heiss93
4th October 2009, 01:24
http://web.archive.org/web/20050313221822/http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=1052
Yury ANDROPOV. A POET OF THE ERA OF DINOSAURS
By Ilya Milstein
http://web.archive.org/web/20050313221822/http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/images/2004_07_milsh.jpgHe lived in fear of death and of violence and horror in the face of a civil war. It determined his life and career Yury Vladimirovich Andropov would have turned 90 today. It may be old for a politician but not necessarily the end: Molotov was 96 when he died and Kaganovich lived even longer. So, age doesn’t matter. Whether a political leader is dead or alive is not very important. What really matters is the viability of a politician’s ideas and the purity of his image.
Most Russians remember Andropov with respect.
There are plenty of reasons for it. They include an obvious liking of the current president for him, the longing for an iron fist and the nostalgia for the period of stagnation, which is by and large remembered as the happiest time in the 20th century. The period of economic stagnation and the president with a CHEKA past go together very well. The past is preferred, for it was then that we “lived in a great country”. There was no shooting in the streets at that time and people were sure of their future without even suspecting how awful this future could be.
Let’s remember Andropov.
Today the Soviet Union is remembered as the era of dinosaurs: a great and irretrievable past, a base and insignificant time (a superpower, grain purchases, loyal Leninists, characters like General Vlasov in literature, songs about the young October revolution, sclerotic elders, the moon rover, informers). That era is so long ago that any praise or criticism seem equally untrue.
Only the anecdotes are authentic.
Andropov loved classical music. He appreciated folk songs, especially the folklore of the Cossacks. His father was a Don Cossack and Andropov’s own childhood passed among the Cossacks of the Terek region. He collected pictures, wrote rhymed verses with sad words about love and death… A statuette of a man with a pointed beard riding on horseback and holding a spear – Don Quixote–always stood on Andropov’s desk heaped with Soviet secret reports. The chief of the KGB looked like an intelligent man. Strange, isn’t it? The all-powerful chief of the Soviet “Gestapo” was not supposed to write poems, listen to music or leaf through albums trembling and feeling jubilant. He should have been a half-delirious fanatic like Dzerzhinsky or an ignorant and scrubby maniac like Yezhov or at least a sadistic voluptuary like Beria. In correspondence with his time, Andropov should have been absorbed in playing domino with the most advanced political bureau members every evening.
Andropov didn’t correspond to those standards.
The stages of a big road
There is very little in Andropov’s biography helping to unravel the mystery of this politician. He started his career in the remote regions of Karelia in the years of Stalin’s rule. At first he worked for the Young Communist League organization and was later engaged in party and CHEKA work. It is natural that informers, arrests and executions were as common in Karelia as elsewhere in the country. Andropov was a capable learner. He was sent to work as the ambassador to Hungary in 1953. His shining moment came three years later when he spearheaded ruthless suppression of the rebellion against the local Communists in Hungary. Andropov returned to Moscow as a victor in 1957 and started to climb the most important party ladder. First he was appointed a department head and then promoted to the post of secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1962. Andropov replaced KGB chief Semichastny, who lost his job for letting Stalin’s daughter escape to the West in 1967. Andropov became a member of the Political Bureau in 1973. He left it in 1973 after Suslov’s death and was ready to succeed the “beloved Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev”. But he wanted to move into the country’s main office from a neighbouring room rather than from Lubyanka. Andropov was elected general secretary in November 1982. Andropov’s successor Konstantin Chernenko would give a highly emotional speech at Andropov’s funeral fifteen months later…
Chernenko has been totally forgotten. The memory of Brezhnev has been preserved in anecdotes which each new young generation find more and more difficult to grasp. Andropov has not been forgotten.
It can easily be explained.
Andropov’s short time in office, a serious illness and an early death have contributed to creating a myth about a leader who wanted to make things better but didn’t have time to. The vague reminiscences of the absurdities while Andropov was in power – the catching of civilians in the streets and at bath-houses in broad daylight – are being replaced by bright memories of the cheap “Andropov” vodka. The abbreviation “KGB”, which is disgusting to Russian intellectuals, doesn’t cause any ill feelings when pronounced together with Andropov’s name. What is remembered are not the “mental hospitals” which society didn’t want to know about but the struggle against the “Brezhnev mafia”. Against the background of today’s joyless life and permanent corruption, the Andropov myth assumes a nostalgiс power.
