The Soviets: A Top Cop Takes the Helm

Yuri Andropov becomes the first KGB boss to run the country

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, 68, is said to be a witty conversationalist, a bibliophile, a connoisseur of modern art—a kind of “closet liberal.” He also happens to be the former boss of the world’s most powerful, and possibly most feared, police organization.

Andropov’s elevation to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union marks the first time that a former head of the KGB has occupied the highest post in the land. His rise sent a chill of apprehension sweeping over the Soviet Union’s intellectual and religious dissidents. It also reinforced the view held by Reagan Administration advocates of a hard line toward Moscow that the Soviet Union is an unregenerate police state.

Paradoxically, the new Soviet leader has been widely described in the U.S. and European press as a liberal and an intellectual with pro-Western leanings. Since Andropov (pronounced an-dro-pof) left the KGB last May, this impression has been fostered assiduously by the Soviets in an effort to soften his image. A number of Soviet intellectuals in Moscow, Soviet tourists abroad and Emigres in the West have been making a point of portraying him as a cultivated man, not at all what one would imagine a top policeman to be like.

On a visit to West Germany, for example, Literary Gazette Editor Alexander Chakovsky characterized Andropov as a “good man” with “broadminded” views. Soviet emigres have described Andropov to U.S. journalists as “savvy,” “open-minded” and “Westernized.” Though the KGB crushed the Soviet Union’s dissident movement, its chief was said to have sought friendly discussions with protesters. (Thus far, however, no dissidents have identified themselves as having had such talks.)

Some Western specialists believe that Andropov will be more flexible than Brezhnev. Writing in the Washington Post, Sovietologist Jerry Hough hailed Andropov’s election last May to the Central Committee Secretariat, which put him in line for the job of party chief, as “one of the most favorable developments to have occurred in the Soviet Union in recent years.” Britain’s weekly Economist declared that though Andropov is “no woolly liberal,” he is an “enlightened conservative.” Soviet experts in the British Foreign Office have characterized the new party chief as an “urbane” and “liberal” figure who offers the best chance for an improvement in East-West relations.

Who is Yuri Andropov—unreconstructed Stalinist despot or pro-Western reformer? Little is known about him, and even less can be surmised from the bare facts of his career. Says Historian James Billington, director of Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center: “The successor had to rise through the system, and the garb he put on for the ascent is not necessarily the garb he will wear when he is in power.”

What can be said with certitude about Andropov is that he is a master politician, adept at the behind-the-scenes maneuverings, and patient coalition building that made his rise to power possible. Few of the contenders for the succession labored under more formidable handicaps. Leonid Brezhnev, wary of Andropov, opposed his police chiefs ambitions. But Brezhnev’s first choice, Andrei Kirilenko, fell ill or was disgraced last year. Then Andropov gradually undercut the heir apparent, Konstantin Chernenko, a longtime Brezhnev crony who was vulnerable because he lacked both experience and political pull.

Andropov also had to contend with the shadow cast on his political career by his 15-year tenure as KGB chief. Though he resigned his police post in May, it was argued both in the West and in the Soviet Union that his image was too tarnished for him to represent his country at home or abroad. A more important impediment Andropov had to surmount was the widespread fear of the KGB among Soviet officials who vividly remember the purges of party and government bureaucrats by Stalin’s secret-police chiefs. Working for Andropov, however, was his record of efficiently crushing religious, intellectual and national dissent; he once dismissed the dissident movement as “a skillful propaganda invention.” Yet at the same time, he managed to make the country’s leaders feel secure from Stalin-like coercion by the KGB.

