Incidentally there was a quite interesting documentary on Andropov on TV the other night. Very interesting guy. Not many people in the West seem aware that perestroika was Andropov's baby. Gorbachev was his protege, basically continuing (incompetently) what Andropov had started. I had no idea that he had been against exiling Solzhenitsyn. No wonder he's so fondly remembered by the public. "Vot takoi, Andropov!" (Andropov, what a guy!) as people say. It's a damn shame he wasn't in power longer. Actually there are rumors he was "helped to die."
Actually, I remember many articles in the US press, including a piece in TNR, by a Russian couple (Vladimir Solovyov, Elena Klepikova ?) surmissing that Andropov was a reformist.Lover of Western Jazz.
Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin by Vladimir Solovyov, Elena Klepikova
On the other hand... http://www.google.com/search?q=liberal+Andropov http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V76I6P87-1.htm Andropov: New Challenge to the West, by Arnold Beichman and Mikhail S. Bernstam Friedberg, Maurice
YURI ANDROPOv's accession to power in the wake of Leonid Brezhnev's death on November 10, MAURICE FRIEDBERG is professor of Russian literature at the University of Illinois and the author... ...SINCE people in power, when faced with choices, tend to resort to methods they know best, Andropov's background offers few grounds for rosy "liberal" prognostications... ...It was Yuri Andropov who crushed the Soviet liberal dissidents and who enlisted psychiatry (and mind-altering drugs) to help in the effort... ...This book thus comes as a useful corrective to the image of Andropov fostered at first by Western media, which depicted the longtime head of the Soviet secret police as a closet liberal, a lover of American jazz, a debonair bon vivant with "Western tastes, a man of intellectual discrimination and toler- ance... ...pay no attention to the fact that [Andropov] and those like him are the products of a history quite alien to our own and are the exemplars of a polit- ical psychology hardly seen in the West outside small sects of millenarian psychopaths...
Vol. 76 • December 1983 • No. 6
The Andropov Hoax WHEN Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was merely head of the KGB, his image was ... a fairly successful campaign to throttle the recent wave of liberal dissidence." Nor ... http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/andropov.htm
Yuri Andropov Soon after ex-KGB chief Yuri Andropov assumed power in the Soviet Union ... a pro-dissident, anti-authority English-speaking, Coke- drinking, Nike-wearing liberal. ... http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid4.htm
Michael Pugliese