Among the first persons of the Soviet state, Yuri Andropov was the most mysterious figure. And the point is not even in his political program, but in very specific facts of his biography - from birth to death.
The official date of birth of the future General Secretary Yuri Andropov - June 15, 1914 - has never been disputed. But its origin is sheer jungle.
Father's last name is unknown
With the mother of Yuri Vladimirovich, everything is relatively simple, although her story is difficult to classify as typical.
A foundling girl named Evgenia was brought up by the Moscow jeweler Karl Frantsevich Flekenstein and his wife Evdokia Mikhailovna. The spouses who lived in Moscow owned a four-story mansion with the Jewelry Store on the Lubyanka. And they were subjects of the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, which was part of the empire.
Evgenia Karlovna worked as a music teacher in a women's gymnasium, but who became her first husband and father of the secretary general is unclear. Probably, it was either a Jew, or a Cossack, or a Finn (or maybe all together), who joined the army as an officer at the beginning of the First World War (which suggests that he had some education) and probably perished at the front in 1916.
The young widow married a second time - to the railway telegraph operator Vladimir Andropov, who served at the Nagutskaya station in the Stavropol Territory and in 1919 died of a loose type. By that time, Karl Fleckenstein had also died, probably beaten for his German surname during the 1915 “patriotic pogrom”.
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Evgenia Karlovna and her son moved to Mozdok, where she married for the third time to an assistant machinist by the name of Fedorov and until her death in 1927 worked as a music teacher at the school.
It is clear that the future secretary general received his last name, Andropov, from his first stepfather, whom he vaguely remembered, but whom he considered his real father. By the way, at first the boy's name was not Yuri, but Grigory, but this is so - a trifle.
Having lost his mother at the age of 13, he could count only on the help of his stepfather, but in reality - only on his own character. After graduating from a seven-year school, Andropov first worked on the railway, then entered the Rybinsk River Technical School, where he began to move along the Komsomol line.
Almost a proletarian
To enter the technical school, he needed a birth certificate, which was easier to obtain in Nagutskaya, at the place of death of his first stepfather. Of course, it was possible to go to Pervoprestolnaya, to see my grandmother, but then, in addition to Moscow, in the column "place of birth", in the column "social origin" they would write him "from the bourgeoisie." No, thanks.
The telegraph dad (in reality, the stepfather) looked preferable.
At the technical school Andropov married a fellow student - the daughter of the manager of the Cherepovets branch of the State Bank, Nina Engalycheva. Having passed all the necessary steps, by December 1938 he rose to the first secretary of the Yaroslavl Regional Committee of the Komsomol. At the same time, health problems appeared - due to poor eyesight and kidneys, Andropov was removed from the military register.
Even Yuri Vladimirovich was seized by the party investigator Kapustina, who was checking his biography.
However, given the specifics of the time, she treated him mildly.
After all, the problems began with the fact that some "kind soul" wrote that Andropov's father was a tsarist officer. Kapustina traveled to Moscow and talked with her grandmother Evdokia Mikhailovna, who continued to quietly trade in jewelry. The collected material was enough to turn Yuri Vladimirovich into a counter-revolutionary, spy, enemy of the people. But everything was released on the brakes. The only thing that Andropov had to write explanatory, where delicate moments were presented in a very neat form: he did not know about his father, a tsarist officer, he heard only out of the corner of his ear about a bourgeois grandmother and never spoke to her. In addition, Kapustina herself gave the correct comments - Andropov's father did not serve in the White Army, since he died back in 1916. Grandparents traded in their own products, that is, they were not traders, but artisans, almost proletarians.
Perhaps Andropov charmed Kapustina, but most likely the decisive role was played by the intercession of the first secretary of the Yaroslavl regional party committee, Nikolai Patolichev (the future Minister of Foreign Trade of the USSR). The Chekists were afraid to touch Patolichev, because Stalin himself spoke warmly about his father, who died heroically in 1920 in the brigade of the First Cavalry Army.
