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 ".

In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorized an operation to destroy the remains.

In Red Rabbit, Ryan's assignment to London focuses on a daring mission to assist the defection of a KGB communications-center officer who has discovered that KGB director Yuri Andropov had ordered the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.

** Yuri Andropov becomes KGB chief.

** KGB head Yuri Andropov is appointed to the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

* November 12 – In the Soviet Union, former KGB head Yuri Andropov is selected to become the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, succeeding the late Leonid I. Brezhnev.

In December 1971, following an informative note from Ion Stănescu, the President of the Council of State Security of the Romanian Socialist Republic, to Yuri Andropov, the chief of KGB, three of the leaders of the National Patriotic Front, Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgar, Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur, as well as a fourth person, Alexandru Soltoianu, the leader of a similar clandestine movement in northern Bukovina ( Bucovina ), were arrested and later sentenced to long prison terms.

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.

Two days after Leonid Brezhnev's death, on 12 November 1982, Andropov was elected General Secretary of the CPSU, the first former head of the KGB to become General Secretary.

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.

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 ".

Yakovlev was also a close colleague of Andropov associate KGB General Yevgeny Primakov, later Prime Minister of Russia.

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.

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.

The Soviets established a special commission on Afghanistan, comprising KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, Boris Ponomarev from the Central Committee and Dmitriy Ustinov, the Minister of Defence.

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.

from: 1974 till: 1978 shift :($ dx, 5 ) text: First KGB special detachment Alpha Group established by Yuri Andropov ( 30 men ).

from: 1981 till: 1991 shift :($ dx, 5 ) text: Second KGB special detachment Vega Group ( Vympel ) established by Yuri Andropov ( 100 men ).

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.

KGB chairman Yury Andropov allegedly explained to Pacepa that " a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions.

During Brezhnev's later rule, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov gradually took over the functions and, eventually, Kirilenko's position within the Soviet leadership.

Upon the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev ( 1982 ), Yuri Andropov ( 1984 ) and Konstantin Chernenko ( 1985 ), Kuznetzov became acting chairman of the Presidiumthe Soviet Union's acting head of state.

When, after Brezhnev's death in 1982, Yuri Andropov was elected chairman of the committee in charge of Brezhnev's funeral, this was seen as a first sign by First World commentators that Andropov might be the most likely candidate for the position of General Secretary.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov reportedly struggled for power with Leonid Brezhnev.

KGB chairman Yury Andropov allegedly explained to Pacepa that

" It was initiated in May 1981 by Yuri Andropov, then chairman of KGB.