There is not much truth in it. People who still have a good memory remember everything. The political trials, exiles, expulsions, prisons and camps for dissidents, repeated terms. The way that active and clever Andropov crushed the human rights movement in the Soviet Union was a personal achievement of the KGB chief.
It was quite a horrible time.
A war was raging in Afghanistan. The economy declined to its lowest level and no reform or restructuring could ever revive it again. The Soviet Union was deploying medium-range missiles in Europe while the Americans were contemplating “star wars”. Reagan was coming to the conclusion that America had nothing to talk about with the Russians without a nuclear shield. The international situation couldn’t have been worse. The Soviet air defense forces couldn’t find a better time to shoot down a South Korean passenger plane over Sakhalin Island in September 1983. Those who still remember those September days, the outright lies in Soviet propaganda and the total fear that embraced the world after that crime would find it difficult to share the people’s longing and nostalgia for Andropov.
It may seem strange but although dissidents condemned Andropov, they rarely talked about him with a feeling of disgust. Their conversations were not void of sympathy.
Human rights activist Dina Kaminskaya recalls in the Lawyer’s Notes : “I met a film director whom I knew among the guests. He used to talk a lot about his personal relations with high-ranking KGB officials. He even tried to convince me that Andropov was a very kind man: each time he ordered a dissident be arrested he got so upset that he nearly broke into tears. “Nearly” is the right word -- it means that he managed to hold the tears back by an act of will.
Prevention is the mother of order
Judging by recollections, Yury Andropov was a very secretive and lonely man. Perhaps, he was born to do something different than head the world’s most powerful and foulest security service. In fact, this is where a clue to the mystery of his character and fate can be found.
Andropov’s analytical mind, restrained desire for power and an ability to instill respect and fear made him the right man to be a KGB chief. However, his family and the people whom he trusted knew a different, mild and sensitive, Andropov. One can read about this side of him in memoirs and I don’t think that it’s a lie. He was that kind of person too. He was interested in poetry and the Taganka Theatre. He was said to have been too shy to phone and book tickets for performances there: “What will my comrades say?” The author of one memoir says that Andropov liked to listen to bards in his free time: his bodyguards made a bonfire, switched on a tape-recorder, and he softly sang along with Vizbor…
I think that fear determined Andropov’s life and career. A fear of death. Some people are more afraid of dying than others. This fear of death is felt in some of Andropov’s verses that are melancholic, ironic and submissive. Secondly, he feared a violent death. That feeling was much more concrete and had an exact return address: Andropov was an executioner in the postwar Karelia but he himself could have easily become a victim in no time. It was apparently in those years that Andropov chose which ranks to join. He preferred to be with the executioners.
However, shear fear of death was not sufficient grounds for such a big and extraordinary person to make his choice. Some kind of ideological support was needed and the communist ideology was suitable for those goals. Nevertheless, Andropov could hardly be called a stubborn and staunch Bolshevik like Suslov. He had other worries and fears – a fear of violence or the horror of a civil war.
It is the war that Andropov saw in Budapest with his own eyes. It was on his orders that the Hungarian rebellion was ruthlessly suppressed with tanks. It was then that he created his own unique style of work.. It came down to prevention, the favourite method of the KGB agents in the 1960s-1980s. People were summoned to the KGB with or without prior notification. They were instructed for several hours, threatened, gently recruited and made promise not to divulge anything… In the 1970s, Andropov arrived in Karabakh where disturbances had been expected. He didn’t even imprison anybody. He just arrived, looked around, held a meeting and looked into people’s eyes. It was sufficient for ten years. Andropov consciously froze society since he had had a very close look at the alternative to punitive medicine and Article 70 of the Penal Code of the RSFSR in Hungary in 1956: rivers of blood and communists on street lamps.
… Here is a subject for a short story. A fifteen-year-old boy is brought to the KGB chief at Lubyanka. He is offered tea and croutons. An elderly man in spectacles and with a sad look in his eyes rises from behind an enormous table, as he does so, he blots out Lenin’s portrait behind him. “Comrade Andropov, why the hell do your gendarmes forbid me to read Nabokov?,” the young boy asks bravely and continues crunching croutons. The old man says nothing, his glasses shining. Then he gives a short laugh, taps his fingers on the table and sips his tea. “And do you want me to tell you what will happen to this country if I allow all of you to read books?” he asks. And then he goes into it all: perestroika, Sumgait, refugees, Chechnya, refugees, crime, default, refugees, etc… “You will leave but what will happen to this country?” he asks curling his lips.
