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.
Michał Elwiro Andriolli
Andriolli was born on 2 November 1836 in Vilna (modern Vilnius), then part of the Empire of Russia as a son of Francesco Andriolli to a family of an Italian emigrant, a veteran of the Napoleon Bonaparte's Grande Armée. In 1855, he went to Moscow, where he started his studies at the School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1858 he graduated from the Imperial Academy of Art in Petersburg. Andriolli received a scholarship and in 1861 he went to Rome, where he continued his studies at the Accademia di San Luca. He returned to Lithuania and took part in the January Uprising against the Imperialism of the Russian Govermant. Arrested by the tsarist authorities, he managed to escape from Kaunas Prison and reach London and then Paris.