPSU and president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, thus nominal head of the Soviet state, was a big change in the pattern of succession. This was the first time that a former chief of the secret police had made it to the helm of the totalitarian regime called the USSR. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria had come within reach of this position, but – as we well know – he was finished off before being able to fill it. Arrested in June 1953, a few months after Stalin’s death, Beria was executed as a spy in December of that same year.

Andropov’s career began under the auspices of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, the supreme ideologue of Stalinism unleashed. Zhdanov was directly in charge of the Karelian-Finnish Autonomous Republic, where Andropov steeply climbed up the party hierarchy. I emphasize this because Zhdanov was the most influential exponent of the Leningrad faction, brutally purged after his death in 1948. The political mythology of Leningrad’s communists matters a great deal in this particular version of history.

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