Editing Yuri Andropov (section)

==Early life==
There has been much contention over Andropov's family background.<ref name="Aktürk2012">{{cite book|last=Aktürk|first=Şener|title=Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YAUhAwAAQBAJ|date=2012|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-85169-5}}</ref> According to the official biography, Andropov was born in [[Stanitsa]] Nagutskaya (modern-day [[Stavropol Krai]], Russia) on 15 June 1914.<ref name=jessup>{{cite book|last=Jessup|first=John E.|title=An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Conflict and Conflict Resolution, 1945–1996|year=1998|publisher=Greenwood Press|location=Westport, CT|page=25|isbn=978-0-3132-8112-9}}</ref> His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was a railway worker of [[Don Cossack]] descent who died of typhus in 1919. His mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein (none of the official sources mention her name), was a school teacher who died in 1931.<ref name="Century Communism 2010">A Dictionary of 20th Century Communism. Edited by Silvio Pons and Robert Service. Princeton University Press. 2010.</ref><ref name='mlech'>[[Leonid Mlechin]]. ''[https://www.sovsekretno.ru/articles/id/1920 Yuri's childhood and other mysteries from the life of the Chairman]'' article from the Sovershenno Sekretno newspaper № 5, 2008 (in Russian)</ref> She was born in the [[Ryazan Governorate]] into a family of town dwellers and was abandoned on the doorstep of Jewish watchmaker and [[Grand Duchy of Finland|Finnish citizen]] Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, who lived in Moscow. He and his wife, Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein, adopted and raised her.<ref name=itogi>{{cite journal|author=Denis Babichenko|script-title=ru:Легендарная личность|trans-title=Legendary Personality|journal=Itogi|date=3 October 2005|issue=40|language=ru|pages=30–34|url=http://www.itogi.ru/Paper2005.nsf/Article/Itogi_2005_10_01_23_1219.html|access-date=3 July 2008|archive-date=22 October 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071022183431/http://www.itogi.ru/Paper2005.nsf/Article/Itogi_2005_10_01_23_1219.html|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref name="sovietlife">{{cite journal|year=1983|title=Biography of Yuri Andropov|journal=Soviet Life|issue=323|page=1B|url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Life,_1983-08,_%E2%84%96_323.pdf}}</ref>

Andropov's earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov which he changed to Yuri Andropov several years later.<ref name='appoint'>''Alexander Ostrovsky (2010)''. Who Appointed Gorbachev? – Moscow: Algorithm, p. 187 {{ISBN|978-5-699-40627-2}}</ref> His original birth certificate disappeared, but it has been established that Andropov was born in Moscow, where his mother worked at a women's [[Gymnasium (school)|gymnasium]] from 1913 to 1917.<ref name=itogi/><ref name='appoint'/>

On various occasions, Andropov gave different death dates for his mother: 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931.<ref name='mlech'/><ref name=itogi/> The story of her adoption was also likely a mystification. In 1937, Andropov was vetted when he applied for [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Communist Party]] membership, and it turned out that "the sister of his native maternal grandmother" (whom he called his aunt), who was living with him and who supported the legend of his [[Ryazan]] peasant origins, was in fact his nurse, who had been working for Fleckenstein long before Andropov was born.<ref name='mlech'/><ref name=itogi/>

It was also reported that Andropov's mother came from a line of [[social estates in the Russian Empire|merchants]]. Karl Fleckenstein was the rich proprietor of a jewellery business which was run by his wife after his death in 1915 when he was mistaken for a German during the infamous anti-German [[pogrom]] in Moscow and killed, although Andropov characterized the pogrom as [[Pogroms in the Russian Empire|anti-Jewish]].<ref name='appoint'/><ref>[http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/2923-na-1914-god-m-1914#mode/inspect/page/845/zoom/5 Page 1007] scan from the [[Vsya Moskva]] city directory, 1914 (in Russian)</ref> The whole family could have been turned into [[lishenets|lishentsy]] and stripped of basic rights had she not abandoned the store after another pogrom in 1917, invented a [[proletariat|proletarian]] background, and left Moscow for the [[Stavropol Governorate]] along with Andropov's mother.<ref name='mlech'/><ref name=itogi/>

Andropov gave different versions of his father's fate: in one, he divorced his mother soon after his birth; in another he died of illness.<ref name='appoint'/> The "father" in question, Vladimir Andropov, was in fact his stepfather, who lived and worked in Nagutskaya and died of typhus in 1919. The Fyodorov surname belonged to his second stepfather, Viktor Fyodorov, a machinist's assistant turned schoolteacher. Andropov's biological father is unknown; he probably died in 1916, a date in Andropov's 1932 résumé.<ref name=itogi/><ref name='appoint' /> During the 1937 vetting, it was reported that his father served as an officer in the [[Imperial Russian Army]]. Andropov joined the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Communist Party]] in 1939.<ref name='mlech' /><ref name=itogi />