Yuri Andropov
There has been much contention over his family background. According to the official biography, Andropov was born in stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai of Russia) on 15 June 1914. His father Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov was a railway worker of Don Cossack descent who died from typhus in 1919. His mother Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein (none of the official sources mentioned her name) was a school teacher who died in 1931. She was born in the Ryazan Governorate into a family of town dwellers and was abandoned on the doorstep of a Finnish citizen, a Jewish watchmaker Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein who lived in Moscow; he and his wife Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein adopted and raised her. Later researches has shown that many details about Andropov's biography were largely falsified during his lifetime which has contributed to the confusion connected to his family history.
Vladimir Ivanovich Voronkov
Voronkov was born in Moscow, the son of two history professors. His father, Ivan Alexandrovich Voronkov (1921–1983), was a department head at Moscow State University (MSU), and his mother taught at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at MSU. Vladimir Voronkov earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in history at MSU. In 1974–75 and 1977–78, he studied at the University of Warsaw. His thesis concerned the Polish Peasant Party in 1918–22. He is fluent in English and Polish.