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.
Viktor Chebrikov
Born in the industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine on 27 April 1923, he finished military school in 1942 and served in World War II as a battalion commander. After the war Chebrikov wanted to continue his military career, but was refused by the prestigious Frunze Military Academy because of his bad eyesight; abandoning his military ambitions, he earned an engineering degree, joined the Communist Party in 1950, and embarked on a political-administrative career, rising through the Ukrainian party ranks until he became First Secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk Party Committee in 1961. In 1967, he was brought to Moscow as personnel manager for the Central Committee. He was Deputy chairman of the KGB under Yuri Andropov from 1968-1982. They began an anti-corruption drive that continued until Andropov's death. Following a brief period under Konstantin Chernenko, Chebrikov was appointed head of internal security under Mikhail Gorbachev.