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The final months of ill health provided the denouement in a career marked by consummate political skill and shrewd calculation. The son of a railway worker, Andropov was born on June 15, 1914, at Nagutskaya Station in the northern Caucasus. He studied at a school for water transportation and worked briefly as a telegraph operator and a Volga boatman, but soon demonstrated his talent for political work. He became active as an organizer in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). After the Stalinist purge cleared vacancies in the organization's HIerarchy, Andropov was catapulted in 1940 into the post of First Secretary in the newly formed Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic.
Andropov played an important role in consolidating Moscow's power in this northwestern region, which had been partly under the control of Finland before the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-40. When the Nazis invaded, Andropov apparently served as a political commissar with the Soviet partisans; he may have been involved in the Allied shipments of materiel through the port of Murmansk. Andropov remained in Karelia after the war as a deputy to the regional party leader, veteran Finnish Communist Otto Kuusinen, who is thought to have been influential in securing for the ambitious Andropov a post in the party's Central Committee in Moscow.
The party bureaucrat proved to be an able diplomat and steadily rose in the ranks. In 1953 Andropov was assigned to the Soviet embassy in Budapest. The next year he became ambassador. Hungarians acquainted with Andropov during that turbulent period described him as a cultivated man who could give formal dinner parties and still enjoy a raucous evening with the Budapest police gypsy band. During the 1956 uprising, Andropov visited Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy, apparently to assure him that Moscow had no aggressive intention against Hungary. Yet at that very moment Soviet tanks were rolling toward Budapest. Andropov's association with Janos Kadar. the Hungarian Communist leader who introduced economic reforms, helped give rise to the rumors that Andropov was interested in adopting some of the liberal ideas that have given Hungary the most innovative economy in the Soviet bloc. He never did so.
After the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising, Andropov was named to an important post in the Central Committee's foreign affairs section. As a liaison with other Soviet-bloc Communist Party organizations, Andropov traveled to Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Albania and North Viet Nam. But neither then nor later in his career did he even set foot in a country that was not under Communist control. Andropov was elected to the Central Committee in 1961; three years later, Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev chose him to deliver the keynote address on the anniversary of Lenin's birthday, a singular honor that marked Andropov as a public figure to be watched.