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.
Constantin Andronikof
Constantin Eseevich Andronikof was born in Russia on 16 July 1916, in St. Petersburg, into an established Georgian family, the Andronikashvili. His father, Iesse Ivanovich Andronicov, was an officer in the Imperial Russian army; and his father's sister, Salomea Andronikova (1888-1982), was a prominent socialite in the Silver Age of Russian culture and an inspiration for many Russian modernist poets and artists. During the Russian Civil War his aunt Salomea fled to Paris, and in 1920 the boy Constantin, in the arms of his mother, also fled to France; but his father, Jesse, was arrested and imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, and was later shot during the Great Purge of 1937.