Professionally, Andropov was a man of secrets as well – the high post he took required that. “People barely knew him as the KGB chief; in every country, people who lead the secret service don ...

the KGB, were blazing at hours when their offices were often mostly dark. Like every foreign correspondent in the city, Mr. Doder heard rumors that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was severely ill.

It meant that one Stalinist "ideologue," Mikhail Suslov, would be replaced by another, Yuri Andropov - with a fifteen-year long history of heading the KGB which was primarily engaged, so far as ...

Putin was one of a generation of young recruits, a cohort of outsiders, brought into the KGB by chairman Yury Andropov in the 1970s. Andropov's career had been made in the CPSU, not the security ...

The first was Yury Andropov, a KGB chairman who was much admired by Putin and who was elected general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in November 1982. Although Andropov only ruled the ...

In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer. By 1984, Kryuchkov’s ...

They later studied together at the Andropov Institute. Zhirnov is a former commander at the KGB, the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until December 1991. He has lived in France ...