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.
Yuri Drozdov (general)
In 1940, Yuri Ivanovich began his military training at the 14th Special Artillery School in Kharkiv where his father had been on the faculty since 1937. When the war began, he evacuated to Aktyubinsk to work at a tank repair plant. He was only 17 when he graduated from school in June 1943 and entered the Red Army in July 1943 for military training at the Red Army Military Technical Academy (the Leningrad Artillery School known today as Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy (). During the Great Patriotic War, he was a Lieutenant on the 1st Belorussian Front and commanded a fire platoon of an anti-tank battalion under the command of famed Nestor Kozin in the 52nd Guards Rifle Division which victoriously entered Berlin in the spring of 1945. He served with distinction receiving the Order of the Red Star (). Following the War, he continued his service with the Red Army and later the Soviet Army in Germany and the Baltics. In 1952, Drozdov began his studies of German and English at the Soviet Army's Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow and then, in 1956, graduated as a German and English linguist and transferred to the KGB.