Yuri Andropov
His earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov; he changed it to Yuri Andropov only several years later. While his original birth certificate disappeared, it was established that Andropov was in fact born in Moscow where his mother had been working in a women's gymnasium since 1913 throughout 1914 and until 1917.
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.