Death and other concerns
Andropov was capable of extraordinary deeds. It is known that he invited the dissident Khaustov to his office in the early 1960s and had a long conversation with him genuinely trying to understand what the young people on Mayakovsky Square wanted. In the early 1970s it was rumoured that a secret meeting had been held at the Communist Party Central Committee behind closed doors to discuss the problem of dissidents. The leaders had to decide what to do with The Chronicle of Current Events, the famous self-published bulletin that recorded accurately and impartially all human rights violations in the Soviet Union. Andropov allegedly said: “Arresting about a hundred dissidents in big cities will be enough to put an end to the Chronicle”.
Andropov was personally responsible for all the “hyped-up” sentences on phoney cases and the deaths of Yury Galanskov and Vasil Stus in labour camps. He was also to blame for breaking and slandering honest and weak people at Lefortovo prison and for the KGB’s “active measures” abroad. One could envy a person who had the strength to write poems despite such a busy schedule.
The unit of fear–1 “androp”
A new unit of time measurement – 1”androp” = 7 years in labour camps plus 5 years in exile.
Andropov’s job required him to be very well informed. He was one of the few Soviet leaders who clearly realized the size of a catastrophe awaiting the Soviet Union. The economy was not the only trouble. The public apathy and cynicism was so great by the early 1980s that it was becoming dangerous for the leaders.
Heavy drinking, laziness and endemic theft were “dissident” acts of a new historical community known as the Soviet people against the dear and beloved Communist Party. That was much more dangerous than reading forbidden books. Andropov found himself at an impasse.
He knew for sure that things could no longer go the old way. But he also knew that the country couldn’t be “unfrozen” because it would collapse. He began looking for a third way. In his capacity as general secretary he tried to increase labor discipline and fired administrative managers who sank into embezzlement. When Andropov fell ill, he started looking for a successor who would continue his glorious deeds. He died in a bad mood, tormenting himself and hesitating.
Andropov’s gaze stopped on Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yury ANDROPOV. A POET OF THE ERA OF DINOSAURS
By Ilya Milstein
http://web.archive.org/web/20050313221822/http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/images/2004_07_milsh.jpgHe lived in fear of death and of violence and horror in the face of a civil war. It determined his life and career Yury Vladimirovich Andropov would have turned 90 today. It may be old for a politician but not necessarily the end: Molotov was 96 when he died and Kaganovich lived even longer. So, age doesn’t matter. Whether a political leader is dead or alive is not very important. What really matters is the viability of a politician’s ideas and the purity of his image.
Most Russians remember Andropov with respect.
There are plenty of reasons for it. They include an obvious liking of the current president for him, the longing for an iron fist and the nostalgia for the period of stagnation, which is by and large remembered as the happiest time in the 20th century. The period of economic stagnation and the president with a CHEKA past go together very well. The past is preferred, for it was then that we “lived in a great country”. There was no shooting in the streets at that time and people were sure of their future without even suspecting how awful this future could be.
Let’s remember Andropov.
Today the Soviet Union is remembered as the era of dinosaurs: a great and irretrievable past, a base and insignificant time (a superpower, grain purchases, loyal Leninists, characters like General Vlasov in literature, songs about the young October revolution, sclerotic elders, the moon rover, informers). That era is so long ago that any praise or criticism seem equally untrue.
Only the anecdotes are authentic.
Andropov loved classical music. He appreciated folk songs, especially the folklore of the Cossacks. His father was a Don Cossack and Andropov’s own childhood passed among the Cossacks of the Terek region. He collected pictures, wrote rhymed verses with sad words about love and death… A statuette of a man with a pointed beard riding on horseback and holding a spear – Don Quixote–always stood on Andropov’s desk heaped with Soviet secret reports. The chief of the KGB looked like an intelligent man. Strange, isn’t it? The all-powerful chief of the Soviet “Gestapo” was not supposed to write poems, listen to music or leaf through albums trembling and feeling jubilant. He should have been a half-delirious fanatic like Dzerzhinsky or an ignorant and scrubby maniac like Yezhov or at least a sadistic voluptuary like Beria. In correspondence with his time, Andropov should have been absorbed in playing domino with the most advanced political bureau members every evening.
