The Soviet leader Iury Vladimirovich Andropov (1914-1984) was the head for 15 years of the Soviet secret police. After Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982 he became for 16 months the ruler of the Soviet Union.

Iury Andropov was born on June 15, 1914, in the southeastern Russian province of Stavropol, where his father was a railroad worker. He attended a secondary vocational school to learn river navigation, graduating in 1936. By then he was already active in the Young Communist (Komsomol) League, organizing Soviet youth to assist the Communist Party.

For several years he worked as a technician along the waterways in the Volga River basin. In 1940 he began a new career in the Komsomol organization, working to organize youth in the territory just taken from Finland in the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940. He continued this work during the World War II, helping to coordinate guerrilla activities in areas controlled by the Finnish army...