Unknown Kremlin poet: poems by General Secretary Yuri Andropov

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Yuri Andropov for 15 years headed the KGB, and then a year and a half was General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee … These are well-known facts. Much less known is that the secretary general wrote poetry, and quite good, played the piano, was well versed in literature, read a lot. Apparently, for this he received the nickname "romantic from the Lubyanka". His poems became known only after his death, they were never published.

One day Andropov received a letter of congratulations, in which it was jokingly mentioned that the authorities spoil people. To this statement, the secretary general replied in a poetic form: He’s got rid of some kind of rascal, As if he spoils the power of the people. About that, all the clever guys have been repeating Since then for many years in a row, Without noticing (here's the attack!), That more often people spoil the power.

Yuri Andropov was very fond of his wife, Tatyana Filippovna Lebedeva, and often dedicated poems to her: I wrote and thought, dear, That at fifty, as at twenty-five, Though my head is almost gray, I am writing poetry to you again. And let them laugh at the poet, And let They are doubly jealous For the fact that I write sonnets to My own, and not someone else's wife. Dear, close, with you We walked through life for many years, And the lot thrown by you, For both of us was "yes" and "no". Both of us shone happiness, both We were shaken by trouble, We were in the bucket and in bad weather, Always faithful friends.

The former chairman of the KGB, one of the closest associates of the secretary general, Vladimir Kryuchkov, claims that Andropov often wrote poetry with profanity and cited as an example a quatrain that he wrote in the Kuntsevo hospital after a heart attack. True, Kryuchkov modestly replaced the last line in it with the "censorship option": I am in the hospital. All exhausted, Every minute of the journey. Yes! You understand things better, if you sit backwards on a hedgehog.

After Andropov's death, on his desk, they found a poem among the papers: Yes, we are all mortal, though not to our liking perishable in this world under the moon: Life is only a moment (and a semicolon); Life is only a moment; nothingness - forever. The globe of the earth is spinning in the universe, People live and disappear. But existence, born in the darkness, Is indestructible on the way to dawn. Other generations on Earth Carry the baton ever farther from life.

Despite his love of literature, Andropov was the initiator of a plan to create psychiatric clinics to "protect society" from dissident writers. He was not a supporter of a radical forceful suppression of dissent, considering it a much more important task to crush the opponents of Soviet power psychologically, for which they used surveillance, dismissals from work, intimidation, and forced confinement to a psychiatric clinic. Especially for this, Andropov created the Fifth Directorate of the KGB - ideological counterintelligence. This department dealt with the affairs of all dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, exiled from the country, one of the five Russian writers who became Nobel laureates.