Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Andropov's elevation to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union marks the first time that a former head of the KGB has occupied the highest post in the land. His rise sent a chill of apprehension sweeping over the Soviet Union's intellectual and religious dissidents. It also reinforced the view held by Reagan Administration advocates of a hard line toward Moscow that the Soviet Union is an unregenerate police state...
Paradoxically, the new Soviet leader has been widely described in the U.S. and European press as a liberal and an intellectual with pro-Western leanings. Since Andropov (pronounced an-dro-pof) left the KGB last May, this impression has been fostered assiduously by the Soviets in an effort to soften his image. A number of Soviet intellectuals in Moscow, Soviet tourists abroad and Emigres in the West have been making a point of portraying him as a cultivated man, not at all what one would imagine a top policeman to be like...
...visit to West Germany, for example, Literary Gazette Editor Alexander Chakovsky characterized Andropov as a "good man" with "broadminded" views. Soviet emigres have described Andropov to U.S. journalists as "savvy," "open-minded" and "Westernized." Though the KGB crushed the Soviet Union's dissident movement, its chief was said to have sought friendly discussions with protesters. (Thus far, however, no dissidents have identified themselves as having had such talks...
Andropov also had to contend with the shadow cast on his political career by his 15-year tenure as KGB chief. Though he resigned his police post in May, it was argued both in the West and in the Soviet Union that his image was too tarnished for him to represent his country at home or abroad. A more important impediment Andropov had to surmount was the widespread fear of the KGB among Soviet officials who vividly remember the purges of party and government bureaucrats by Stalin's secret-police chiefs. Working for Andropov, however, was his record of efficiently...
Though Andropov's name is inextricably associated with the KGB in the minds of Westerners and Soviet citizens, he is in fact not a professional policeman. Until his political appointment to the KGB in 1967, Andropov's career had been in government or party service. The son of a railway worker, he was born in 1914 in the village of Nagutskoye in the northern Caucasus. At times a telegraph operator and boatman on the Volga River, Andropov began his political career at 22, when he became an organizer for the Young Communist League. After serving as a political commissar...