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.
Valery Popov (writer)
Born in Kazan into the family of a biologist, he graduated from Saint Petersburg State Electrotechnical University in 1963 and worked as an engineer until 1969; in 1970 he graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. His first story was published in 1963 and his first collection, "Yuzhnee, chem prezhde" (""Further south than before"") in 1969. During this period he was, along with Sergei Dovlatov, in a "group of aspiring young writers called Gorozhane (The Townsmen) — a group that included Vladimir Maramzin, Valery Popov, Boris Vakhtin, and Igor Yefimov." Jekaterina Young writes of these early stories:The emphasis is upon the narrator's complex reactions and the construction of a world that is unusual and even absurd. The events narrated appear random; the author is not concerned to tell a story about a specific character. He is more interested in the intonation and rhythmic precision of his stories, almost all of which are first-person narratives.His later works, "depicting surreal post-Soviet life, such as "Days in the Harem" (1994) and "She-rascal" (1996), utilize elements of the picaresque novel." He has also written a biography (2010) of his friend Dovlatov.