From: "Chris Doss=?koi8-r?Q?=22=20?= <nomorebounces at mail.ru>
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
WHEN Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was merely head of the K.G.B., his image was that of the stereotypic hard-line "police boss." His major accomplishment, according to C. L. Sulzberger, writing in The New York Times in 1974, was "a fairly successful campaign to throttle the recent wave of liberal dissidence." Nor was he viewed as much of an admirer of foreign culture. In 1980 Harrison E. Salisbury wrote in the Times that Andropov "has been working for three years on schemes to minimize the mingling of foreigners and natives.... Now Andropov's hands have been freed to embark on all kinds of repressive measures designed to enhance the 'purity' of Soviet society." Completing this picture of a tough, xenophobic, wave-throttling cop, Andropov was physically described, in another Times story, as a "shock-haired, burly man."
Andropov's accession to power last November was accompanied by a corresponding ennoblement of his image. Suddenly he became, in The Wall Street journal, "silver-haired and dapper." His stature, previously reported in The Washington Post as an unimpressive "five feet, eight inches," was abruptly elevated to "tall and urbane." The Times noted that Andropov "stood conspicuously taller than most" Soviet leaders and that "his spectacles, intense gaze and donnish demeanor gave him the air of a scholar." U.S. News & World Report, on the other hand, reported that "he has notoriously bad eyesight and wears thick spectacles."
His linguistic abilities also came in for scrutiny. Harrison Salisbury wrote, "The first thing to know about Mr. Andropov is that he speaks and reads English." Another Times story took note of his "fluent English." Newsweek reported that even though he had never met a "senior" American official, "he spoke English and relaxed with American novels." Confirmation of his command of English appeared in Time, The Wall Street journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post. The Economist credited him with "a working knowledge of German," and U.S. News & World Report added Hungarian to the growing list. And this quadralingual prodigy was skilled in the use of language, too.
Time described him as reportedly "a witty conversationalist," and "a bibliophile" and "connoisseur of modern art" to boot. The Washington Post passed along a rumor that he was partly Jewish. (Andropov was rapidly becoming That Cosmopolitan Man.)
Soon there were reports that Andropov was a man of extraordinary accomplishment, with some interests and proclivities that are unusual in a former head of the K.G.B. According to an article in The Washington Post, Andropov "is fond of cynical political jokes with an antiregime twist.... collects abstract art, likes jazz and Gypsy music," and "has a record of stepping out of his high party official's cocoon to contact dissidents." Also, he swims, "plays tennis," and wears clothes that are "sharply tailored in a West European style." Besides the Viennese waltz and the Hungarian czarda, he "dances the tango gracefully." (At a press conference within hours of Andropov's accession, President Reagan, asked about the prospects for agreement with him, used the unfortunate metaphor, "It takes two to tango.") The Wall Street journal added that Andropov "likes Glenn Miller records, good scotch whisky, Oriental rugs, and American books." To the list of his musical favorites, Time added "Chubby Checker, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Bob Eberly," and, asserting that he had once worked as a Volga boatman, said that he enjoyed singing "hearty renditions of Russian songs" at after-theater parties. The Christian Science Monitor suggested that he has "tried his hand at writing verse-in Russian, as it happens, and of a comic variety." <SNIP>
Michael Pugliese