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.
Yury Yaremenko
He was born in Chita in eastern Siberia, 300 miles east of Lake Baikal and 100 miles north of China. His father worked in a repair shop for railroad cars. This work would have exempted him from military service in World War II, but he chose to enlist and served in a tank crew. After the war, he was stationed in Germany for two years, where he was joined by his wife, ten-year-old Yuri, and a younger sister. After two years, they returned to the Ukraine. From there Yuri was able to enter Moscow State University in 1953. From his first year, he began to study Chinese and the economy of China. After graduation, he was sent in November 1957 to study economics at the People's University in Beijing. He graduated there in 1960 and returned to Moscow at just the moment when relations between China and the Soviet Union dramatically worsened. Despite his exceptional knowledge of Chinese institutions and language, he could find no appropriate work that used them. Nevertheless, during the rest of his life, he followed events in China closely, wrote about them, and taught courses on the economy of China at Moscow State University.