Yuri Andropov. Part 5. Unfulfilled hopes
Restraint, professionalism and a clear understanding of the ranking made Yuri Vladimirovich isolated from the entire Kremlin flock. He did not take part in the joint feasts and hunts so beloved by Brezhnev, he was an absolute ascetic, which irritated the clans and at the same time instilled fear in them, especially after many years of service in the security organs …
Part 1. An intellectual from the KGB
Part 2. In connections that defame himself, noticed …
Part 3. Khrushchev's hard times
Part 4. In the labyrinths of the KGB
Yuri Andropov's predecessor, Semichastny, was removed from office for two reasons. First, he was Khrushchev's man and helped him overcome the difficult path to power. But the most significant blunder of the chairman of the KGB of the USSR, which cost him his career, was the case of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter. In 1967, Svetlana Iosifovna, leaving the embassy hotel in Delhi, appeared at the American embassy and asked for political asylum. From Delhi through Europe, she was sent to the United States, where the State Department and the CIA had already prepared her meeting with journalists at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York.
The effect was amazing, the reaction of the USSR was appropriate. The next sensation was to be Alliluyeva's book Twenty Letters to a Friend, the manuscript of which was already in the United States and was being prepared for translation and publication. Circulations and royalties were supposed to be huge, and leading publishers around the world were in a hurry to buy the rights to translate and publish the book.
For the USSR, this escape was a bombshell, but the publication of the book, scheduled for the fall and timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, could be even worse. The situation was rectified by Andropov, who recently replaced the Sevenfold. Actually, this was one of his first serious cases, which the KGB will then have a lot of.
It was necessary to play ahead of the curve. The committee members, like a needle in a haystack, rushed in Moscow to look for a copy of Alliluyeva's manuscript, confident that some of their friends would find it. Found. No sensations were found in it. “Svetlana tried to somehow justify her father, presenting him as a victim of Beria's intrigues,” wrote the publicist Roy Medvedev in the book Andropov.
In Great Britain, Soviet intelligence kept a semi-legal, pirate publishing house working for the black market "at gunpoint". It was to him that the manuscript of Svetlana Iosifovna's book "Twenty Letters to a Friend" and a selection of rare archival family photographs of Stalin were transferred.
The book in Russian was made up quickly. It went on sale three months earlier than the one that was prepared in America. The press circulated fragments of the Russian-language version, the German magazine Stern accepted it for publication in German, and the belated edition of the original had to be sold at a humiliating price of 50 cents.
General secretary and gray cardinal
Relations between Andropov and Brezhnev were of a purely business nature. Yuri Vladimirovich was afraid of all Brezhnev's entourage, which had broken up into various Kremlin clans, thirsty for power, but one thing in solidarity - in friendship against this dark horse named Andropov. They were united in dislike for him, and each in his own way incited the general against Andropov.
Restraint, professionalism and a clear understanding of the ranking made Yuri Vladimirovich isolated from the entire Kremlin flock. He did not take part in the joint feasts and hunts so beloved by Brezhnev, he was an absolute ascetic, which irritated the clans and at the same time instilled fear in them, especially after many years of service in the security agencies.
Andropov never came to Brezhnev without a preliminary call and, setting out any complex questions, imperceptibly and unobtrusively suggested answers, without bothering Leonid Ilyich with puzzles. This greatly impressed the urethral general secretary, and soon the olfactory Yuri Vladimirovich becomes one of his most trusted people. As General Secretary of the CPSU, Brezhnev worked for 18 years, 15 of them - hand in hand with Andropov.
It was that exceptional case in the history of the Russian state, when the natural tandem of the urethral leader with the olfactory advisor for many years kept a huge state in a state of stability, keeping him and his people calm in the world space.
Do not publicly execute enemies, but strangle them in your arms …
These words ended the note "On the question of Solzhenitsyn" by the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR Nikolai Shchelokov, sent to Leonid Brezhnev. He fussed for the writer in connection with the latter's desire to buy an apartment in Moscow for foreign currency.
