Word: andropov
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Medvedev offers some compelling particulars. In early 1982, he says, Andropov ordered the KGB to arrest two close friends of Brezhnev's daughter Galina for diamond smuggling. News of the arrests was leaked to the Western press, and Galina was dispatched to the Kremlin hospital, supposedly because of a "nervous breakdown." According to the author, Brezhnev's doubly distraught daughter attended her father's funeral in the company of two well-dressed secret policemen, who appeared to be members of the family. The funeral was televised live, Medvedev explains, and the KGB was afraid that Galina might...
...speech was read by an announcer. Writes Medvedev: "An error of this kind was unprecedented, and was inexcusable for an aide, who would certainly expect immediate dismissal." Although all of Brezhnev's aides lost their positions after his death, Alexandrov-Agentov was kept on as an assistant to Andropov...
According to Medvedev's unofficial sources in the Soviet Union, supporters of Brezhnev's hand-picked successor, Konstantin Chernenko, counterattacked by floating a rumor that Andropov was not Russian but half Armenian and a quarter Jewish. Since Stalin's death there has been an unwritten Kremlin rule that the party chief must be an ethnic Russian. In Medvedev's view, the tactics used by Chernenko's supporters were mere pinpricks to Andropov, who had gained the crucial support in the Politburo of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov...
Since then, Andropov has barely mentioned his predecessor. Meanwhile, his much touted drive against corruption has continued to target Brezhnev's old pals, including General Nikolai Shchelokov, the former Minister of Internal Affairs. But the anticorruption campaign has affected too many highly placed officials, Medvedev notes, and Andropov's policy has met with powerful resistance. As a result, the drive has recently been toned down...
Medvedev argues that Andropov, for all his shrewdness, remains beholden to the old, entrenched bureaucracy. Now 69, he has "waited for supreme power for too long," says Medvedev. "If he wants to make his mark on history, he must move faster than his predecessors." Andropov's recent track record, Medvedev observes, indicates that he is capable of quick action in foreign policy but has repeatedly gone into reverse when it comes to meeting his people's main desire for "at least a moderate level of political democracy...