Andropov was elected the party's General Secretary on 12 November 1982 by a decision of the Central Committee.

Judson Mitchell claims that the Central Committee meeting which elected Andropov as General Secretary, was little more than a rubber stamp meeting.

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.

At this point, Western experts believed that Andropov was grooming Gorbachev as his successor.

At 71, Konstantin Chernenko was in poor health, suffering from emphysema, and unable to play an active role in policy making when he was chosen, after lengthy discussion, to succeed Andropov.

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.

Chernenko was then elected to replace Andropov, despite concerns over his own ailing health, and against Andropov's wishes ( he stated he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him ).

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.

He became the third Soviet leader to die in less than three years, and, upon being informed in the middle of the night of his death, US President Ronald Reagan, who was seven months older than Chernenko and just over three years older than his predecessor Andropov, is reported to have remarked " how am I supposed to get any place with the Russians if they keep dying on me?

He was appointed following lobbying made by the Soviets, most notable among them was Yuri Andropov, the KGB Chairman.

Within three years of the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo in 1985.

On November 10, 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB.

On February 9, 1984 Andropov died and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko who in turn died on March 10, 1985.

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (; – 9 February 1984 ) was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.

Andropov was the son of a railway official Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, who was a member of a Armenian noble family.

Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College.

During the Prague Spring events in Czechoslovakia, Andropov was the main proponent of the " extreme measures ".

However his message was destroyed because it contradicted the conspiracy theory fabricated by Andropov.

Andropov aimed to achieve " the destruction of dissent in all its forms " and always insisted that " the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet state ".

Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as General Secretary

Even so, by the time he had succeeded in dominating the Central Committee, Andropov fell ill.

Chernenko never got complete control over the Central Committee and Party apparatus ; while Andropov never succeeded in removing the majority of Brezhnev appointees in the Central Committee, he had succeeding in dividing the Central Committee along factional lines.

He was succeeded in office by Konstantin Chernenko, who was destined to serve even less time in office ( 13 months ) than Andropov did before his death in office.

When Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union in November 1982, the mainstream Western newspapers and magazines ran numerous front page photographs and articles about him.

When Brezhnev died in 1982, he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died quickly after taking power.

Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev's 68-year-old successor, was seriously ill with kidney disease when he took over, and after his death fifteen months later, he was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, then 72, who lasted thirteen months before his death and replacement with Gorbachev.

He succeeded his patron Yuri Andropov as the head of State Security on 26 May 1982.

* 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.

A Parade of Mirrors and Reflections, a novella by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, centers on the cloning of deceased Soviet premier Yuri Andropov.

* 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 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 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.

During his rule, Andropov attempted to improve the economy by raising management effectiveness without changing the principles of socialist economy.

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.

According to the Soviet medical report, Andropov suffered from several medical conditions: interstitial nephritis, nephrosclerosis, residual hypertension and diabetes, which were worsened by chronic kidney deficiency.

Andropov, " a throwback to a tradition of Leninist asceticism ", was appalled by the corruption during Brezhnev's regime, and ordered investigations and arrests of the most flagrant abusers.

* The KGB's 1967 Annual Report, signed by Andropov by CNN

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.

Tretyakov says that from 1979 the KGB wanted to prevent the United States from deploying the missiles in Western Europe and that, directed by Yuri Andropov, they distributed disinformation, based on a faked " doomsday report " by the Soviet Academy of Sciences about the effect of nuclear war on climate, to peace groups, the environmental movement and the journal AMBIO.

Andropov had been the Soviet Ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and began his tenure as Soviet leader by strengthening the powers of the KGB, and by suppressing dissidents.