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.
Aleksandr Iosifovich Popov
Aleksandr Iosifovich Popov (; 7 June 1913 in Dorpat, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire – 23 April 1993 in Moscow, Russia) was a Soviet permafrost researcher at the Moscow State University. He served as head of the Department of Cryolithology and Glaciology. Popov was a member of the International Commission on Periglacial Morphology of the International Geographical Union. He organized and led numerous expeditions to investigate permafrost and deep seasonal freezing in the Soviet Union. Popov edited the geocryological map of the Soviet Union that was published in 1986.