In general, Andropov was not only acquitted, but also promoted.
Between wife and war
In 1940, after the not very successful Winter War, part of the territories taken from the Finns was cut to Soviet Karelia, forming a new union republic - the Karelo-Finnish SSR with the capital in Petrozavodsk. Otto Kuusinen was made its nominal leader - the Chairman of the Presidium of the Republican Supreme Council. In 1918, he took part in the unsuccessful Bolshevik revolution in Finland, then became the second (after Georgy Dimitrov) person in the Comintern. With the beginning of the Winter War, he headed the puppet government created in Moscow, which on behalf of the Finnish workers and peasants turned to the USSR with a request to help "throw off the yoke of landlords and capitalists."
But nothing came of this venture …
But Kuusinen spent most of his time in Moscow. The real head of the Karelo-Finnish SSR in the status of the first secretary of the republican Central Committee was the Russian - Gennady Kupriyanov. And the relationship with him was more complicated.
In the summer of 1941, the Finns who sided with Germany seized most of Karelia. The party and state leadership of the republic was evacuated first to Medvezhyegorsk, then to Belomorsk, where they began work on organizing an underground and partisan movement in the occupied territory.
Later, in his published memoirs, Kupriyanov wrote about the outstanding role played in these events by Andropov. But for himself, he wrote this to his desk: “Yuri Vladimirovich himself did not ask to send him to the war, underground or partisans, as many older workers insisted on. Moreover, he often complained of kidney problems. And generally on poor health. He also had one more reason for refusing to send him underground or to a partisan detachment: his wife lived in Belomorsk, she had just given birth to a child. And his first wife, who lived in Yaroslavl, bombarded us with letters complaining that he did not help their children much, that they were starving and walk without shoes, they broke off (and we forced Yuri Vladimirovich to help his children from his first wife) … Somehow it was inconvenient to say: "Do you want to fight?" The man hides behind his nomenclature armorfor my illness, for my wife and child."
Andropov by that time really divorced his first wife and entered into a second marriage with the Komsomol member Tatyana Lebedeva.
Such "personal affairs" always created unnecessary tension in the party offices, and, of course, Kupriyanov was annoyed that he had to educate Andropov on a question that he could easily solve on his own. But the claims that Yuri Vladimirovich did not want to go into the enemy's rear look far-fetched. There would have been little sense from him as a commander or commissar of a partisan detachment or an underground cell, but if the invaders had captured the leader of the republic's Komsomol (on June 3, 1940, Andropov was elected first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee of the Karelo-Finnish SSR), the effect would have been rather negative …
Karelian partisan
Andropov was doing the same as most of his colleagues from the regions occupied by the enemy. He studied the affairs of those who were sent to the enemy's rear, talked with them "heart to heart" and gave instructions before the transfer, prepared propaganda materials. There was a lot of work, but purely bureaucratic and not life-threatening. And he appreciated Andropov's Kupriyanov, otherwise he would not have supported the presentation of his comrade-in-arms who had not been under fire to the Order of the Red Banner.
It is significant that in 1944 it was decided to transfer Yuri Vladimirovich to a similar position in Ukraine. Kupriyanov objected to the recall of a valuable employee, and Andropov himself did not rush to Ukraine, realizing that it was easier to move there, but it was also easier to break his neck.
A black cat ran between them in 1950, when Kupriyanov was imprisoned for the "Leningrad case", but Andropov's cup passed. The intercession of Kuusinen, who valued Yuri Vladimirovich for the campaign he organized to glorify the exploits of the Karelian partisans on an all-Union scale, helped. By the way, this campaign actually saved the representatives of the local Finno-Ugric population from being accused of aiding the invaders. So the Finns, Karelians, Izhora, Vod, Veps were not deported.
