By contrast, the leaders of the former Warsaw Pact intelligence community, when I was one of them, looked up to Andropov as the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist party in governing the Soviet Union, and who was the godfather of Russia's new era of deception operations aimed at improving the badly damaged image of Soviet rulers in the West.

As KGB head, Andropov was ruthless against dissent, and author David Remnick, who covered the Soviet Union for the Washington Post in the 1980s, called Andropov " profoundly corrupt, a beast ".

Andropov was in a good position to take over the control of the party apparatus ; three big system hierarchs, Brezhnev, Kosygin and Suslov had all died.

Yuri Andropov, Boris Ponomarev and Dmitriy Ustinov all thought highly of Najibullah, and negotiations of who would succeed Karmal might have begun as early as 1983.

In August 1983 Andropov made a sensational announcement that the country was stopping all work on space-based weapons.

After they had gone, Andropov remained alone with Kryuchkov and told him that he wished health and success to all the friends.

Alexander Yakovlev, later an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and the ideologist of perestroika, said " In a way I always thought Andropov was the most dangerous of all of them, simply because he was smarter than the rest.

:" In the West, if Andropov is remembered at all, it is for his brutal suppression of political dissidence at home and for his role in planning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

It is also questionable whether Andropov spoke any English at all.

However, in 1983, Yuri Andropov ended all IS testing and all attempts to resume it failed.

The last four Soviet leaders ( Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev ) were all senior Secretaries before becoming General Secretaries.

The ceremonies held after the deaths as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko all followed the same basic outline.

In Russia, during the time of the Soviet Union ( 1917 – 1991 ), the state funerals of the most senior political and military leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko all followed the same basic outline.

* 1983 – American schoolgirl Samantha Smith is invited to visit the Soviet Union by its leader Yuri Andropov after he read her letter in which she expressed fears about nuclear war.

* April 25 – Manchester, Maine, schoolgirl Samantha Smith is invited to visit the Soviet Union by its leader Yuri Andropov, after he read her letter in which she expressed fears about nuclear war.

Andropov was advised by his Defence Minister Dmitriy Ustinov and by the head of the KGB Viktor Chebrikov to keep secret the fact that the Soviet Union held in its possession the sought-after " black box " from KAL 007.

" He was certainly generally regarded as inclined to more gradual and constructive reform than was Gorbachev ; most of the speculation centres around whether Andropov would have reformed the USSR in a manner which did not result in its eventual dissolution.

All of the work and its results were kept secret from the public: outside of the investigative team, only KGB director Yuri Andropov and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev were informed.

Thereafter, Ustinov, along with Viktor Chebrikov, head of the KGB, recommended to premier Yuri Andropov that their possession of the Black Box not be made public since its tapes could not support the Soviet contention that KAL 007 was on a U. S. espionage mission.

In the Soviet years, Rybinsk continued its impressive renaming record, for it changed its name four times: to Shcherbakov ( after Aleksandr Shcherbakov ) in 1946, back to Rybinsk in 1957, to Andropov ( after Yuri Andropov ) in 1984, and back to Rybinsk in 1989.

Operation RYAN was downscaled in 1984, after the deaths of its main proponents, Yuri Andropov and defense minister Dmitriy Ustinov.

If I've seen tossed and nervous because of the Afghan war, Andropov, who understood ultimately their mistake, Ustinov was always calm and apparently convinced that he was right.

Two days passed between his death and the announcement of the election of Yuri Andropov as the new General Secretary, suggesting to many outsiders that a power struggle had occurred in the Kremlin.

In 1968, Andropov as the KGB Chairman issued his order “ On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary ”, calling for struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters.

The proposal by Andropov to use psychiatry for struggle against dissidents was implemented.

Andropov declared, " the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet state.

In 1968, Andropov as the KGB Chairman issued his order " On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary ", calling for struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters.

The proposal by Andropov to use psychiatry for struggle against dissenters was implemented.

On 10 September 1976, Chairman of the KGB Yuri Andropov submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union his report informing of " anti-Soviet campaign with nasty fabrications regarding the alleged use psychiatry in the USSR as an instrument in the political struggle with ' dissidents '.

Andropov said that " It is time they stopped ... search for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war ...

To make matters worse for Chernenko, he did not have control over the Politburo ; both Andrei Gromyko and Dmitriy Ustinov were both very independent politically, and the Politburo still contained several leading Andropov protégés, such as Gorbachev, Vorotnikov, Solomontsev and Heydar Aliyev.

After Brezhnev's death in November 1982, there was speculation the position of General Secretary would fall to Chernenko, however he was unable to rally enough popular support for his candidacy within the Party, and the posting fell to former KGB chief Yuri Andropov.

Arkady Volsky, an aide to Andropov and other general secretaries, recounts an episode that occurred after a Politburo meeting on the day following Andropov's demise: As Politburo members filed out of the conference hall, either Andrei Gromyko or ( in later accounts ) Dmitriy Ustinov is said to have put his arm round Nikolai Tikhonov's shoulders and said: " It's okay, Kostya is an agreeable guy ( pokladisty muzhik ), one can do business with him ...." The Politburo failed to pass the decision for Gorbachev, who was nominally Chernenko's second in command, to run the meetings of the Politburo itself in the absence of Chernenko ; the latter due to his declining health, began to miss those meetings with increasing frequency.

* August 25 – Samantha Smith, " Goodwill Ambassador " between the Soviet Union and the United States for writing a letter to Yuri Andropov about nuclear war, and eventually visiting the Soviet Union at Andropov's request, dies in the Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808 plane crash.

Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple.

In 1957, Andropov returned to Moscow from Budapest in order to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers ' Parties in Socialist Countries, a position he held until 1967.

Andropov was the longest-serving KGB chairman and did not resign as head of the KGB until May 1982, when he was again promoted to the Secretariat to succeed the late Mikhail Suslov as secretary responsible for ideological affairs.

In foreign policy, the war continued in Afghanistan, although Andropov — who felt the invasion might have been a mistake — did half-heartedly explore options for a negotiated withdrawal.

Andropov was encouraged to state that the Soviet Union engaged in the deception that they too were looking for KAL 007 and the black box.

In his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev recalled that when Andropov was the leader, he and Nikolai Ryzhkov, the chairman of Gosplan, asked Andropov for access to real budget figures.

On 31 December 1983 Andropov celebrated the New Year for the last time.

The Western media favored Andropov because of his supposed passion for Western music and scotch.

Andropov fought hard for Soviet intervention, telling Leonid Brezhnev that Amin's policies had destroyed the military and the government's capability to handle the crisis by use of mass repression.

After the elections, the KGB director Yuri Andropov obtained permission for additional money and other resources from the Central Committee of the CPSU to ensure an Allende victory in Congress.