Though Andropov’s name is inextricably associated with the KGB in the minds of Westerners and Soviet citizens, he is in fact not a professional policeman. Until his political appointment to the KGB in 1967, Andropov’s career had been in government or party service. The son of a railway worker, he was born in 1914 in the village of Nagutskoye in the northern Caucasus. At times a telegraph operator and boatman on the Volga River, Andropov began his political career at 22, when he became an organizer for the Young Communist League. After serving as a political commissar on the Finnish front during World War II, he worked in a series of party jobs, gradually gaining a reputation as an expert on Eastern Europe. As Moscow’s Ambassador to Hungary, he played a key role in orchestrating the brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

Later, Andropov is said to have supported Hungarian Party Chief Janos Kadar’s liberalizing economic reforms. But according to Columbia University’s Seweryn Bialer, he is scarcely likely to model the gigantic, centrally planned Soviet economy on the Hungarian system, which has abolished most planning and is heavily dependent on imports and exports. As a secretary of the Central Committee from 1962 to 1967, he was in charge of relations with the Communist bloc, traveling to Eastern Europe, Albania, Yugoslavia and Viet Nam. Says the University of California’s George Breslauer: “He has tended to take a more tolerant view of Eastern Europe because he is more familiar than most with the complexities of those countries.” But those are about the only countries he is familiar with; he has never visited a non-Communist nation.

Partly because he has not been exposed to the West, Andropov’s personality and private life are even more shadowy than those of other Politburo members. Soviet Historian Roy Medvedev says Andropov has only one hobby—politics. “He’s a politician who loves politics.” A widower, Andropov has a son, Igor, 37, who has worked under Soviet Americanologist Georgi Arbatov at Moscow’s Institute of U.S.A. and Canada Studies. According to Hough, Arbatov has had a long personal and professional relationship with Andropov and may now become the equivalent of national security adviser to the new General Secretary.

Andropov’s daughter Irina is married to Actor Alexander Filipov, who has performed in a number of avant-garde productions at Moscow’s Taganka Theater. It is through Filipov that Russian artists and theater people have sometimes caught a glimpse of the unofficial Andropov. At theater parties, the former Volga boatman likes to join in hearty renditions of Russian songs. Andropov also has a dry sense of humor. One Moscow actor who chanced to be seated across a dinner table from Andropov related how the then secret-police chief reached across, the table to offer him a glass of cognac. When the actor demurred, Andropov joked: “You’d better accept. The KGB has a very long arm.”

According to former KGB Agent Vladimir Sakharov, who defected to the U.S. in 1972, Andropov has a 5½-room apartment in Moscow that is comfortable but not elegant. When Sakharov was invited to visit by Andropov’s son in the mid-1960s, the apartment’s outstanding features were a stereo system, a sofa and a cabinet of highly polished wood, gifts to Andropov from the late Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito.

Sakharov was amazed at Andropov’s collection of books and records, which showed “a strange attraction for Western culture,” and not necessarily for the best it has to offer. In literature, his taste ran to Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, and in music, to Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and Bob Eberly.

Still, a penchant for American pop fiction and golden oldies does not make a liberal intellectual.

“They don’t raise doves in the Kremlin,” says Medvedev. “But where Mikhail Suslov [the late party ideologue] was a dogmatist, Andropov is a pragmatist. The major problems of Soviet foreign policy today—Poland and Afghanistan—cannot be solved by applying more power, but through skill and flexibility.”

In domestic affairs, Andropov may well use the strong-arm methods he developed in the KGB to discipline the Soviet Union’s unruly and underproductive labor force. Says Breslauer: “There is a feeling in the Soviet Establishment that the system is grinding down and that the Soviet Union now needs a strong man to take charge.” Though Breslauer, like most Sovietologists, does not anticipate a wave of neo-Stalinism, he believes that Andropov could easily exploit the prevailing mood. “He has 15 years of experience in the KGB, and his role in helping crush the Hungarian uprising is seen as an accomplishment. Andropov seems to have the capacity for the kind of decisive leadership the Soviet Union is looking for.”

But given his age, he may not have a great deal of time to bring about an Andropov era. All but one of the Politburo members who supported him for the leadership are in their 70s.* Andropov has suffered at least one heart attack. The actuarial tables suggest that he will be a transitional figure who will prepare the ground for a new generation of leaders. But Andropov has confounded Soviet watchers before, and this enigmatic figure may do so again as he takes up the portentous burden of ruling the Soviet Union.

—By Patricia Blake. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow and Joseph J. Kane/ Los Angeles

*The “Andropov group” in the Politburo is believed to be composed of Defense Minister Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, 74, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, 73, Kazakh Party Chief Dinmukhammed Kunayev, 70, and Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 64.