Kuusinen, being a connoisseur of the Karelian-Finnish epos "Kalevala", loved heroic tales and achieved Andropov's transfer to the Union Central Committee, as an inspector for the Baltic republics. Apparently, in order to please his patron, Yuri Vladimirovich studied a very difficult Finnish language, and then his kindred Hungarian. Sometimes knowledge multiplies sorrow, and soon Andropov was appointed ambassador to Hungary, where he witnessed and participated in the dramatic events of October - November 1956.
Kuusinen meanwhile, after Stalin's death, became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU and secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In 1962, he pulled his protégé to a similar position. And then, after the death of the patron, Yuri Vladimirovich already rose on his own.
The assassination attempt on Kutuzovsky
Having headed the KGB in 1967, Yuri Vladimirovich received the nickname Jeweler from his subordinates - the Lubyanka was full of rumors about his unusual origin.
Unlike other senior leaders of his generation, Andropov did not have a higher education (except for correspondence studies at the Higher Party School), which caused him complexes. Among the official documents on the desk of the KGB chief, there was always some kind of clever book, like Seneca or Plato, lying annoyingly.
But his erudition and outlook were enviable, so that with people who were reputed to be intellectuals, he was on an equal footing. He wrote good poetry for an amateur, reasonably not trying to pretend to be a professional writer.
Yuri Vladimirovich approached the highest power carefully. Sensitive to potential rivals, Brezhnev removed everyone he suspected of excessive ambitions - Shelepin, Podgorny, Kosygin. But in the country they knew Andropov, and his appointment to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU was taken without surprise.
Andropov's political program is as mysterious as his personality. Rumors around the personality were abundant, despite the fact that they were rather complementary for him. The people grumbled about the strengthening of labor discipline, but they fully approved of the measures to combat corruption.
One problem - having become the "first person" in November 1982, since June 1983 Yuri Vladimirovich practically stopped appearing in public.
According to the official version, the reason was kidney problems and a whole bunch of other diseases. But there was another version as well. Allegedly, on February 19, 1983, Andropov was shot at by the wife of Nikolai Shchelokov, who was removed from the post of Minister of Internal Affairs two months earlier.
She made an attempt on her life in the elevator of the “nomenklatura” house at 26 Kutuzovsky, where both the Shchelokovs and the Andropovs lived. Once in the same elevator with the secretary general, she shot him from a Browning, aiming at a diseased kidney. Although the version looks too extravagant and does not honor the Kremlin guards, it should not be completely denied.
Shchelokov's wife was not one of those who could be so easily searched or shoved aside if she climbed into the same elevator with Andropov. It is known that it was on this day that she committed suicide, which psychologically is quite linked with the version of the attempt. Shchelokov himself shot himself in December 1984.
Yuri Andropov died on February 9, 1984.
Former Yeltsin's security guard Alexander Korzhakov recalls: “When Yuri Vladimirovich was in the Central Clinical Hospital, three resuscitators were constantly on duty, but if two of them are real professionals, they chose this specialization in the medical institute and from the first year they were preparing to pull out patients from the other world, then the third there was a therapist (maybe a good one), who only completed the relevant courses. It was on his watch that Andropov died, and the replacements unanimously insisted that if they were there, they would not let him die …”.
A completely natural death for a leader, whose whole life turned out to be a continuous mystery.
Hidden son
Andropov's daughter from his first marriage - Evgenia (married - Volkova) - became a doctor. I practically did not communicate with my father.
The son from his first marriage, Vladimir, was twice imprisoned for theft. After his release, he drank himself and died at the age of 35. Andropov concealed this, especially since the KGB did not even take the relatives of previously convicted citizens into the KGB. The daughter from her second marriage - Irina - received a philological education. She was married to actor Mikhail Filippov (married to actress Natalia Gundareva for the second time).
The son from his second marriage, Igor, made a diplomatic career. He was ambassador to Greece, later - ambassador-at-large at the USSR and Russian Foreign Ministries.
Oleg Pokrovsky
