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 Andropov
Upon Brezhnev's death on November 12, 1982, Yuri Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary and (by extension) leader of the Soviet Union. During his tenure, Andropov sought to eliminate corruption and inefficiency within the Soviet system by investigating longtime officials for violations of party discipline and criminalizing truancy in the workplace. However, upon suffering total renal failure in February 1983, Andropov's health began to deteriorate rapidly. On February 9, 1984, he died after leading the country for only 15 months.