Andropov didn’t correspond to those standards.
The stages of a big road
There is very little in Andropov’s biography helping to unravel the mystery of this politician. He started his career in the remote regions of Karelia in the years of Stalin’s rule. At first he worked for the Young Communist League organization and was later engaged in party and CHEKA work. It is natural that informers, arrests and executions were as common in Karelia as elsewhere in the country. Andropov was a capable learner. He was sent to work as the ambassador to Hungary in 1953. His shining moment came three years later when he spearheaded ruthless suppression of the rebellion against the local Communists in Hungary. Andropov returned to Moscow as a victor in 1957 and started to climb the most important party ladder. First he was appointed a department head and then promoted to the post of secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1962. Andropov replaced KGB chief Semichastny, who lost his job for letting Stalin’s daughter escape to the West in 1967. Andropov became a member of the Political Bureau in 1973. He left it in 1973 after Suslov’s death and was ready to succeed the “beloved Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev”. But he wanted to move into the country’s main office from a neighbouring room rather than from Lubyanka. Andropov was elected general secretary in November 1982. Andropov’s successor Konstantin Chernenko would give a highly emotional speech at Andropov’s funeral fifteen months later…
Chernenko has been totally forgotten. The memory of Brezhnev has been preserved in anecdotes which each new young generation find more and more difficult to grasp. Andropov has not been forgotten.
It can easily be explained.
Andropov’s short time in office, a serious illness and an early death have contributed to creating a myth about a leader who wanted to make things better but didn’t have time to. The vague reminiscences of the absurdities while Andropov was in power – the catching of civilians in the streets and at bath-houses in broad daylight – are being replaced by bright memories of the cheap “Andropov” vodka. The abbreviation “KGB”, which is disgusting to Russian intellectuals, doesn’t cause any ill feelings when pronounced together with Andropov’s name. What is remembered are not the “mental hospitals” which society didn’t want to know about but the struggle against the “Brezhnev mafia”. Against the background of today’s joyless life and permanent corruption, the Andropov myth assumes a nostalgiс power.
There is not much truth in it. People who still have a good memory remember everything. The political trials, exiles, expulsions, prisons and camps for dissidents, repeated terms. The way that active and clever Andropov crushed the human rights movement in the Soviet Union was a personal achievement of the KGB chief.
It was quite a horrible time.
A war was raging in Afghanistan. The economy declined to its lowest level and no reform or restructuring could ever revive it again. The Soviet Union was deploying medium-range missiles in Europe while the Americans were contemplating “star wars”. Reagan was coming to the conclusion that America had nothing to talk about with the Russians without a nuclear shield. The international situation couldn’t have been worse. The Soviet air defense forces couldn’t find a better time to shoot down a South Korean passenger plane over Sakhalin Island in September 1983. Those who still remember those September days, the outright lies in Soviet propaganda and the total fear that embraced the world after that crime would find it difficult to share the people’s longing and nostalgia for Andropov.
It may seem strange but although dissidents condemned Andropov, they rarely talked about him with a feeling of disgust. Their conversations were not void of sympathy.
Human rights activist Dina Kaminskaya recalls in the Lawyer’s Notes : “I met a film director whom I knew among the guests. He used to talk a lot about his personal relations with high-ranking KGB officials. He even tried to convince me that Andropov was a very kind man: each time he ordered a dissident be arrested he got so upset that he nearly broke into tears. “Nearly” is the right word -- it means that he managed to hold the tears back by an act of will.
Prevention is the mother of order
Judging by recollections, Yury Andropov was a very secretive and lonely man. Perhaps, he was born to do something different than head the world’s most powerful and foulest security service. In fact, this is where a clue to the mystery of his character and fate can be found.
Andropov’s analytical mind, restrained desire for power and an ability to instill respect and fear made him the right man to be a KGB chief. However, his family and the people whom he trusted knew a different, mild and sensitive, Andropov. One can read about this side of him in memoirs and I don’t think that it’s a lie. He was that kind of person too. He was interested in poetry and the Taganka Theatre. He was said to have been too shy to phone and book tickets for performances there: “What will my comrades say?” The author of one memoir says that Andropov liked to listen to bards in his free time: his bodyguards made a bonfire, switched on a tape-recorder, and he softly sang along with Vizbor…
I think that fear determined Andropov’s life and career. A fear of death. Some people are more afraid of dying than others. This fear of death is felt in some of Andropov’s verses that are melancholic, ironic and submissive. Secondly, he feared a violent death. That feeling was much more concrete and had an exact return address: Andropov was an executioner in the postwar Karelia but he himself could have easily become a victim in no time. It was apparently in those years that Andropov chose which ranks to join. He preferred to be with the executioners.