On October 8, 1970 A. Solzhenitsyn was proclaimed a Nobel laureate. Thinking of himself as a literary star, he demanded that the party ideologist Suslov publish the novels Cancer Ward and August the Fourteenth. No one was going to make concessions to Solzhenitsyn, his negative role as an anti-Soviet turned out to be too great. The Nobel laureate himself refused to go to Stockholm to receive the prize. Most likely, he had a presentiment that he would not be allowed back to the USSR.
It will take four long years to make a decision to prosecute the writer "for malicious anti-Soviet activities" and to prepare a Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "On deprivation of USSR citizenship and expulsion from the USSR of AI Solzhenitsyn."
Interior Minister Nikolai Shchelokov, not without pressure from his wife Svetlana, tried to procure an indulgence from Brezhnev for the writer, and at the same time a residence permit in Moscow.
Shchelokov is well known for his friendship with Brezhnev, hostility to Andropov, and later corruption scandals. His wife was related to Galina Vishnevskaya. Alexander Solzhenitsyn lodged at the dacha of Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich, so the reasons why the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, violating the chain of command, rudely intervened in the affairs of his colleague, chairman of the KGB of the USSR, Yuri Andropov, are quite obvious. The committee members not only prepared for the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the country, but for a long time watched his actions on the other side of the border.
Andropov took the opposite position with regard to the expulsion of another dissident from the Soviet Union. “Why can't Sakharov be allowed to travel abroad after all? He no longer works in his specialty, and the secrets that he knew are probably out of date? Andropov replied: “Because he has“golden brains”, rare in the world, which, perhaps, are not in the West” (Roy Medvedev, “Andropov”, ZhZL). As a result, the scientist from Moscow was exiled to the city of Gorky.
Unfulfilled hopes
It was not the Western democracy that had slipped into the gaps and crevices of the iron curtain, they were already blown out by the beginning of information wars, which Andropov tried to contain by all means for 15 years. The Security Committee persecuted dissident, anti-Soviet, nationalist activities in the USSR that corroded the foundations of the integrity of the state.
The issues of geopolitics and territorial change of the USSR have never been removed from the agenda by the leading capitalist countries, they both conducted and continue to conduct their intelligence and subversive activities. Only today have the methods and forms of work of the special services of foreign states against Russia changed.
It is not surprising that the urethral Brezhnev, who inherited the country that was beginning to crack at all the seams from Khrushchev, who was displaced by him, chose the balanced and closed Andropov for the post of chief committee. The urethral leader does not exclude the olfactory person from his environment; on the contrary, he listens to his every word, guided by his recommendations.
Becoming a constant adviser to the leader, the olfactory person, if necessary, is able to take his post and, for the sake of his own survival, take over responsibility for the flock. This can be clearly seen: after the death of Lenin's urethral polymorph, his post was taken by the olfactory Stalin, and after the death of the urethral-visual Brezhnev - by the olfactory Andropov … and so on.
Having entered into a cruel game with the Western olfactory world, pursuing skin corruption inside the country, in which the Kremlin clans themselves were mired, Yuri Vladimirovich, being already a rather sick person, could not, for health reasons, continue the work begun to transform the USSR. He died after a serious and prolonged illness, having spent 15 months as General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. For most Soviet people, these were months of hope.
After Andropov's death, Konstantin Chernenko, appointed to the post of general secretary, and the party apparatus behind him curtailed all the reforms initiated by Yuri Vladimirovich, returning everything to the familiar Brezhnev rut. Labor discipline was forgotten, the corruption cases started by Andropov during Brezhnev's life were closed, the system in the USSR was proposed to be renamed developing socialism. These "elders" did not care what was happening on the other side of the Kremlin walls.
And behind them already loomed perestroika with huge changes in Europe and the biggest geopolitical catastrophe in the country - the collapse of the USSR.
Other parts of the series on Yuri Andropov:
Part 1. An intellectual from the KGB
Part 2. In connections that defame himself, noticed …
Part 3. Khrushchev's hard times
Part 4. In the labyrinths of the KGB
