Word: andropov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some Western analysts speculate that Andropov's election as party chief reflects the gradual gravitation of political power in Communist countries toward the military and security sectors. Andropov's first round of appointments certainly suggests that he wants to use KGB men and methods to run the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Kuzichkin, a former KGB agent in Iran who defected to the British last June, insists that Andropov has been and remains a loyal party man. As Kuzichkin told TIME: "In the West people talk about the KGB as if it were an independent body. It is an instrument...
Ironically, Andropov may owe his rise to the bungling of one of the nation's most notorious secret police chiefs, Lavrenti Beria. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the tiny Georgian with the trademark pincenez tried to bully his way to power by incorporating the Ministry of the Interior into his vast security empire. That incautious move roused a vengeance-minded Politburo to action. Beria was arrested and executed. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, in a famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, vowed that the state security forces would be subservient to the principles of "revolutionary...
...former Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov was chosen by Brezhnev in 1967 to continue the gradual "politicization" of the KGB. He took over a security service still demoralized after several reorganizations. Andropov set about winning friends among the power groups hostile to the secret police. The military, for example, has been a traditional KGB rival. Security police ruthlessly purged the military high command on Stalin's orders in 1937, and uniformed KGB agents still riddle the armed services at all levels, a power unto themselves. It was a measure of Andropov's political skill that he managed to form an alliance...
During the Andropov era, the overwhelming majority of Soviets have lost their fear of the midnight knock on the door and the random arrest, but the KGB still moves with brutal swiftness to suppress dangerous displays of "nonconformity." One innovation was the creation of a KGB directorate to control political, nationalist and religious dissent. The directorate has achieved results without great social disruption, something that Andropov's conservative comrades on the Politburo clearly value. The democratic movement within the Soviet Union that first surfaced in the 1960s and gained impetus from the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Human Rights has been...
Western intelligence authorities fear that the KGB believes the same rules that lead to success at home will also work abroad. During the Andropov era, the KGB's foreign directorate moved out of the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters to a large, modern, half-moon-shaped office building on the Moscow Ring Road. It expanded overseas operations, though it still shares assignments with the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet military. Many experts consider the KGB to be the world's most effective information-gathering organization. Says a senior intelligence staff member in Congress: "It used...