However, shear fear of death was not sufficient grounds for such a big and extraordinary person to make his choice. Some kind of ideological support was needed and the communist ideology was suitable for those goals. Nevertheless, Andropov could hardly be called a stubborn and staunch Bolshevik like Suslov. He had other worries and fears – a fear of violence or the horror of a civil war.
It is the war that Andropov saw in Budapest with his own eyes. It was on his orders that the Hungarian rebellion was ruthlessly suppressed with tanks. It was then that he created his own unique style of work.. It came down to prevention, the favourite method of the KGB agents in the 1960s-1980s. People were summoned to the KGB with or without prior notification. They were instructed for several hours, threatened, gently recruited and made promise not to divulge anything… In the 1970s, Andropov arrived in Karabakh where disturbances had been expected. He didn’t even imprison anybody. He just arrived, looked around, held a meeting and looked into people’s eyes. It was sufficient for ten years. Andropov consciously froze society since he had had a very close look at the alternative to punitive medicine and Article 70 of the Penal Code of the RSFSR in Hungary in 1956: rivers of blood and communists on street lamps.
… Here is a subject for a short story. A fifteen-year-old boy is brought to the KGB chief at Lubyanka. He is offered tea and croutons. An elderly man in spectacles and with a sad look in his eyes rises from behind an enormous table, as he does so, he blots out Lenin’s portrait behind him. “Comrade Andropov, why the hell do your gendarmes forbid me to read Nabokov?,” the young boy asks bravely and continues crunching croutons. The old man says nothing, his glasses shining. Then he gives a short laugh, taps his fingers on the table and sips his tea. “And do you want me to tell you what will happen to this country if I allow all of you to read books?” he asks. And then he goes into it all: perestroika, Sumgait, refugees, Chechnya, refugees, crime, default, refugees, etc… “You will leave but what will happen to this country?” he asks curling his lips.
Death and other concerns
Andropov was capable of extraordinary deeds. It is known that he invited the dissident Khaustov to his office in the early 1960s and had a long conversation with him genuinely trying to understand what the young people on Mayakovsky Square wanted. In the early 1970s it was rumoured that a secret meeting had been held at the Communist Party Central Committee behind closed doors to discuss the problem of dissidents. The leaders had to decide what to do with The Chronicle of Current Events, the famous self-published bulletin that recorded accurately and impartially all human rights violations in the Soviet Union. Andropov allegedly said: “Arresting about a hundred dissidents in big cities will be enough to put an end to the Chronicle”.
Andropov was personally responsible for all the “hyped-up” sentences on phoney cases and the deaths of Yury Galanskov and Vasil Stus in labour camps. He was also to blame for breaking and slandering honest and weak people at Lefortovo prison and for the KGB’s “active measures” abroad. One could envy a person who had the strength to write poems despite such a busy schedule.
The unit of fear–1 “androp”
A new unit of time measurement – 1”androp” = 7 years in labour camps plus 5 years in exile.
Andropov’s job required him to be very well informed. He was one of the few Soviet leaders who clearly realized the size of a catastrophe awaiting the Soviet Union. The economy was not the only trouble. The public apathy and cynicism was so great by the early 1980s that it was becoming dangerous for the leaders.
Heavy drinking, laziness and endemic theft were “dissident” acts of a new historical community known as the Soviet people against the dear and beloved Communist Party. That was much more dangerous than reading forbidden books. Andropov found himself at an impasse.
He knew for sure that things could no longer go the old way. But he also knew that the country couldn’t be “unfrozen” because it would collapse. He began looking for a third way. In his capacity as general secretary he tried to increase labor discipline and fired administrative managers who sank into embezzlement. When Andropov fell ill, he started looking for a successor who would continue his glorious deeds. He died in a bad mood, tormenting himself and hesitating.
Andropov’s gaze stopped on Mikhail Gorbachev.